'Romanticism In Edgar Allen Poe's Ligeia'

The first paragraph of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Ligeia” centers around a supernatural theme of Romanticism. This passage has the tendency to display irrational, mysterious, and unexplainable situations, which are characteristics use a lot in the Romantic era. In the first paragraph the narrator states, “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia” (692). There is a contradiction of the narrator’s relationship with Ligeia, the supposedly love of his life, from the start. It is very unusual for someone to barely remember where there love one come from.
Another situation in the story that makes me argue that the supernatural tendencies are dominant within the story is the narrator’s obsession with Ligeia’s unusual beauty. The narrator states, “I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of classic regularity, although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed “exquisite,” and felt that there was much of “strangeness” pervading it, yet I tried in vain to detect the irregularity, and to trace home my own perception of “the strange.” Poe demonstrates the principle of the strangeness of beauty being valued above all else in this text. Here Poe does away with the classical or ordinary view of beauty, and describing Ligeia’s beauty as a like no other. Ligeia strange beauty is also repeated numerous times throughout that text that Rowena really just did not stand a chance of being the
Despite the issue that the narrator abuses opium, the story starts to show multiple characteristics of Romanticism. The narrator then states that, “An hour thus elapsed when, (could it be possible?) I was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. I listened --- in extremity of horror” (700). There is a little of supernatural foreshadowing of what is to come of Rowena’s body while supposedly in her death