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Compared to other poems by Poe, “For Annie” has been somewhat neglected of late, possibly because it lends itself so readily to either of the two common ways of assessing Poe’s works: by biographical reference and by explication de texte. The biographical critic can easily regard the poem as merely another “vulgarly theatrical” product of “infantile wish-fulfillment” in which a neurotic obsession with death mixes with attachment to a maternal love object. The love object can be clearly identified as Mrs. Nancy Richmond of Lowell, Massachusetts, to whom Poe had turned in 1848-49 for sympathy during and after his turbulent attempts to engage marriage with Sarah Helen Whitman, a poetess living in Providence, Rhode Island. The death motif that informs the poem is traceable to Poe’s recently abortive attempt to take an overdose of laudanum, send for Mrs. Richmond before it took full effect, and thus die contentedly in her consoling arms. Moreover, one readily observes provocative psychological hints in the poem: Marie Bonaparte suspected that it was written to satisfy Poe’s desire as an adult nursling for eternal sleep at his mother’s breast, and a more recent critic has suggested that “For Annie” fulfills symbolically Poe’s adolescent yearning for sexual union with Mrs. Richmond. Similarly, critics given to explication de texte have little difficulty settling on an interpretation of the poem. To them it is a Platonic celebration of the sort of ideal love which alone could calm the frayed nerves of a lifelong victim of worldly troubles — a love knowable, if ever, only by one resting half-consciously in a fantastic Aidenn, somewhere between life and death, enjoying at last the quasi-oblivion so uncomfortable to a Ligeia or a Madeline Usher (1).
Too bad, really, that we have let it go at that, because “For Annie” is interesting for at least two other important reasons. First, the poem illustrates an aspect of Poe’s poetic craft which has been given short shrift, especially insofar as it applies in this poem: that is, his ability to create new genres out of old. And secondly (a closely related point), “For Annie” helps us characterize Poe’s long-recognized status as a transitional figure in American literature. [column 2:]
The matter of genre is often avoided by critics of Romantic and modern poetry, usually because they fear chastisement by post-Jungian theorists, who define nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature by its apparent rejection of convention, by its formal and philosophical idiosyncrasy. Progressively after the Enlightenment, so the argument goes, poets lost their predecessors’ sense of universal morality, aspects of which could be mirrored by traditional poetic forms containing traditionally meaningful themes, narrative poses, and character types. To compensate for this vanishing of a widely accepted Weltanschauung, post-Enlightenment poets turned inward for meaning, sought to establish unique relations between themselves and the objects of their attention, replaced morality with a continuing quest for significant experiences which they could then communicate through what Emerson called “a metre-making argument” or by verbally feeling their way through experience toward what Joyce would term an “Epiphany.” Form, that is to say, grew out of each poetic motive as its unique expression, and conventions were things of the past.
But gradually we have seen where this neat approach to the history of literary form fails, and many current scholars and critics have scrapped it in favor of the revision independently arrived at by many major critics using varying critical approaches. T. S. Eliot, in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and Harry Levin, in his “Notes on Convention,” are only two of the more important literary men to embrace the view concisely expressed by Paul Fussell:
. . . art works by artifice, by illusion, and by technique, and . . . no amount of talent, idea, or largeness of soul or heart in the artist produces anything except through artifice or technique. . . . Conventions are . . . inseparably a part of the act of art. . . . And there is no source of conventions inside ourselves: they reside only in public places, only in external history — for convention is a symbol of a public agreement between artist and audience that certain kinds of artificiality will be not only accepted but actually relished. . . (2)
How can this more comprehensive attitude be seen to bear on “For Annie”? Together with what we know about Poe’s broad — if relatively shallow and spotty — acquaintance with Western literature from Homer to Tennyson, it suggests that the poem may owe a great deal to various lyrical conventions of the past, and it leads one to wonder how Poe’s personal, “Romantic” response to the moral and experiential chaos of his life affected his handling of these conventions. Since it is difficult — well-nigh impossible — to trace his specific debts to previous and contemporary lyricists, let us assume that his wide reading, as described by Haldeen Braddy in a summary of scholarship on the [page 2:] subject,3 familiarized him with the main lyrical forms, themes, and narrative postures that were passed, with progressive modifications, from the ancients, through the medieval schools and the troubadours of Provencal, to the Renaissance singers, neoclassical gentlemen, and Romantic bards. Certainly this assumption is justified by the melodramatic letters Poe regularly penned in a flush of affection for his current loved one. No professional commitment to a “philosophy of composition,” no devotion to the well-wrought, original, and musical evocation of absolute beauty, prevented these epistolary effusions from rehearsing two thousand years of amorous strategies. And this is nowhere so evident as in the letter to “Annie” Richmond which Poe sent from Fordham on November 16, 1848 (4). A comparison between this letter and the later distillation in the poem, “For Annie,” of feelings similar to those in the letter should reveal the extent to which Poe accepted and modified the European love conventions.
The letter would probably have struck Petrarch or Dante, Ronsard or Donne, as the prose sketch for a forthcoming love lyric. “Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,” Poe joins earlier lovers in seeking a balm to cure the “spider Love” that converts “Manna to gall” (5). To be with his Annie now, he says in the letter, “I would willingly — oh joyfully abandon this world. . . . So long as I think that you know I love you . . . no worldly trouble can ever render me absolutely wretched.” We can scarcely miss the echoes of such traditional sentiments as Louise Labe’s “If with my arms both clasped around him . . . Death came in envy of the ease I had: . . . How much were dying than my life more glad!” Even Poe’s presumably factual account of his attempted suicide, with its accompanying reminder that Mrs. Richmond had promised to attend his deathbed, recalls a pantheon of earlier lyricists who longed for oblivion as a delicious release from the tribulations of courtship. Ovid himself yearned, he said, to assume “everlasting care” for his beloved and “to be sorrowed over” by her when he died (6). And Ronsard’s sonnet on this theme is a sixteenth-century version of Poe’s plan:
Let me decease within shine arms, my Dear
That shall suffice: for nothing would I know
Of louder glory in the world than so,
In kissing thee, to yield my breath even here.
He from whose heart Mar’s [sic] fires have licks out fear,
Shall to the war, and, mad with the long show
Of life and power, shall flaunt it for the blow
His valour covets from a Spanish spear.
I, with less rage, ask but for this goodhap,
Idly to die, Cassandra, in thy lap,
After a hundred years, without a name:
For I do err, or there’s more happiness
Thus dying, than in daring to possess
All of a short-lived Alexander’s fame. (7)
Nor can one miss the conventional Christian Platonism in Poe’s letter, where he refers to Mrs. Richmond as “my pure beautiful angel — wife of my soul — to be mine hereafter & forever in the Heavens,” and speaks of her “holy promise” and “the clear Heaven” of her eyes. In a treatise of 1504 Cardinal Pietro Bembo popularized the notion that man might realize God by contemplating the divine beauty of a woman; but by then it had already become a fashionable affectation to compare one’s mistress [column 2:] to a goddess or to some celestial ideal (see Petrarch’s Sonnet CLIX), and poets like Spenser and Shakespeare would carry the practice through to at least the end of the sixteenth century. Even the specific association Poe makes between heaven and Mrs. Richmond’s eyes harks back to a courtly commonplace, used in various ways by many love poets, “that Love entered through the eyes and penetrated to the heart” (8).
As for the poem,”For Annie,” to have created it by merely injecting a conventional form — say, the sonnet or Pindaric — with the sort of timeworn themes and poses that inform the letter to Mrs. Richmond would have been uncharacteristic of Poe as craftsman. Yet, while the poem seems not to be obviously derivative, it makes rather interesting use of traditional materials, and its resemblance in some respects to the work of certain other poets leads to revealing observations about his poetic technique. Beneath the typically Poesque qualities lie many of the same venerable themes and attitudes observable in the letter to Mrs. Richmond, though here they are less sentimental and more carefully transformed: the world-weariness, the imagined release of death, the idealization of the mistress and the obsession with her eyes. To these we might add the two conventional comparisons between life and disease and between death and sleep (9). The former echoes Shakespeare’s “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well” and Pope’s “this long disease, my Life,” while the latter is heir to such utterances as Daniel’s “Care-charmer sleepe, sonne of the Sable night, / Brother to death, in silent darkness borne: / Relieve my languish, and restore the light, / With darke forgetting of my cares rerurne” (10). Unlike the letter to Annie, however, the poem weaves these traditional threads into an integral piece of work. It does this by subordinating them to another conventional theme — entrancement by love — and by controlling them through a dramatic technique which, though not without precedent, strikes me as unique in its employment.
The love poetry preceding that of the Romantic movement often represented the poet as having been hypnotized, entranced, usually by one of four means: (1) by simply confronting the physical beauty of his beloved, as in Sappho’s first lyric or Petrarch’s ninety-fourth Sonnet; (2) through sexual love, as in Joachim du Bellay’s “L’Olive” (xiv); (3) by contemplating the mistress, as in Sonnet VIII of Spenser’s Amoretti; and (4) through a mystical perception of the mistress’ spiritual purity, as in Petrarch’s Sonnet CCCXLVIII.1l In “For Annie” there is the suggestion that all of these kinds of love trance have been passed through, except the last, and that Poe has his own version of the ultimate entrancement. Stanzas eleven and fifteen imply that the speaker has previously contemplated the physical beauty of his beloved, particularly her hair and eyes; stanza six alludes to an earlier longing for sexual oblivion, “the napthaline river / Of Passion accurst”; and in the final stanza the poet says that his current state of dreamy meditation is partly owing to “the thought” of his lady. So far, in fact, all this sounds very much like the traditional progression from “falling” in love to the mature awareness of love’s spiritual reality. One sees the pattern in Dante’s Vita Nuova, where the human passion on which the old chivalric code of love was founded grows into religious devotion, and in Petrarch’s sonnet sequence, in which, likewise, the experience [page 3:] of love deepens gradually into spiritual understanding. The movement reappears often in later lyrics, such as William Habingeon’s “Perfection of Love” and Lovelace’s “Going Beyond the Seas” (12).
But Poe’s highest vision of his mistress is not that of the Christian Platonists; it is perhaps closer to that of the medieval troubadour poets and their successors in Stuart England, who could rest content with a conceptual image, without needing to link that image with mystical insights into heavenly bliss. The Stuare poet John Hoskins, for instance, sings of enjoying his beloved in “some close corner of my braine” (13). Yet if Poe’s speaker, too, embraces his mistress in his “braine,” that is where his resemblance to the courtly lyricists ends. In both Christian and courtly love lyrics the speaker celebrates an imaginatively conceived ideal which is abstracted from the specific traits of his lady. To the Christian lyricist the generalized image thus created becomes a symbol for divine beauty, and the poet’s carnal passion is transformed into spiritual devotion while to the courtly singer the ideal image refers not upward but downward to its particular, imperfect, earthly original, and the poet’s carnal passion is transformed, presumably, into creative energy and appeased during poetic composition. In Poe’s poem, the speaker’s conception of Annie is neither a symbol for the ineffably celestial nor a metaphor for a love object; rather it is the dream reality of a specific person, the ideal yet still fluidly tangible presence in which the speaker is said to be “Bathing,” so that he feels deliciously “Drowned” in his lady’s “tresses.” No medieval or Renaissance poet, unless it be Donne in “The Extasie,” anticipates Poe in this respect. Annie is being praised not merely by being idealized but by being transformed into a kind of hallucination.
This idea of immersion in a dream world was, of course, not Poe’s invention, though he had used it as early as 1827 in “Tamerlane” and “Dreams” and later in “To Francis” (1835), “Dream-Land” (1844), “To Marie Louise” (1847), and the second “To Helen” (1848). Visionary experiences had already been represented in much Romantic poetry, such as Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) and “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)
Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” (1821) and Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters” (1832). Like these poets, Poe understood thee the Romantic kind of vision is possible neither to the waking, lucid, metaphor-making mind nor to the mind of a Christian devotee rapt in contemplation of the afterlife. It is accessible only through the dream fantasies of sleep, of hallucinatory drugs, or, as is the case here, of quasi-death. Coleridge and the Gothic novelists had anticipated Poe even in this obsession with a limbo which the Ancient Mariner personifies as Life-in-Death (14), the limbo inhabited by Mary Shelley’s anthropomorphic monster in Frankenstein (1818), by Charles Maeurin’s Melmoth “the Wanderer” (1820), and by the haunted and haunting spirit of Catherine in Wuthering Heights (1847).
These obvious similarities between Poe’s subjective vision and the “egotistical sublime” (l5) of English Romantics have led many critics to treat Poe as what F. L. Lucas has called a “decayed Romantic,” (16) but if we return once more to his relation to lyrical tradition, we are likely not to accept such an assessment wholesale. If Poe’s use of Romantic entrancement distinguishes his poem thematically [column 2:] from the tradition of love lyric that he inherited from the ancients, his casting of the Romantic vision into a dramatic scene distinguishes him from the earlier English Romantic poets and links him to another creative heir to their vision, Robert Browning. It had been neither customary nor conventional among love lyricists to celebrate their ladies through the use of dramatic devices. Most traditional love lyrics were first-person expostulations, avowals, apologies, or laments, addressed to the beloved or to the universe, and they were reformulations of an idea “rather than,” as Robert Langbaum has it, “the dramatic presentation of how through a particular dialectical situation the idea comes to be perceived” (17). The only notable exceptions were, perhaps, Catullus, Donne, and Pope. However, those of Catullus’ lyrics which are dramatically presented employ the retrospective soliloquy rather than the technique Poe uses (an internal monologue carried — in the presence of others and concerning a present state of mind), and the same goes for Pope’s dramatic lyric, “Eloise to Abelard.” Doubtless, Donne was the first master of dramatic lyric in English, as witness the bedroom scenes of “The Sunne Rising,” “Breake of day,” and “Going to Bed.” Yet none of these anticipates the particular setting used in “For Annie,” though Donne’s facetious tone and his penchant for the abrupt, direct opening — “Busie old foole, unruly Sunne”; “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love” — seem to echo in Poe’s “Thank Heaven! the crisis — / The danger is past” (18).
The dramatic situation in “For Annie” is, as far as I know, not duplicated in any other well-known lyric in previous English or French poetry. There is a suggestion of it in Donne’s “Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,” but there the reclining, dying speaker, surrounded by physicians, addresses an inner monologue to his Maker regarding the state of his soul, whereas in “For Annie” the half-dead speaker addresses his thoughts to the anonymous beholders, and his subject is the phantasmal idea of his mistress. Likewise, the situation is only superficially similar in Jean-Pierre de Beranger’s “The Old Tramp,” where the dying speaker, prostrate in a gutter, watching the passersby, has social injustice rather than love in mind. Wordsworth’s “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” (1798) is another retrospective soliloquy, like “Eloise to Abelard,” only in this case the speaker is, like Poe’s narrator, near death, if not quire so near. Other such soliloquies, which bear no noticeable resemblance to Poe’s poem, are Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon” (1816) and Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad” (1842). The latter poet’s “St. Simeon Stylites” (1842) and “Ulysses” (1842) are closer to the sore of commentary on a current situation used in “For Annie,” but, of course, the situations themselves are different, and in “St. Simeon” there is no human audience. Thomas Hood, whose “Bridge of Sighs” seems to have influenced the throbbing rhythm of “For Annie,” wrote a lyric called “The Death-Bed” which, though retrospective, is interestingly enough written from the viewpoint of the watchers at a woman’s deathbed, and the sentiments of lines 11 and 12 — “We thought her dying when she slept, / And sleeping when she died!” — look forward to the remarks made by Poe’s moribund speaker when he suspects that his watchers “fancy” him dead (19).
Not really until Robert Browning began publishing his dramatic monologues was there any steady flow of [page 4:] poems using the technique employed in “For Annie,” and, of course, it was Browning, not Poe, who perfected the technique. In three previous poems, “Tamerlane” (1827), “Bridal Ballad” (1836), and “The Raven” (1844), Poe made significant uses of dramatic narrators, but in none of these does he achieve the immediacy of “For Annie,” and in none does he rely so entirely on setting for effect. The expiring Tamerlane speaks to an audience of one (his confessor), but his theme is the past, and the reluctant bride of the second poem soliloquizes, like Eloisa (but unlike Poe’s speaker), about an absent lover (dead in this case), a recent event, and the emotional impact of her experiences. In “The Raven” we are not aware until the end that the speaker actually occupies the setting he reminisces about, though his neurotic, whimsical attitude foreshadows that of the persona in the later poem. “For Annie” alone among Poe’s poems approximates the new method refined by Browning (20). The difference, easily observable by comparing “For Annie” to “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” (1845), marks the point at which Romantic lyrics give way to the almost empirical, dramatic lyrics of a later age (21).
In Browning’s poem there are the twin trademarks of true dramatic monologue (22): the disequilibria between the occasion and the utterance, and between what the speaker intends by his speech and what it actually reveals about his personality. The dying bishop, intending only to describe for his “nephews” the kind of tomb he desires, presents instead a lengthy discourse that reveals both his own venality and pride and that of his age, the Italian Renaissance. In “For Annie,” however, the relatively brief interior monologue is completely justified by the occasion, and it reveals only that aspect of mind and heart which is the speaker’s immediate subject. Nevertheless its reliance for effect on the dramatic setting, on an extraordinary point of view, and on the idiosyncratic experiencing of a particular time and place, classes it with Browning’s new kind of poetry, rather than with the earlier Romantic lyric. Thus, instead of marking Poe as a decayed Romantic, “For Annie” designates him as the American precursor of Robinson, Masters, Frost, and Eliot, insofar as they used dramatic monologue to evoke sympathy with the mental and behavioral aberrations of neurotic misfits.
This brings us back to the question of genre. “For Annie” is, as the tide suggests, a love lyric, and one that clearly fits into the continuing tradition, just as did his earlier ones, like “To M —— ” (1829), “To Francis” (1835), “To Marie Louise Shew” (1847), and the two versions of “To Helen” (1831 and 1848) (23). Like these, and their European ancestors, it was written partly to praise a lady by means of established lyric conventions, as we have seen. Of the older love poets, John Donne seems in this respect most like the Poe who wrote “For Annie,” for Donne, too, made unique use of most of the love conventions: love’s torments and the longing for relief through oblivion (“The Dreame,” “Twicknam garden”), the conflict between carnal and spiritual love (“Loves Alchymie,” “Of the Progresse of the Soule”), the visual entrancement (“The Extasie”), the idealization of the mistress (“Negative love,” “The good-morrow”) (24). And Donne’s colloquial, slightly facetious tone, experimental [column 2:] rhythms, and dramatic technique are closer to Poe’s than those of perhaps any other poet before Browning.
In fact, as the author of “For Annie,” Poe might be said to represent a transition from Donne’s kind of “Romantic” lyrics to Browning’s — from the strategic or rhetorical monologue, designed to praise a mistress while representing a state of mind, to the seemingly unpremeditated, dramatic monologue in which the speaker inadvertently reveals hidden aspects of his character and modes of perception. Unlike Donne, Poe as speaker indulges more in his own mental and physical condition than in his lady’s perfections, and the praise thus offered is less a rhetorical tactic than an integral part of the fixation on his own thoughts and feelings. Yet “For Annie” does not go all the way toward Browningesque dramatic monologue, for if it is not calculatedly rhetorical, it is completely purposeful (though spontaneously so), and it reveals about the speaker only what the speaker wishes to reveal. Moreover, there is no built-in dramatic irony to complicate and deepen the speaker’s personality (though it is dramatically ironic that the beholders think he is dead): the utterance suits the occasion.
How to label the form and technique of “For Annie,” other than to call it transitional, is problematical. It is not simply a variation on the occasional love poem, because its speaker is, to all outward appearances, dead. But neither is it an elegy, since the mistress being praised is quite alive. It is, I suppose, a kind of reverse elegy, with the “dead” lover praising the living lady. Perhaps it is more important to note Poe’s interesting combination of rhetorical and expressive modes of composition. “For Annie” shares with most Romantic and modern poetry its illusion of growing organically out of particular experience, but it shares with the classical and rhetorical poetry of earlier ages its unifying of fixed conventions around a predetermined intent, in this case the intent to praise, to compliment — what the ancients termed the epideictic purpose (25). By creating this new synthesis Poe has managed to offer up perhaps the highest praise accessible to a Romantic poet. For not only has he forged together, in the heat of passionate conviction, a throbbingly musical version of the conventional love lyric; but he has placed the love-struck singer in the only position from which a Romantic poet could absolutely assure his lady of her true value to him: the position of a dead man, a man enjoying that Al Aaraaf, that eternally star-lit region beyond Mont Blanc, where a woman’s deepest beauty, apart from its earthly disguises, can be fully realized and, thus, ultimately complimented. We must not be put off by the fact that “For Annie” contains so many of the elements usually pointed out in order to condemn Poe as a self-indulgent, negative, decadent Romantic, for here, at least, they appear in a poem that uses conventions and rhetoric as means to transform egotistical expression into formal, publicly pleasing artifice.
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NOTES
(1) See Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), pp. 135-138; F. L. Lucas, Literature and Psychology (London: Cassell, 1951), pp. 130-132, Marie Bonaparte The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, trans. John Rodker (London: Imago, 1949), pp. 180-183; [page 5:] Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1941), pp. 587-591; L. Lynn Hogue, “Eroticism in Poe’s ‘For Annie,’” New Approaches to Poe: A Symposium, ed. Richard P. Benton (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1970), pp. 85-87; Darrel Abel, “Coleridge’s ‘Life-in-Death’ and Poe’s ‘Death-in-Life,’” N&Q NS 2 (1955), 218-220, Thomas O. Mabbott, ed. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), I, 454; Floyd Stovall, Edgar Poe the Poet (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1969), pp. 180, 232-233; Daniel Hoffman, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 67-70; David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 170.
(2) Fussell Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, i965), pp. 189-190; and see T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, New Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), pp. 3-11; and Harry Levin, “Notes on Convention,” Perspectives of Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 55-83.
(3) Glorious Incense: The Fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe, 2nd ed. (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968), pp. 81-88.
(4) The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John W. Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), II, 400-403.
(5) John Donne, “Twicknam garden,” Donne, ed. Andrews Wanning (New York: Dell, 1963), p. 43.
(6) Labe, Sonnet XIII, trans. George Wyndham in Renaislance and Baroque Lyrics, ed. Harold Martin Priest (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1962), p. 107; Ovid, Amores, I, 3, quoted by Robert E. Hallowell, Ronsard and the Conventional Roman Elegy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1954), p. 59.
(7) Pierre de Ronsard, “Let me decease . . . ,” trans. George Wyndham in Priest, Renaissance and Baroque lyrics, p. 110.
(8) See Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethan Love Conventions (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1933), pp. 44, 301; Petrarch, Sonnet CLIX, quoted by Hugh M. Richmond, The School of Love: The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), p. 137; Spenser, Amoretti, III, The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Dodge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), p. 718.
(9) See lines 5-6; 53-58; 69-70, 102; 5, 25-30; and 49-52. My text is that which appears in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas O. Mabbott, I, 452-461.
(10) Shakespeare, Macbeth, III, iii, 23, in The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William A. Neilson and Charlff J. Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), p. 1197; Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” 1.132, in Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry & Prose, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p. 220; Samuel Daniel, Sonnet XLV, in Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, p. 152.
(11) Sappho, Lyric I, quoted by Richmond in The School of Love, pp. 38-39; Petrarch, Sonnet XCIV, in Richmond, p. 44; du Bellay, “L’Olive,” xiv, trans. George Wyndham, in Priest, p. 126; Spenser, Amoretti, VIII, in Dodge, Complete Poetical Works, p. 719; Petrarch, Sonnet CCCXLVIII, quoted by O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Rnduring Monument (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 150.
(12) See Habington, in Abbie Findlay Potts, The Elegiac Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), p. 105; and Lovelace, in Richmond, p. 152.
(13) See Bernart de Ventadorn, Sels qui cuion, trans. L. F. Mott, in Lever, p. 1; Hoskins, quoted by Richmond, p. 152.
(14) See Abel, “Coleridge’s ‘Life-in-Death’ and Poe’s ‘Death-inLife,’” pp. 218-220.
(15) See H. J. F. Jones, The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth’s Imagination (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954).
(16) See Literature and Psychology, pp. 130-132.
(17) The Poetry of Experience ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 190.
(18) See “The Sunne Rising” and “The Canonization,” in Donne, ed. Wanning, pp. 30, 32; and see Langbaum’s remarks on “Eloise to Abelard,” pp. 146-147. [column 2:]
(19) See Donne, pp. 174-175; de Beranger, in The Penguin Book of French Verse, ed. Anthony Hartley (Baltimore: Penguin, 1958), III, 1-3; William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: Modern Library, 1950), pp. 84-86; Byron, Selected Poetry and Letters, ed. Edward E. Bostetter (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), pp. 38-49; Tennyson, Selectiom from Tennyson, ed. W. C. and M. P. De Vane (New York: Crofts, 1940), pp. 87-88, 62-67, 69-70; Hood, Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, ed. John Clubbe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 64; and see Mabbott’s comments, Collected Works, I, 453.
(20) See Collected Works, I, 22-64, 304-310, 350-374.
(21) See Browning’s poem in The Shorter Poems of Robert Browning, ed. W. C. De Vane (New York: Crofts, 1937), pp. 54-57.
(22) See Langbaum, esp. Chs. 2, 4, and 6.
(23) See Collected Works, I.
(24) See Donne, pp. 27, 43-44, 49-50, 51-52, 60-62, 72, 124-147.
(25) See Hardison, The Enduring Monument, esp. pp. 1-106.
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