Edgar Allen Poe's Philosophy of Poetry

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Edgar Allan Poe had a philosophy that poetry should appeal only to the sense of beauty, not truth. I think that what Poe is trying to say with this philosophy is that not everything that we sense is beautiful is necessarily truly beautiful. In all of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems there is a haunting aspect of beauty that he describes, however, his life was not full of beauty or happiness. I will show the beauty Edgar Allan Poe describes in his poetry that may have escaped his life or not even existed.

One of the many things that Edgar Allan Poe did not have in his life for a long time, was the love of a woman. That is why many of his poems involve the death of a beautiful woman. With his mother being taken from him at a young age, and his wife Virginia dying of tuberculosis shortly after they were married, a beautiful woman was not a constant in his life. One beautiful line that describes a great beauty now lost is in the poem To Helen (II):

“Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary, wayworn wand...

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