"...ye loved her for her wealth, and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her, that she died!"..."
[from "Lenore", by Edgar Allan Poe]
As I see it, "loved...for...wealth, and hated...for...pride" were A) wish-fulfillment thinking & B) his 'revenant love', or 'life-in-death woman' were (at least partly) self-representation on Poe's part. ( I also think that esp. Annabel Lee is not so much a loved woman as a symbol - of aspiration, etc. )
To explain:
A): wish-fulfillment, analogous to Mozart ( after being kicked by the Bishop of Salzburg's secretary ) saying(what never happened) that he would like to show up the Bishop's secretary properly, and give him several kicks on the arse in return as well [-quoted more accurately, from a letter written by Mozart, by Harold C. Schonberg in 'Lives of the Great Comoposers, Vol. 1'. ...this may put in context the Why of Voltaire's concurrent desire to 'ecraser l'infame'.] - Poe was never that well-off, even at best. (Not having neglected his wife, nor any other woman particularly, during his entire lifetime... that sort of thing might've saved him some money.)
B): ...self-representation (in life-in-death beloveds)... somewhere in Poe's impoverished and ultimately orphaned childhood, something failed to grow up in him, you could say - killed before it could properly develop (rather than 'failure to grow up' as in 'remaining childish') as it should have. Doubtless he sensed this in himself, given as he was to intense pity and regret for the lost opportunities of all That Which is Past. And having married a sexlessly beautiful, much younger woman for sheer idealism [the sexual element in his marriage is commonly acknowledged nowadays to have been nil, or nearly] doubtless also left a feeling of possibilities blocked (as well as, of course, the obtrusively imitative elements, Virginia Clemm his young bride having been an invalid of the type known then as a consumptive... as currently described by Dickens Nicholas Nickleby, ...], consumptives had an appearance of the corpse about them while yet alive.)
[- by Russell Hess, (C) November 5, 1998. ]
- Page created (&, except for this footer/graphic, taken from a draft copy done on my old Zenith laptop on November 22 1998) June 9 & 15, 2000 by Russell Hess, Webmaster (hess1@bigfoot.com) of 'UpSky2' and 'UpSky'.
