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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Romanticism—a literary and artistic movement that largely began as a reaction against enlightenment era values like objectivity, logic, and reason—came to dominate much of European and American art and literature in the 19th century. With its openness to personal experience, imaginative speculation, and the belief in the human spirit, it was an ideal form for a writer like Edgar Allan Poe—an artist fascinated by the complexity and richness of the human psyche. To be sure, with its emphasis on emotion, feeling, dreams, fantasy, and the spirit, “Annabel Lee” is very much a romantic era poem.
However, like other Poe poems—“The Bells,” “The Raven,” “The Haunted Palace,” “Spirits of the Dead,” “Lenore,” and “El Dorado”—“Annabel Lee” belongs to the sub-genre of romanticism willing to explore darker, often occult forces in ways that the work of foundational romantic writers like William Wordsworth, John Clare, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge were not. When considered alongside texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,”, and later, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “Annabel Lee” stands as a poem which both prioritizes the limitless capacities of the human heart (not even death can destroy true love) and accepts the possibility that God’s emissaries (in this case, angels) are not necessarily as pure as people would like to believe.
By Edgar Allan Poe
A Dream Within a Dream
A Dream Within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe
Berenice
Berenice
Edgar Allan Poe
Hop-Frog
Hop-Frog
Edgar Allan Poe
Ligeia
Ligeia
Edgar Allan Poe
Tamerlane
Tamerlane
Edgar Allan Poe
The Black Cat
The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe
The Cask of Amontillado
The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe
The Conqueror Worm
The Conqueror Worm
Edgar Allan Poe
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
The Gold Bug
The Gold Bug
Edgar Allan Poe
The Haunted Palace
The Haunted Palace
Edgar Allan Poe
The Imp of the Perverse
The Imp of the Perverse
Edgar Allan Poe
The Lake
The Lake
Edgar Allan Poe
The Man of the Crowd
The Man of the Crowd
Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Edgar Allan Poe
The Oval Portrait
The Oval Portrait
Edgar Allan Poe
The Philosophy of Composition
The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe