By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was a pioneer of the short story form, but he was also an accomplished poet. Below, we’ve selected ten of Poe’s very best poems and offered a short introduction to each of them.
‘The Raven’.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.’
This poem had to head the list of a selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s best poems, really. It is the only literary work to inspire the name of a sporting team (the American Football team the Baltimore Ravens).
According to Poe himself, in a later work of literary analysis, if he hadn’t had a change of heart we might well be reading a poem called, not ‘The Raven’, but ‘The Parrot’ (although he may have been pulling his readers’ legs there).
The unnamed narrator sits up late one dreary winter night, mourning the loss of his beloved, Lenore, when a raven appears at the window and speaks the repeated single word, ‘Nevermore’. The narrator starts to view the raven as some sort of prophet. Follow the link above to read the poem in full and learn more about it.
‘To Helen’.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
This early poem was first published in 1831 in Poems of Edgar A. Poe, which appeared when Poe was still in his early twenties, although Poe made a few tweaks to the poem in 1845.
Poe addresses Helen of Troy, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the classical world. But as well as such universal resonances, ‘To Helen’ also has more personal links to Edgar Allan Poe’s own life, and indeed the poem has been analysed in terms of its biographical associations.
Jane Stanard, the mother of one of Poe’s childhood friends, had been the first person to encourage Poe in his writing ambitions, at a time when Poe’s foster-father thought he should be doing other things.
‘To Helen’ was one of the first poems Poe wrote, and he wrote it for her. Poe was most likely only a teenager when he wrote ‘To Helen’. If only we could all be so deft with a pen at such a young age! Follow the link above to read the poem in full and learn more about it.
‘Ulalume’.
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Subtitled ‘A Ballad’, this longer poem shares, with ‘The Raven’, a narrator who has lost his loved one. The brooding narrator wanders the moors one October night, unaware that he is meandering in the direction of the tomb of his lost beloved.
Although criticised for privileging stylish sound-effects over richness of content (by Aldous Huxley among others, who called it, in something of a mixed review, ‘a carapace of jewelled sound’), the poem is a great one for reading aloud during the Halloween season and makes our pick of the best Halloween poems.
‘A Dream within a Dream’.
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
How can we separate reality from illusion? What if, to quote from Poe’s poem, ‘All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream’? One of Poe’s more famous poems, ‘A Dream within a Dream’ muses on the fragility and fleetingness of everything, and asks whether anything we do has any lasting or real effect: ‘All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.’ See the link above to read this dreamy poem in full.
‘The Bells’.
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells –
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
This poem earns its place on this list not least because it gave us the delightful word ‘tintinnabulation’, to describe the ringing of bells. If ‘Ulalume’ was a carapace of jewelled sound, ‘The Bells’ is another such sonic carapace, a masterpiece of onomatopoeia…
‘Sonnet—To Science’.
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
Poe was greatly interested in science, and among his literary achievements is a long prose-poem-cum-essay, Eureka, which is subtitled in some edition of Poe’s work ‘An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe’.
In this shorter poem, a sonnet following the Shakespearean or English rhyme scheme, Poe calls science ‘true daughter of Old Time’ which ‘alterest all things with thy peering eyes’. But although ‘Sonnet – To Science’ may appear to be a hymn to the importance of scientific endeavour and discovery, there’s a little more going on in this poem.
This sonnet was written when Poe was a young Romantic poet, and it bears the influence of John Keats, who had attacked science, in his poem ‘Lamia’, for destroying the sense of mystery and awe in the world
‘Eldorado’.
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
A knight goes in search of Eldorado, that golden paradise, in this short poem. But the knight grows old without ever finding that fabled city. And then he meets a shade which tells him where he can find Eldorado. Follow the link above to read the full poem.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago).
The palace of this poem is a palace of the mind, found in ‘the monarch Thought’s dominion’. This is a haunted palace because, whilst it is beautiful, it is also inhabited by ‘evil things, in robes of sorrow’ which ‘assailed the monarch’s high estate’. This poem may well have had its origins in Poe’s own troubled life, his battle with alcoholism, and his bouts of depression.
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
This is another Poe poem which was originally written when he was still in his early twenties, in 1831, but was rewritten for publication in 1845.
Part Gothic poem and part fantasy, this poem tells of an underwater city ruled by Death himself: ‘Death has reared himself a throne / In a strange city lying alone / Far down within the dim West, / Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best / Have gone to their eternal rest…’
‘Annabel Lee’.
Iwas a child andshewas a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
This seems like a fitting poem to conclude this list of Poe’s greatest poems, since it was the last poem he completed before his untimely death in 1849.
Precisely who the inspiration for the character of ‘Annabel Lee’ was remains a mystery, although Poe’s cousin, whom he fell in love with when she was thirteen, is the leading candidate. The narrator fell in love with Annabel Lee when they were both young and his love for her continues even after her death. Follow the link above to read the whole sorry tale.
Continue to explore the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe with our celebration of his contribution to literature, our pick of his best short stories, and our exploration of his use of the short story form.
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