SOURCE: “Poe's Most Poetic Subject” in Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 44-57.

In the following excerpt from an essay written in 1982, Bessein suggests that Poe's concentration on dead women in his works has negatively influenced later treatments of women in American literature, as well as women's images of themselves.

Charles Baudelaire pronounced Edgar Allan Poe's attitude toward women chivalric, and scholars have repeatedly done likewise, even within the past three decades, without finding chivalry incompatible with his proclamation that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetic subject to be found. Even when seeing his life and works as inextricably bound together, writers generally look upon what they consider his chivalrous approach as the accepted mode for a Southern gentleman and seem to have no special misgivings about his statement on what is suitable subject matter for poetry.¹ With...