SOURCE: “The Madness of Art and Science in Poe's ‘Ligeia,’” in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. 24, October, 1995, pp. 21-32.

In the following essay, Hume analyses Poe's “Ligeia” as a synthesis of mythology and science.

In a September 1839 letter to Philip Cooke, Edgar Allan Poe expressed his view that “Ligeia” was “intended to convey an idea of truth to the narrator” (Letters 118). Although numerous critics have offered theories about what this “truth” might be, they all tend to treat Poe's narrator either as a romantic artist or madman, diminishing his scientific ruminations in this tale. However, a close reading of this narrator's “scientific” speculations in relation to his treatment of the mythological dimensions of Ligeia reveal that he is, as D. H. Lawrence first suggested in Studies in Classic American Literature, as much a mad scien-tist as an artist in his investigation of Ligeia's phenomenal return from the...