SOURCE: Zayed, Georges. “The Symbolism of the Poems.” In The Genius of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 127-36. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Zayed discusses the pervasive presence of death in Poe's poetry.

In fact, Poe's poems translate an internal reality, felt by him with intensity and pain, without however becoming confessions. If certain pieces obviously refer to events in his emotional or intellectual life, he does not strike a heroic pose in them, as do the Romantics, nor does he exalt his own ego. On the contrary, he conferred enough universality to his poems so that they find an echo in all hearts. That is also the main quality of French Classicism. Like the short stories, which express the dreads of the human heart, anxiety before life, and anguish before death, the poems are dominated in general by the spectre of death. But in them...