Duality In Edgar Allan Poe's Poetry Essay

American writer and editor, Edgar Allen Poe is known for his poems of horror and mystery. Using the duality of his personal experiences, both devastating and pleasant, he produces literary works of art. The satisfaction in sadness surrounding Edgar Allen Poe’s life, as depicted in his daguerreotype, reflect the duality of the mood and tone conveyed in his poems as guided by his use of literary devices, such as in the poem, For Annie.

In Poe’s poem, For Annie, the main character is thankful and relieved that the persistent illness, “the fever called "Living" is conquered at last” after consuming some means of poison, otherwise known as naphthaline, in an act of suicide, now lying in the narrow bed that is his coffin(5-6). The character Annie possesses a kind of duality that is appealing. Annie is happiness. Annie is death, and the poison is love. This toxic poison of love quenches every thirst and leaves a feeling of completeness as if another drink or touch of one more would

This use of this literary device is intriguing and causes the reader to wonder what the author was thinking about or reminiscing on at the time he wrote this poem. Further, it causes the reader to wonder what kind of tragedy the author must have experienced in order to write such a distressing yet passionately poem. The manner in which this poem is presented gives light to a new perspective on life and death. Life is an illness and death is a cure, and while the man’s is physically lifeless, his heart and mind are alive. Similar to the emotion conveyed in Poe’s daguerreotype, the literary devices rhyme and repetition stress the narrator’s emotional exhaustion in the poem when he is deprived of Annie, while Poe is emotionally exhausted by the traumatic loss of the woman he loved whom he watched take her final