The subject of beauty, or subjects seen to be beautiful, have inspired poets since the earliest recorded cultures.  Writers of every era and culture have maintained the tradition; from Keats to Wordsworth, and from Whitman to Auden, poets seem to be inevitably compelled to identify and praise beauty in verse.

Edgar Allen Poe was no exception in the pursuit.  What sets him apart, however, is a distinctly different approach, and one evident in all of his work.  For Poe, there is the same urgency to exalt the beautiful, but it is an urgency that is never satisfied  with only the  form that beauty takes.  The loveliness is there, definitely, and Poe describes it.  However, it is for him purely symbolic, or expressive, of something usually too remote to grasp.  Consequently, beauty in the hands of Poe is typically not a matter of rejoicing, but for sadness.

To understand the process behind this mode of interpretation, Poe’s own views on the subject must be taken literally, as he presents them in his “The Poetic Principle”:  “When, indeed, men speak of beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality…but an effect.”  This is Poe calmly asserting that his fellow men are, understandably enough, taken in by the senses and thrilled by beauty as a thing, and as an essence unto itself.  It is, in his eyes, incorrect.  For Poe, we see beauty because what we really see is a sign, or a suggestion, of a grandeur we could not otherwise know.  His view of beauty, in fact, is rarely rapturous because beauty promises great things which men can never attain or achieve.  In the work of Edgar Allen Poe, beauty is a magnificent and often painful frustration.

He does acknowledge that he is not alone in trying to come to terms with the mystery that is beauty; in “The Philosophy of Composition”, he fully admits to the universal dilemma: “The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness…has given to the world all that it which it…has ever been enabled at once  to understand and to feel as poetic.”  Consequently, Poe is never content to describe or merely praise beauty.  He seems to reflect a deeper obligation, to instead seek the greatness that beauty implies as existing.

This is, as Poe’s work plainly demonstrates, a recipe for sadness, if not despair.  Since the wonder behind the beauty can never be known to mortal man, Poe translates this through the form of loss, or inability to capture, mankind can comprehend: death.  Loss is everywhere in Poe.  That is to say, whatever beauty he finds is connected to loss, as in “Annabel Lee”.  There is a sense in the poem that the narrator can only hold onto the perfect, beautiful vision of Annabel Lee because, in fact, she is gone.  The death serves to give shape to the mystery of her perfect beauty, as it is equally unfathomable and removed.

Even when actual sorrow is not the effect, Poe can never accept beauty as a component in the here and now; it must always refer to what can only be guessed at.  It is true that Ligeia’s beauty is exalted by him as an actual thing, but only minimally.  He acknowledges the existence of the quality of it, but he can only describe it in terms of what it promises or suggests: “It was the radiance of an opium dream, an airy and spirit-lifting vision…”  Then, his ode to Helen completely transforms the nature of her loveliness.  It is not “beauty” in any worldly sense; it is a mysterious kind of journey, or transportation.  In the brief poem, the beauty is either a distance or a means of reaching an ideal place: “Helen, thy beauty is to me/ Like those Nicean barks of yore…”  It is most certainly not an object to be known and cherished as such.

For Poe, beauty was nothing more than a gripping representation of something beyond, for which the human soul hungers.  He believed in beauty, but there is a strong sense in all his work that he did not trust it, or even especially care for it.  It drew him in, as it draws in all people, but the work of Poe points to a growing disillusionment, and something like anger, with it.  He said that beauty was an effect, and not an actual quality, and there is wisdom in this.  The sadness is that Poe, unable to isolate what beauty promises, is left to wrestle with the painful frustration of its existence.