Text: Lynn Hogue, “Eroticism in Poe's For Annie,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 85-87

[page 85:]

Poe rarely used eroticism in his poetry — images and language which convey or reinforce impressions of sexual desire or activity. In fact, of all Poe's poems only “For Annie” reflect a conscious use of it, which deserves more than passing notice. Until now the sexual interpretation of Poe's poetry has been the domain of the Freudians, notably Roy P. Basler and Marie Bonaparte. Basler's study, commendable for its restraint in a field abounding with mountebanks, is limited to the work itself, avoids the personality of the writer,(1) and actually has little to say about sex itself in Poe's work. He notes it only in “Ulalume” and there only in terms of underlying meaning rather than explicit expression: “... the poem narrates the struggle between a feared new passion for a flesh-and-blood woman and an old worship of an ideal image that is perfectly safe because separated long since from its objective reality.”(2)

Marie Bonaparte is another case. The instances of eroticism in both the poems and tales which she marshals to substantiate her view of Poe as a sado-necrophilist are too numerous to examine here. Her examination of “For Annie” ignores the evidence of eroticism that does not apply to “Annie! as measured by her Procrustean couch. In fact, Bonaparte has much in common with modern critics who would agree with her “that Poe's passions were as platonic as tempestuous, ...”(3) although they would scarcely attribute this as she does to “Poe's great and renewed yearning for union with the dead mother. ...”(4) Sexual interpretation is not the exclusive province of the Freudians, however, and, as this study will show, it can enlarge the reader's understanding of “For Annie without commenting on Poe's sexuality.

Hints of the poem's eroticism have come even from more conventional critics. Arthur Hobson Quinn, for example, has noted its “pulsing passion,”(5) and Floyd Stovall once suggested that “the emotions thus indelicately laid bare must have been genuine and acute at the moment of writing.”(6) These clues have been ignored in more recent studies by Richard Wilbur, Eric W. Carlson, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, and Floyd Stovall, who have regarded the poem as essentially nonsexual. Wilbur sees it not only as an outgrowth of “an intense Platonic relationship” but also controlled by it: “I have avoided, as distracting and reductive, any clinical interpretation of these poems; but it may as well be said here that ‘For Annie’ is a direct statement of Poe's Oedipal feelings, of his horror of the physical and his consequent devotion to fantasies of spiritual union in death.”(7) Carlson follows much the same direction in his introduction to Poe: “The relationship was highly Platonic: in one letter he addressed her as “[[‘]]my own sweet sister Annie, my pure beautiful angel — wife of my soul — to be mine hereafter and forever in the Heavens. ...[[’]] Whether or not dead, the speaker lies ‘composedly’ in his narrow bed. It is the puritan ideal of love and loyalty (the ‘Puritan pansies,’ the rosemary and rue) that redeems him.”(8) And E. San Juan, Jr., echoes the same view when he speaks of Annie's “metaphysical purity.(9)

Both Thomas Ollive Mabbott and Floyd Stovall have continued the Platonic interpretation of “For Annie.” Mabbott asserts of Poe and “Annie” Richmond: “Her husband did not object to their Platonic relationship.”(10) Stovall in his recent Edgar Poe the Poet proposes a similar view: “It is not a love poem, unless of the Platonic kind, for it contains no suggestion of physical passion.”(11) Like Wilbur, Carlson, and Mabbott, Stovall draws upon biographical material in order to substantiate the poem's alleged Platonism: “In so far as the poem reveals Poe's state of mind in the late winter and spring of 1849, it suggests that he was relieved to be free of the uncertain and frenzied emotions with which he had courted and proposed marriage to Mrs. Whitman, and content in the more spiritual love of Mrs. Richmond. Since she had a husband and was loyal to him, the poet was not tantalized by the question of marriage. Annie was his “sweet sister,” the “wife” of his soul, a relation which remained the same in death or 1ife.”(12)

Stovall errs, like his predecessors, in assuming that the speaker of the poem is Poe himself and, therefore, that the attitudes and events to which the poem alludes must somehow be squared with the biographical details known about Poe's relationship with “Annie” Richmond. Thus, as apparently Wilbur, Carlson, Mabbott, [page 86:] and Stovall would lead us to believe, if the relationship was Platonic, then the poem must be Platonic. Divorcing Poe from the persona should, of course, free the reader to examine the evidence of eroticism in “For Annie! without threatening his biographical understanding. Yet the eroticism of the poem fits easily within the framework of what we know about Poe and Mrs. Richmond.

Mabbott indicates the basis of the lyric “in a somewhat hysterical letter to “Annie” from Fordham on November 16, 1848:” “Why am I not with you now darling that I might ... look deep down into the clear Heaven of your eyes ... whisper in your ear the divine emotion[s], which agitate me [?] ... in Providence — I went to bed & wept through a long, long, hideous night of despair ... I procured ... laudanum and ... took the cars back to Boston ... I wrote you a letter, in which I opened my whole heart to you ... I then reminded you of that holy promise, which was the last I exacted from you in parting — the promise that, under all circumstances, you would come to me on my bed of death ... Having written this letter, I swallowed about half the laudanum ... A friend was at hand, who ... saved me ... After the laudanum was rejected from the stomach, I became calm, & to a casual observer, sane ... I am so ill ... in body and mind, that I feel I CANNOT live, unless I can feel your sweet, gentle, loving hand pressed upon my forehead — oh my pure, virtuous, generous, beautiful, beautiful sister Annie! — is it not POSSIBLE for you to come ... until I subdue this fearful agitation ... Farewell-here & hereafter — forever your own Eddy — ”(13)

Although Poe may have “said that he thought that more than Platonic friend- ship for them would be unwise,”(14) in “For Annie” he is certainly free to portray for the persona a more explicitly sexual involvement. Quinn, in fact, recognizes Poe's sincere passion for “Annie” Richmond.(15) It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the throes of apparent suicidal impulse and unfulfilled desires, he would turn to erotic wish fulfillment through poetry. Although Poe's desires for “Annie! Richmond by his convalescent bedside remained unrealized, the consummation of the persona's love in “For Annie” is real enough. Apparently Poe constructed the fantasy out of his desire for Annie and included a description of her sexual union with the persona as well as her subsequent ministrations to him, transforming his convalescence into a Joyful experience.

T. O. Mabbott is correct in asserting that the persona is alive. He follows Stéphane Mallarmé in viewing him as “one who has been so ill that he has fancied himself in the first moments of death but has been revived by the presence and affection of Annie.”(16) Essentially, the poem reflects two views of the persona. “The crisis” is treated in lines one through forty-four, in which the speaker characterizes his emotional experience in allusive terms and lines sixty-seven on- ward where he depicts his erotic experience more explicitly. The intermediate Lines forty-five through sixty-six contain an over-lapping of the two types of reflection, where the narrator gradually shifts his thoughts from the first more associational presentation to the second.

Although the two views of the experience are developed separately, they are by no means unrelated. The ‘crisis” [1] (17) with its “lingering illness” [3] marked by “nausea” [25] and “pain” [26] is, in fact, a characterization of the speaker's passionate involvement. The “fever called ‘Living’” he will describe more pictorially later. The images of the first part are not explicitly erotic, though “napthaline river! [35] would seem appropriate foreshadowing. The speaker lies exhausted, only temporarily satisfied. His taste of “the river / Of passion” [35-36] having piqued and inflamed him, has aroused him to further pursuit with a “tantalized spirit” [53] when it is again physically possible. A second image — the vulval “spring and “cavern not very far down under the ground,” may represent an impressionistic description of Annie as the speaker perceives her in sexual union. The crisis experience, however, and not the coital encounter, is the primary focus of part one.

Several references in the transitional stanzas (45-66) mark the gradual shift from a characterization of the sexual event to its more explicit expression. The speaker's bed becomes a place of significance: “to sleep, you must slumber Zen Just such a bed” (51-52). The commingling of the “rosemary odor” with that of the “Puritan pansies” (63-66) presages eventual sexual union with Annie. The description of being bathed by Annie's tresses, kissed and caressed, and then falling gently to sleep on her breast (71-78) is clearly erotic, picturing the foreplay and aftermath of sexual intercourse. The conclusion, in which the speaker focuses his thought on the love-light in Annie's eyes contrasts with “To Helen” where the [page 87:] speaker is drawn at last to the ideal conceptions of Beauty and Hope, in that his heart “is [now] brighter” [95], it “sparkles! [98] and it “glows” [99] in warm response to the passionate involvement reflected in his partner's eyes.

The passion expressed explicitly in this poem is unique in Poe's poetry and is important to an accurate understanding of the content of the poem. To say that the eroticism should alter our view of the Poe-Richmond relationship is to commit the same blunder in the biographical sphere that earlier critics have made in the critical. The eroticism should be judged rather for its contribution to the total impact of the poem on the reader.

North Carolina State University

[page 87, continued:]

[[Notes]]

1 Roy P. Basler, Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature, (N.Y., 1967), p. 11.

2 Basler, p. 185.

3 Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, trans. John Rodker, (London, 1949), p. 18h.

4 Bonaparte, p. 179.

5 Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biography, (N.¥Y., 1941), p. 573.

6 Floyd Stovall, “The Women in Poe's Poems and Tales,” University of Texas Studies in English, V, (1925), 206.

7 Richard Wilbur, ed., Poe: Complete Poems, (N.Y., 1959), pp. 149-150.

8 Eric W. Carlson, Introduction to Poe: A Thematic Reader, (Glenview, Illinois, 1967), pp. 570-571. HR i

9 E. San Juan, Jr., “The Form of Experience in the Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,” Georgia Review, XXI, (1967), 75.

10 Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ed., Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, I, (Cambridge Mass., 1969), 454.

11 Floyd Stovall, Edgar Poe the Poet (Charlottesville, 1969), p. 232.

12 Stovall, Edgar Poe, p.233.

13 Quoted in Mabbott, pp. 453-454,

14 Mabbott, p. 3.

15. Quinn, p. 592.

16 Mabbott, p. 454.

17 All citations are from The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Floyd Stovall (Charlottesville, 1965).