Please can anyone tell me the religion of Edgar Allen Poe?

Thank you,

June

-- Anonymous, February 24, 2002

Answers

I believe Poe to have been an agnostic. He referred to god or demons in his works often but one does not find his characters ever gaining solace from the divine powers as a rule. Reading biographies of Mr. Poe we also do not see any affiliations with a church or churches during his lifetime. One would have thought that during the period he was married to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, and living with her mother that this would be a time that would exploit any religious affiliations if Poe were to have any - there is no evidence of that.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2002

Most vividly seen in his inability to see or fully believe in redemptive afterlife. He wants to escape the trap OR just get on with life but instead is left with insubstantial hauntings. No Beatrice, just a lonely beacon vaguely among not too sympathetic angels. In fact, Poe resents death for stealing away his loves, his happy moments, his hopes.

As for social religous affiliation, poe likely was a child of the age in America, an intellectual Deist, whose God is philosophically central but personally remote. Remoteness is definitely a Poe experience of the supernatural. He didn't believe much in manifestations, even the angels being symbolic conventions. His stay with the Fordham Jesuits inspired him enough to write of the Catholic female figure, Mary as gleaned from evening vespers, another ceremonial symbol of the lady of brightness and hope for the poor beleaguered Poe.

But that is as far as he went. He even abandonned or obscured other female Beatrices(Royster, Virginia, etc etc)in that curious way he had of striving for an ideal but resenting and denying death and ghostly clinging. Poe's spectrum of interests and writing is broad but limited to his personal thought. Politics and theology is a remote interest though he latched onto Biblical themes for Pym and some essays ofn the Holy Land which impressed him with the obscure darkness of prophecy, curse and the empty wasteland- Poe's landscape of Limbo.(That is where Dante places the pagan poets).

-- Anonymous, February 27, 2002

Although this is not an answer i would like to reply by the fact that knowone in their right mind would take info from this source because much of it is false and stated with opinions. U might as well get a new site because this one sucks.

-- Anonymous, November 23, 2002