Edgar Allan Poe had a sad life. His parents died while he was still too young to remember much of them, he got involved in drugs, and writing seemed his only outlet. I understand, because I myself am a writer. It's a way to totaly disguise what you're really saying behind powerful words. You can make a totally tragic thing happen to someone who's exactly like yourself, but in the end, you get to go back to the same life you've always had. I like best his epics on tragic love such as Lenore. That is the closest related to my own life. I love a boy who doesn't love me back, but I can't tell him because he doesn't like me as anything more than a friend. So I will live my life (in short, Valentine's Day) by myself. All I want is him.

-- Anonymous, February 10, 2003

Answers

I think it is too much to say that alcohol was his only outlet. Drugs only on a few rare occurrences. If you read "Alone" or "the Lake" you see that poetry or more fundamentally, his poetic wellspring, was his main outlet, even more important than lady loves and the departed dead themselves. The loss of his mother when he was to young to grieve followed by one loss or disappointment after another fleshed out or confirmed that art of melncholy that attracted him so. As a real person he definitely did not want misery or the weight of haunting and oppressive memories, but as poet he could- as Baudelaire put it- make gold out of mud.

So oddly, his losses are unrequited yet depersonalized- made universal in poetry. The same can be said about the women figures in Yeats' poetry- according to Yeats himself. At the same time he never got over these losses, unable to complete the grieving process like a pattern since his mother's death.

-- Anonymous, February 12, 2003