February is a time when we’re encouraged to focus on all things romantic. Love poems, rom-coms, candlelit dinners, and chalky little heart-shaped candies. We do love all those things, of course, but we’ve got a less conventional Valentine’s Day author to add to your reading list for this most-romantic of months.
For your consideration: Edgar Allan Poe. Though his best-known works are more known for terror than tenderness, Poe wrote of love often. Loves lost, loves mourned, and love enduring.
Poems like “Annabel Lee” contain many of Poe’s most famous poetic lines about love:
But we loved with a love that was more than love–
I and my Annabel Lee–
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
His other love poems “To Helen”, “For Annie”, and short stories like “Eleonora” and “The Oval Portrait” are also good places to start your darker Valentine’s Day reading. “Eleonora” even boasts a happy ending, which can’t be said for most of Poe’s protagonists!
Poe even wrote a poem called “Valentine”, a clever acrostic that hides the full name of the woman he intended to impress with is. Can you find her name in the lines below? (Hint: 1, 2, 3, 4…)
For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that, nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines! — they hold a treasure
Divine — a talisman — an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure —
The words — the syllables! Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor!
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot
Which one might not undo without a sabre,
If one could merely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdu,
Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets, by poets — as the name is a poet’s, too.
Its letters, although naturally lying
Like the knight Pinto — Mendez Ferdinando —
Still form a synonym for Truth. — Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do.
Stumped? Check our Facebook account on Friday, February 13 at 8:00 a.m. for the answer!
Throughout all of Poe’s writings related to love, themes of loss and longing are present, reflecting the author’s own numerous personal losses in this arena. Despite these; however, he returns to themes of beauty, love, and hope in these works.
So for this February’s celebration of romance, consider checking out a compilation of Poe’s writing, and exploring them after a candlelit dinner somewhere with sad, uncertain, rustling purple curtains. We’ll understand if you’d still like to stream a few romantic comedies, too.
Contact us at [email protected] or (815) 756-9568 ext 2150 for help placing a hold.
And on March 14, at 10:00 a.m., come to the library’s annual World of Reading celebration to visit six literary worlds, one of them inspired by Edgar Allan Poe! Wall up your friends in Fortunado’s catacombs, enjoy atmospheric chamber music, decorate a mask for the Masque of the Red Death, sample tavern fare that Poe would have enjoyed in New England in the 1800s, and more. You could even win a beating Tell-Tale Heart plush, perfect for snuggling on a midnight dreary.