Knowra Annabel Lee Annabel Lee A narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe in which a speaker mourns his beloved Annabel Lee, who died young. Its musical repetitions and idealized love turn grief into a haunting tale.
Romanticism : An artistic and intellectual movement emphasizing imagination, emotion, nature, and individual experience. The poem’s intense feeling and idealized beloved place it within Romantic literary traditions.
Anaphora : The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or lines. Repeated openings such as “In a kingdom by the sea” give the poem its incantatory refrain.
Edgar Allan Poe : An American writer and critic known for poetry and tales of mystery, horror, and psychological intensity. Poe wrote the poem near the end of his life and gave it his characteristic musical precision.
Lenore : A poem by Edgar Allan Poe about a young woman’s death and the responses of those who mourn her. Poe’s earlier treatment of a dead beloved offers a compact counterpart to Annabel Lee’s narrative.
Gothic fiction : A literary mode using dread, death, haunting, and dark settings to unsettle its audience. The speaker’s nightly vigil beside Annabel Lee’s tomb gives the love story a Gothic afterlife.
Internal rhyme : Rhyme between words within a single line of poetry. Poe’s internal rhymes make the short lines unusually musical and tightly linked.
The Southern Literary Messenger : A Richmond literary magazine that published American writing and criticism during the nineteenth century. The poem first appeared there in January 1849.
La Belle Dame sans Merci : A ballad by John Keats about a knight who encounters an enigmatic and fatal supernatural woman. Keats makes the beloved a source of danger, while Poe’s speaker presents her as wholly innocent.
Elegy : A poem of mourning that reflects on death and the loss of a person or way of life. The poem reshapes personal bereavement as a sustained, musical lament.
Ballad : A narrative poem, often in short stanzas, shaped by songlike rhythms and repetition. Its compact storytelling and recurring phrases recall the oral ballad tradition.
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