Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the inevitability of death and encourages reflection on mortality through poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe suggests that poetry serves a vital purpose in reminding readers of their own mortality. By confronting the reality of death, poetry compels individuals to ponder the meaning of life, cherish their experiences, and appreciate the fleeting nature of existence. This acknowledgment of mortality can evoke deep emotional responses and inspire deeper insights into the human condition.
In practice
During a literary discussion, this quote could spark a contemplation on the role of poetry in understanding life's transience.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.
Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. Maybe because it is newer. The investigation of ugliness is, to me, more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty. And why? Because ugly is human.
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.
It hurts when God has to PRY things out of our hand!
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