Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - J. Gerald Kennedy (essay date 1987)

J. Gerald Kennedy (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: “Writing and the Problem of Death” in Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 1-31.

[In the following essay, Kennedy examines the responses to death of various nineteenth-century American writers—including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper—eventually focusing on the role of death in Poe's works.]

In the grip of death, Poe's Ligeia asks her husband to recite “certain verses composed by herself not many days before.” Nineteenth-century readers must have anticipated a scene of deathbed intimacy in which the dying woman would through a consolatory rhyme signify her readiness to die. Similar scenes filled contemporary fiction and poetry and—according to memoirs and biographies of the same period—mirrored a pervasive social practice. In Victorian England as well as America, “the deathbed presented...

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