...Perhaps Poe best appreciated women's death as an occasion of male cathexis in his 1846 remark that "the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world" (535). Poe is only about half 13 Coverdale's rebuke of Silas Foster echoes warnings that receptive...

...selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead" (25). Edgar Allan Poe's dubious theory that the death of a beautiful woman "is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world" (1981, 982) offers only the logical extension of this association. Living female objets d'art are dangerously...

...natural world cannot be ultimately mastered or transcended. THE DEAD AND THE LIVING MUSE [T]he death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. Lamartine's Angel —Edgar Allan Poe In a letter of October 1903, written in the first year of his...

...participates, 'embracing the shiver of music's mystery'.57 The desire of The Blessed Damozel The death ... of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. EDGAR ALLAN POE Rossetti's poem and painting, both entitled The Blessed Damozel, were inspired by Poe's...

...une resurrection" (586). 36. In the "Philosophy of Composition," Poe suggests that "the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" (19). In Over Her Dead Body, Elisabeth Bronfen more specifically focuses this issue on an object of...

...form of master)' over this fear, in the late nineteenth century, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."1" The morbid association of women with death was made in nineteenth-century an and literature,...

...that exemplifies Poe's famous dictum from "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) that "the death ... of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,"18 be it in terms of a psychoanalytical dimension (Bronfen) or resonance with sentimental mass...

...work of French poets, but in Wordsworth, Goethe, and of course Poe when Johnson quotes: "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."66 Although Johnson sees this remark of Poe as misogynistic, it is important to understand how...

...are death and young women. Ah! — it comes to Poe in a flash, Archimedes in the bathtub. Eureka! — "the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. . . ." Now it is moderately clear that Poe needed to write about dead women. Far from being the last...

...relies upon a woman's death to nourish the poem's "Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance." If "the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world," and "the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover," as Poe absurdly codifies in...