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Essay on Edgar Allan Poe's Ideal Love of His Soul
To Helen presents beauty as necessary for apprehending the divine. Poe celebrates beauty, specifically the beauty of women, as represented by two women known for beauty in Greek legend (Helen of Troy and Psyche). Helen's beauty escorts him to Hellenistic culture and values, which brings him to Psyche, who illuminates the divine.
The poem "To Helen", often praised by Romantics as a near perfect statement of ideal beauty and love can be interpreted many different ways. Although, there may be a discrepancy of who the inspiration of the poem was, the poem could be described as a devotion to an ideal of beauty, only conceived through one's own imagination. But, looking further into the poem and researching its many aspects, I have come across that maybe Poe's, To Helen could be an attempt at escaping, through imagination, to the classical past, i.e. Greece and Rome, two of the major ages of classical history................
