Edgar Allan Poe’s Apocalyptic Vision in The Conqueror Worm and The City in the Sea

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, RWTH Aachen University, language: English, abstract: Themes of ruin and apocalypse intensify in several poems of the 1840’s and as one of the today most approved writers of that time, Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry is certainly worth being investigated in this regard. In this paper I want to investigate the apocalyptic vision in Edgar Allan Poe’s poems The Conqueror Worm , published in 1843, and The City in the Sea , in its final version from the year 1845. I also have to mention that I will examine The Conqueror Worm as a poem on its own and not in connection with the tale Ligeia, into which the poem was later (1845) established. I have also decided to work with the five-stanza version of The City in the Sea , opposed to a widely spread opinion that the poem should only contain four stanzas . For an analysis concerned with this topic, it has to be made clear what I understand when I use the term apocalyptic. Therefore the paper starts with an attempt to define the term as good as possible. Afterwards I am going to give a thorough analysis of The Conqueror Worm first, and then I will analyze The City in the Sea . The analyses are going to include interpretations according to the apocalyptic vision in the poems. At the end of the paper I will give a short summary together with the most important outcomes of the analyses.