Beginning of Essay
A Poe story which fuses the themes of transcendence and lost love is "Ligeia," Poe's own favorite of his tales. The story's narrator marries a woman of exquisite beauty--a woman named Ligeia. To the narrator (and to Poe, naturally), she is the perfect woman, for s ....

Middle of Essay
.... myself, with childlike confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the early years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph--with how vivid a delight...did I feel...that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to a goal of wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden (Poe Modern Library ed., 657). But Ligeia grows ill. Even her intense passion for life could not save her from the Conqueror Worm. Her last words were shrieked in despair: "Man doth not yield him to the a ....