I need to approach an essay about "Annabel Lee" by Poe from either a biographical or an historical critical approach.

While the losses in Poe's life through the
deaths of beautiful beloved women--his mother, his friend's idolized mother, his young wife--is
reflected in his poetry--just as his years living in England under the sway of Gothic influences
is reflected in his poetry--his intellectual aesthetic of poetry is also reflected in his poetry
since it is through this aesthetic theory that he builds his poetry. An historical approach to
discussing "" might take the route of discussing Poe's historic influence on the
theory and development of literature.

According to the Critical Survey of
Poetry, Poe, who was one of the few early American poets to be famous while still living,
influenced the Symbolist movement in poetry because of their admiration of his conceptualization
of "ideal beauty," the musicality of his verse (which some critics derided), and his
ability to createin poetry. Renowned poets who have similarly attributed admiration and
influence to Poe are Yeats, Baudelaire, Eliot, and Dante Rossetti, along with playwright George
Bernard Shaw and composers Stravinsky and Debussy.

Other impacts Poe had on
the historical development of literature were to devise and advocate a criticism for poetry and
book reviewing that exposed bad poetry and writing by insisting that judgments must be made on a
system of standards that identifies defects. Along with this, he was a pioneer in defining a
poem as a purely aesthetic object that could be justified on purely aesthetic grounds regardless
of thematic meaning or truthfulness, as was advocated by the "art for art's sake"
movement.

In conjunction with these ideas, he advocated leaving the realms of
truth and logic to works of prose, such as the novel or short story, because poetry, an
aesthetic art form, was primarily occupied with producing an effect on the reader. "Annabel
Lee" can be analyzed in terms of Poe's theory and aesthetics and in terms of the qualities
that made his work such a widespread and strong influence of other writers and on whole
movements.