The Phantasmal Future: Memory, Haunting, and Spectral Longing in the Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

Hauntology means to study ghosts of the lost time or lost souls which is no longer and may never be. This study analyses how solitude becomes temporal suspension in the poems The Raven, Annabel Lee and The Spirits of the Dead by Edger Allan Poe. The qualitative approach of research has been done over the lost future which is dominated by the ancestral spectres and lingers the atmosphere which itself refuse to stay silent. This paper finds the echoes from the compulsive repetition of absence and the speakers loop of mourning. These three poems by Edgar Allan Poe gives voice to the temporal stasis and forecloses futurity. It highlights the shared hauntological condition in which the dead persists in the present, hence anticipates the concerns of modern time about unresolved histories and stalled future.

Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe, Hauntology, Future Denial, Nostalgia