23 pages • 46 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Conqueror Worm
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
Poe always understood his market; he understood what the people wanted. And in the 1840s, America wanted the apocalypse. Poe grew up within the social-cultural dynamic in New England and in the Mid-Atlantic states that has since come to be called the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant religious revival that lasted more than a decade and radically altered the place of religion in American culture.
Beginning in the 1820s and continuing until the 1850s, a wide confederacy of itinerant preachers working the East Coast tirelessly promoted the miracle of conversion and the urgency to return to God. Indeed, one of the cornerstone doctrines of the Second Great Awakening was that the time for the Great Reckoning promised in Christian writings, most notably in the Book of Revelation, was actually set to happen. In fact, one of the more prominent preachers during the time in which Poe was drafting his theatrical apocalypse, “The Conqueror Worm,” was the New York Baptist minister Reverend William Miller (1782-1849) whose unapologetically certain prediction for the apocalypse, or more specifically the Second Coming of Christ—he actually set the date as October 22, 1844—created a widespread hysteria as Americans bought into the idea that the end of the world was fast approaching. Followers committed suicide, others gave away their family fortunes, others quit jobs and families to join the so-called Millerites in New York State. Reverend Miller assured his followers the date was the result of careful calculations extrapolated from his study of the Old Testament, most notably the Book of Daniel.
Although he never wrote directly about America’s great religious revival, Poe must have found fascinating the herds of otherwise clear-thinking Americans giving away their life savings, donning white robes, and waiting on the hillsides of upstate New York for the apocalypse to rain down. That the agent of the apocalypse in Poe’s own grandly silly theater piece is a big red worm that eats human flesh reflects Poe’s ironic perception of the folly and foibles of own historic era.
Literary Context
Undoubtedly “The Conqueror Worm” reflects Poe’s study of early 19th-century Romanticism, particularly its striking affirmation of the emotions over the intellect, its exploration of the darkest psychologies and most lurid urgencies, its embrace of the macabre and its use of gothic trappings, and supremely, its willingness to indulge the widest and broadest reaches of the imagination. In the provocative poetry of the German and British Romantics, most notably Johann Goethe and Heinrich Heine in Germany, John Keats, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, Poe found license to use the vehicle of poetry to challenge the conventions that poetry must necessarily be directed toward sharing insights that would in turn cause readers to live higher, greater, and more moral lives. Poe did not see poetry as a device for clarifying life, for giving readers a reward, or insight into moral and ethical awareness.
Poe found little of that intellectual premise in the dark poetry of the German and British Romantics. In those works, poetry sought to stir strong emotions, create uneasiness or delight, and in turn to use the devices of language—the careful control of both rhythm and rhyme—to give a poem a specific and designed emotional impact rather than intellectual impact. Like other American writers of his generation, most notably Herman Melville, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe learned from his thorough self-directed study of the British and German Romantics that poetry and short stories best struck the reader when they dealt with the unfamiliar, not with the everyday, not with the ordinary moments and pedestrian details of life; poetry should take readers into worlds in which they feel disoriented, unsure, uneasy. Those writers who dared to introduce to their reader images that upended expectations, images and situations that were original and daring, unexpected and puzzling (like, say, a giant carnivorous blood-gorged worm), those were the writers of impact, Poe believed.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
