To Helen

“To Helen” is a lyric romantic poem. Romanticism as a poetic genre was a movement that began in the 18th century in England and Europe. It included poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge. Romantic poets rejected scientific practices in favor of imagination and emotion. Romanticism also frequently references classical works, often implying modern works can never live up to the greatness of ancient works of literature. “To Helen” alludes to several classical works, especially The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer and the lost text Cypria by Stasinus.

The Iliad describes the war between the Acheans (Greeks) and Trojans, incited by the love of a beautiful woman: Helen of Troy. Helen is described by Christopher Marlowe, famous English Renaissance poet, as possessing “the face that launched a thousand ships” in his work The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. This connects Helen’s beauty with the ability to bring men across the sea, which is seen in Poe’s poem. The sequel to The Iliad, The Odyssey, follows the Greek hero of the Trojan war, Odysseus, traveling home to return to his wife, much like the wanderer in the first stanza of “To Helen.”

The inciting incident of the Trojan War was the Judgment of Paris, a myth that is only alluded to in the works of Homer and likely was first composed as part of Stasinus’s Cyrpira. In the myth, Paris, a prince of Troy, is chosen to judge who the most beautiful of the goddesses is, and he chooses Aphrodite (also known as Venus) over Athena and Hera. As a gift, he is given Helen (also known as Helen of Sparta), the most beautiful mortal woman. This further infuriates Hera, as Helen is one of the many illegitimate children of her husband Zeus.

Poe, as a Romantic poet, is an interesting contrast to much of his body of work. Romanticism’s rejection of contemporary technologies and techniques opposes the scientific and observational manner of his detective fiction, which focuses on the present and minute. Poe’s use of ciphers and cryptography, encoding secrets into numbers or unrelated text, also relies on deliberate use of techniques that stand opposite to Romantic allusions the reader is expected to immediately understand. In this manner, Poe is both a Romantic poet and an Antiromantic author, anticipating and setting the stage for modernist literature and pulp fiction after his death.