Feeling in Poe's Letters

In mid-September of 1835, Poe wrote to the novelist John Pendleton Kennedy: "You will believe me when I say that I am still miserable…. I say you will believe me, and for this simple reason, that a man who is writing for effect does not write thus." These protestations imply that men can and do write for effect and that feelings may be misrepresented. Poe's letters raise questions about the readability of feelings and the performance of emotional states. This essay examines instances when feelings overflow in letters he composed, first as an adolescent writing to his increasingly estranged foster father, John Allan; then as a young lover who feared the loss of his beloved Virginia; and eventually as a widower who expressed painful emotions while also engaging in emotionally fraught epistolary flirtations. Further, the essay considers these manifestations of feeling through theories of affect that interrogate the performative aspects of expressions of feeling while also devoting attention to the importance of shame as a recurring affect in Poe's letters.