Poe's characteristic topics of revived corpses and obsessive grief surely derive from his own psychology, but they also reflect anxieties of his own times. Many of his stories feature the presumptive but not quite dead body; Madeline Usher who rises from her coffin and claws at the doors of her tomb in "The Fall of the House of Usher" offers the most dramatic example. Rowena is another: Thought to be dead, she stirs three times and finally rises from her bed. She had "died" on the third day after the narrator saw the drops fall into her cup; on the fourth day, he still sits with body. He lingers perhaps in stasis from grief, perhaps to be assured that she is really dead.

Although exaggerated and filtered through his own unresolved emotions and thematic concerns, Poe's treatments of premature diagnoses of death gain immediacy if seen...