One of the first critics to comment on a connection between Poe and the speaker in "Annabel Lee" is John Cowper Powys, in his 1915 work Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions. He writes that in poems such as this Poe expresses "a certain dark, wilful melancholy," a cold mood that Poe "must surely himself have known." Powys's suggestion may spring from Poe's experience with loss, and in particular the death of his child bride, Virginia Clemm. Virginia's death occurred in 1847, two years prior to the writing of this poem, and her loss could have created for Poe the atmosphere or mood that he reproduces in his poetry. Even before her death, however, Poe had experienced the death of his actress mother when he was a small child, and then the death from brain cancer of Jane Stanard, a friend's beautiful mother whom the fourteen-year-old...