So when Teya and Salena take to the Eurovision stage in Liverpool next week, their song may be new, but their story of ghostly authorship and spirit possession comes straight from Poe’s work itself. But the dead might also be said to survive in the creative responses they continue to inspire. Today we can bring back the voices of the dead through sampling and even AI. Scholars have read this short story as a commentary on writing itself – if someone can communicate from beyond the grave, what might be the possibilities for posthumous authorship or artistic creation? Valdemar (1845), a man is placed in a mesmeric trance at the point of death and inexplicably affirms “ I say to you that I am dead!”, after which his body gruesomely disintegrates. Poe was writing before the spiritualist boom, but he was fascinated with how human consciousness might transcend the boundaries of bodily death. The Raven, Ligeia (1838), Lenore (1843), Ulalume (1847), and Annabel Lee (1849) are all explorations of this theme.
His poetic and fictional personas yearn to be reunited with departed wives and lovers. Poe returned to the figure of the dead or dying beautiful woman throughout his career. In A Predicament (1839), aspiring author Zenobia narrates her own beheading. In Some Words with a Mummy (1845), a group of Egyptologists reanimate a mummy, who speaks to them with an unexpected eloquence. He asks his readers to consider at what point death truly occurs if the dead can still speak or inhabit the bodies of the living. In his work, Poe continually blurs the boundary between life and death. Poe, wrote Griswold, had a “morbid sensitiveness of feeling, a shadowy and gloomy imagination”. Griswold established this image in his 1849 obituary, in which he reflected that Poe was “a dreamer – dwelling in ideal realms – in heaven or hell”. They are influenced by the image of Poe as a melancholic loner, tormented by bereavement and alcoholism, and fascinated with the otherworldly. The posthumous “Poe” poems are not very good, but they attempt to capture the content or style of Poe’s living poems: dramatic and dark lyrics about the loss of loved ones and the crossover between the living and spirit worlds. Read more: Depression and language: analysing Edgar Allan Poe's writings to solve the mystery of his death The living and the dead Spiritualists produced these celebrity ghost writings to demonstrate the authenticity of their practice and the radical possibility of the living and the dead merging consciousnesses. Magazines and collections produced “original” posthumous texts on a monthly basis. The fever for spirit writing covered several well-known deceased writers and historical figures.
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