Like Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe’s life was marked by tragedy. Unlike Emerson, however, Poe did not turn to morality for comfort. Instead, he embraced the darkness of lived experience: “[T]he real subject of Poe’s work […] is the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it” (77). Poe embraced uncertainty, because certainty was never a part of his life.

Eliza Poe, Edgar’s mother, was an actress who died at age 24 when Edgar was only two years old. Her death was preceded by a long illness and the abandonment of her husband, Edgar’s father. Poe was sent to live with another family, but he had a contentious relationship with the family’s patriarch. He became friends with a woman named Jane Stannard, who died a short time later. In 1834, he married 13-year-old Virginia Clemm who died from tuberculosis eight years later.

Oliver explains that Poe’s mother appears in nearly all his works, represented in the eyes and faces of his characters. She is Helen, Lenore, Eleonora, and Lady Madeline. The characters’ eyes tell Poe’s story. Even in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the mansion is described as having a face with eye-like windows. Many of Poe’s characters also actively try to escape the world, whether through drinking, drugs, or sleep. Poe describes this escape as “swooning.”

In Essay 10, Oliver connects philosopher William James to the poet Walt Whitman. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James explores four markers of mystical experiences. Oliver argues that Whitman exhibits these four markers and that “Song of Myself,” appearing in Leaves of Grass, reveals Whitman’s mystical nature. The first is that the experience must be such that the individual cannot describe it fully. The second suggests that the experience carries the weight of authority. The third proposes that the following state cannot be sustained forever. The fourth is that the individual feels they were possessed by a power greater than themselves.

In Leaves of Grass, Whitman describes his own mystical state, but—as James suggests—Whitman is unable to describe it. Oliver hails the first poem in the collection as Whitman’s greatest. “Song of Myself” reveals the connection between the individual self and the wider world:

In these lines the great work is begun, and the secret of success has been given. And what is that great labor? Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all. The rest is literature (97).

Oliver views Whitman’s poem as an invitation into the mystical realm. One of the ways that Whitman embraces the mystical that is unlike his contemporaries is his association with the erotic life with the divine. Whitman saw the body as holding authority and music in its own right. He does not distinguish between the spiritual self and the self that is in the world.

Finishing her section that explores author influences, Oliver turns her attention to William Wordsworth. She opens the essay by describing her own time sitting in a field on a winter morning, watching the sun illuminate the frosty blades of grass. She recalls spending time as a child building small houses in the woods using dirt and sticks. These houses always had an open door, and Oliver sat inside, looking out into the world.

When Wordsworth was a child, he stole a rowboat and rowed out onto a lake in the middle of the night. He was overtaken with the beauty of the moon reflecting in the water. After some time, he saw a mountain nearby that loomed over the water. The young Wordsworth felt that mountain was watching him and pursuing him. He rowed quickly back to shore, but the experience stayed with him: “The experience led him, led his mind, from simple devotion of that beauty which is a harmony, a kindly ministry of thought, to nature’s deeper and inexplicable greatness” (113). Wordsworth realized that both beauty and terror were a part of nature; they could not be separated from one another.