23 pages • 46 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Conqueror Worm
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
One of the last poems Poe completed, the poem reflects the audacities and the ironies of “The Conqueror Worm.” Set to a riveting and compelling galloping rhythm, the poem delights the ear with its clever wordplay and its subtle weave of sounds, the joy it displays in the sheer fun of recitation. It is all-too-easy to get caught up in the carefully crafted sounds of each line. Yet, like “The Conqueror Worm,” Poe uses such gaudy and happy wordplay to explore a progressively darker vision of how a person ages, the relentless movement from childhood to mortality, each of our signal live-moments set to the giddy irrepressible “tintinnabulation” of the “bells, bells, bells.”
“Dejection: An Ode” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802)
Written by one of Britain’s iconic dark Romantics, the poem paved the way for fledgling poets of Poe’s era to explore our darkest and more forbidding thoughts. The world here is the familiar wordscape of Poe himself, a forbidding and empty expanse where joy is ironic and thoughts center inevitably on the gloomy, the morbid, and the grotesque, Poe’s signature “midnight of the soul” (a phrase Poe borrowed from this poem). This poem is “The Conqueror Worm” without Poe’s saving sense of irony.
“Darkness” by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1816)
A forbidding and yet fascinating recreation of the end of the world (encouraged by a series of events in Byron’s world, most notably the eruption of a great volcano in Indonesia), Byron’s poem can be helpfully contrasted to Poe’s more snarky theater piece. Byron takes very seriously the idea of creating a probable, suffocatingly real endscape in which, quite literally, the sun finally extinguishes itself. Read alongside Poe’s ironic send-up of such apocalyptic fears, Byron’s poem serves as a sobering and unsettling kind of foreshadowing of Poe’s loonier investigation into the implications of the End Times.
Further Literary Resources
“Poe’s ‘The Conqueror Worm’” by Burton R. Pollins (2015)
An online publication, this brief explication of the poem sets out the basic situation of the poem by triangulating the audience of angels, the actors/mimes, and the great red worm. The reading provides a helpful gloss of both Coleridge and Keats as poets critical in defining Poe’s elaborate sense of the gothic. The reading does not introduce the possibilities of irony; the reading is straightforward and treats the entire apocalyptic stage play at face value.
“Monster Quest: Background Myth and Contemporary Context of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Conqueror Worm’” by Farrah Senn (2012)
In this far-ranging reading of the poem, Professor Senn uses the worm as the poem’s central moral allegory. Introducing the image of the serpent from Old Testament writings, the reading suggests that Poe deconstructs that myth and recasts from its elements this grotesque monstrosity as a way to undermine the premise of Judeo-Christian theology. In addition, this article explores Poe’s later incorporation of the poem into a revision (1845) of one of his more famous short stories, “Ligeia,” in which the story’s doomed heroine writes the poem shortly before she dies, or rather does not die, since she appears to come back from the dead. A gloomy, campy story that complements this gloomy, campy poem.
“Poe’s ‘Conqueror Worm’” by Klaus Lubbers (1967)
The article emphasizes that long after the poem’s 1843 publication, Poe himself regarded the poem as his greatest achievement; this article investigates why. It positions Poe’s apocalyptic poem within the context of the Second Great Awakening and the urgent sense of doom and gloom that drove American Protestantism for more than 20 years. It also investigates Poe’s use of rhythm and rhyme to create the poem’s gothic theatrical feel as the reason why Poe so steadfastly insisted on the poem’s achievement.
Listen to the Poem
The legendary character actor Vincent Price (1911-1993) is highly suited to the macabre poetry of Poe. Price, who starred in a number of B movie adaptations of Poe’s short stories and is known perhaps best by contemporary audiences as the quietly maniacal voiceover for Michael Jackson’s iconic music video “Thriller” (1983), always managed to maintain the balance between horror and irony. He always seemed one line away from laughing at the obvious campy, hyper-gothicism of Poe’s darkest stories. Indeed, Price starred in The Conqueror Worm, a quickly forgotten 1968 film loosely based, according to the credits, on the poem.
Price recorded a number of Poe stories and poems during the 1950s and 1960s. His reading of “The Conqueror Worm,” is available on YouTube. He lingers over the luscious rolling consonants (particularly the r’s) and soft vowels with Shakespearean grandeur. His voice spikes with urgency at just the right spots. The images on the video are bright red demons each set against a formidable black, and background music is appropriately hyper-gothic, rich with lurid spooky organ play. What Price’s rich and rolling rendering excellently highlights the poem’s musical qualities and the sound-texture that Poe creates.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
