Love in Poe's Annabel Lee and Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci "Annabel Lee" by Poe and "La Belle Dame sans Merci " by Keats describe the destructive effects that women have on men. In both poems, women, through death and deceit, harm their adoring lovers. In "Annabel Lee", Annabel dies and leaves the speaker in seclusion in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", the fairy, "La Belle". Dame," captures the speaker's heart, and then abandons it. The common theme of both poems, that love generates harmful effects, is a reflection of both poets' upsetting and harmful childhood experiences. The poem, Keats argues , “comes from the ferment of an unhappy childhood working through a noble imagination” (Keats 16). bitterness of their loss" is "necessary to a poem" (Keats 17). The deaths of [Poe's] parents, adoptive mother, and wife develop a similar intensity in the form of "lingering pity and sorrow for the dead" ( Whitman 61).The malevolence implicit in "Annabel Lee" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" echoes these poets' pasts; the speakers of the poems are unable to live healthily or comfortably after experiencing and then losing objects of their exquisite affection. Furthermore, the names of the speakers are hidden, underlining the importance of women over the speakers. Although both poets believe that love creates destructive situations, they differ on the type of love that is most harmful. Poe believed that an innocent, sexless love hurts more: the speaker went mad for "a love that was more than love", while he and his lover were "children". Poe's "aesthetic religion" was a "cult of the beautiful... in all noble thoughts, in everything... in the middle of the paper... a Belle Dame sans Merci" through their "fascination with doomed nature" of love" (De Reyes 107). Works Cited Allen, Hervey. Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Holt, 1934De Reyes, Mary. "John Keats." Poetry Reviews. 3 vols. 1913Keats , John. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” London: Macmillan, 1992Poe , Edgar. "Annabel Lee." Stefan Gmoser online. America online. 12 January 1998. Edgar Allan Poe and his critics. New York: Haskell House, 1972Wilbur, Richard. "Poe and the Art of Suggestion." Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, 1987