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’Ligeia’ is an unsurpassed study of terror and insanity, a fantasia on the theme of love conquering the grave, on a deeper level it is a fascinating exploration of the quest of the poetical imagination for celestial beauty. For this reason, it remains one of Poe’s finest contributions to the genre of the short story. When he came to revise the story, his artistic sense, rooted deeply in his own unconscious processes, did not permit the alteration of the conclusion to fit an interpretation essentially superficial and incomplete in its perception of the psychological origin of the story. and I cannot think that Poe, fully aware of the justice of Cooke’s criticism in that view, would have left the denouement as it was originally written, unless he believed that there was more artistic verisimilitude in the story as he had created it than there was in the story as Cooke had interpreted it. Is this simply a tale of the opium-induced hallucinations of the narrator in which both Ligeia and Rowena are figments of the narrator’s imagination? Is the story meant to provide a validation of Ligeia’s theory of willpower, in which the narrator uses his willpower to summon her back to life? Is Ligeia a vampire-like creature who has fed on the soul of Rowena and inhabited her body to be reanimated? Or is this a kind of burlesque? Numerous critics have advanced theories to support each of the preceeding, but no consensus regarding the meaning of the tale has been reached. This story, obviously, is so rich in details’ poems, epigraph, various styles and symbols etc., that it lends itself to many and varied interpretations. Therefore all of these interpretations have some probabilities, and it is thought that he could concieve and write ’Ligeia’ considering many respects. If ‘the highest imagination’ poe said is this kind, his words-’undoubtedly the best story I have written’ and ’may be called my best tale’ may be understood.
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