He had proposed to her, and when she refused, he attempted suicide by overdose of laudanum. .
After several attempts of sobriety, Poe's alcoholism finally got the best of him. He was physically weak and suffered a persecution complex. On October 7, 1849 Poe was found delirious in Baltimore, where he tragically came upon his death. Poe's literary executer, Rufus Grisworld published a slanderous obituary that ruined Poe's reputation and destroyed his image. .
Many critics have claimed that Poe's last poem "Anabel Lee- was inspired by his beloved wife Virginia's death. Poe also said that "the death.of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."" Poe had a theory that " the dead are not entirely dead to consciousness, his hope that love could transcend death, and his apprehension of beauty beyond the grave were inspired by the early deaths of his mother, of Jane Stanard (the idealized mother of a school friend), and of Frances Allan ( his foster mother) ( Bloom 73).
These themes culminate in "Annabel Lee- by introducing his subject as a maiden "whom you may know,"" he presents a universalized dead woman and a fictional dead woman for the purposes of the poem, all with a conversational ease that suggests an intimate subject and an intimate audience. Because the poem conveys this familiarity, perhaps, almost as if the speaker were disclosing his sorrow to the reader alone, this poem has invited more autobiographical interpretations than Poe's other versions of the lament for a beautiful woman. (Bloom 73).
Poe had an unusual morbid fascination with death and corpses. It was such an obsession that many could classify it under necrophilia. He had many twisted views and had a hard time keeping it to himself. He loved his wife so dearly that when she died he grew even more obsessed with the ideal subject of a beautiful woman's death. He verbalized this thought threw his poems.