While we are right to see the causes of personal tragedies in the tragic shortcomings of the greater world, we are also right see causes of personal tragedies in the tragic failure of art or any personal work to sustain and nourish us. This means, by way of example, that we might not be surprised that Edgar Allan Poe drank himself to death, for his work, regardless of its morbid influence, is hardly something that might give one the strength to enjoy living. Works such as Poe’s, which are rooted in personal tragedy and vision, might be relatively meaningless to the many fans who experience his fiction as just that–fiction, something that stimulates and elicits no understanding of any deeper truths.
