Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe
Published 1927 · 6,600 words
How hard is Annabel Lee to read?
Annabel Lee scores 40 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Simple diction chosen for sound rather than difficulty.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Regular ballad syntax with heavy repetition.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- A concrete story used for one abstract feeling.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- Very light — a single situation, restated.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- A grieving speaker whose account is coloured but not concealed.
- Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
- The sea, the kingdom and the tomb are all doing symbolic work.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Direct and unironic; the poem means what it says.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- The grief is stated plainly and completely.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Six regular stanzas, straight through.
How Annabel Lee is regarded
Annabel Lee holds a literary regard score of 87 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.