The City in the Sea

The poem appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger, The American Review, the Broadway Journal, as well as in the 1850 collection The Poets and Poetry of America.

Poe speaks in the last part of the poem of the end of days when "the waves now have a redder glow, the hours are breathing faint and low."

[1] This combines with the poem's theme of a self-conscious dramatization of doom, similar to Poe's "The Sleeper" and "The Valley of Unrest.

"[2] Poe was inspired at least in part by Flavius Josephus's History of the Jewish Wars, a first-century account of the Biblical city of Gomorrah.

[4] Poe's last version of the poem may also reference Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene with the term "proud tower".

[3] The Proud Tower by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, subtitled "A portrait of the world before the War: 1890-1914", New York: Macmillan, 1966, derives its title and contains an epigraph from Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 version of the poem "The City in the Sea".

The German metal band The Ocean used "The City in the Sea" as lyrics, only swapping a few lines to fit rhythmical patterns of the song.

In 1989 Danish composer Poul Ruders wrote a piece "The City in the Sea" (subsequently released on a CD by Bridge Records, New York) for Symphony Orchestra and Contralto, making full use of Poe's text.