"No man is an island, entire of itself."

Edgar Allen Poe's "Alone" starts with a dark and gloomy reminiscence about his isolation in childhood. He then goes on to say that "Then--in my childhood... was drawn/ The mystery... Of a demon in my view." I have experienced times of intellectual reflection in which I believed myself to be entirely of an independent nature. And of that nature, I do deem to have 'seen a demon.' I think that Poe is trying to point out that his separation from others early on has forced him to look from a third party perspective and see the 'demons' of the other's lives. I entirely agree that isolation can breed cynicism through over-analysis. However, in John Donne's Meditation XVII, he says that "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." In that, Donne is saying that all life is interrelated (at least on the level of human emotion) and that Poe's witness of the 'demon' as a result of being alone may be a witness of the 'demon' of loneliness itself.  These opposing ideas became ever-prevalent in my thoughts on this subject when I began to wonder about my academic lack of peers. It wasn't truly a lack of peers at all. Quite the contrary, the 'demon' of my loneliness was a fear of anything more than loneliness. However, Poe's representation of one side of this discussion was artfully crafted with a chain of couplets and what seems to be a loose iambic tetrameter. The genuine nature of the piece will hopefully find its way into my writing through example.