As is the case in almost all of Poe's short stories, the first-person narrator here is never named; he has no family or friends. We know nothing about his background; we know him only through his mental states that we witness in the story. This characteristic, as noted, is often typical of the Romantic writer.
The story takes place, then, at some distant time in some unknown place and concerns characters who have no discernible past. Furthermore, the narrator is typical of many types of Romantic heroes in that he desires absolute knowledge; we see a similar situation in the Romantic story of Goethe's Faust.
Furthermore, the Romantic hero is completely dominated by his concept of love. The deep love which the narrator has for Ligeia is seemingly his sole reason for existing.
In his theory of poetics, Poe expressed the belief that the most perfect subject for a poem (and, therefore, by extension, a short story) would be "the death . . . of a beautiful woman" as told through "the lips . . . of a bereaved lover." This short story fits that prescription perfectly. Even though the narrator marries the Lady Rowena, he can never put aside, or ignore, the power of his love for the Lady Ligeia, and it is possible that it is this all-abounding love which helps the Lady Ligeia to return to the narrator at the end of the story.
The tale of Ligeia begins with the narrator asserting his deep love for the Lady Ligeia, even though he cannot remember how or where he met her — or even if she has a family. Thus, at the very beginning of the story, the mood is set: Poe (and many other Romantic writers) creates a certain vagueness and indefiniteness; these qualities, he felt, were essential to the production of the perfect art form. By this, Poe meant that he wanted his stories to be removed from the mundane world; he wanted them to exist on a higher plane, one where ethereal matters were the main concern of art. Because the narrator knows nothing of the Lady Ligeia's past (he does not even know her last name), the emphasis is upon the purely transcendent nature of their relationship.
