Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) was an American short-story writer, poet, essayist, and literary critic. This master of mystery and the macabre has been one of the most examined writers of all time—his work, like his life, is complex and enigmatic.
Born in Boston to itinerant actors and orphaned at age two, Poe was raised by his godfather. He attended the University of Virginia but got dismissed within a year due to mounting gambling debts.
Romantic and Gothic writers influenced Poe. His first anthology of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839,) contains one of his most famous works, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In this Gothic romance, the narrator visits the crumbling house of his childhood companion Roderick Usher to find both Usher and his twin sister Madeline in the final phases of mental and physical disability.
Poe’s story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is often regarded as the first detective story in English literature. His poem “The Raven,” first published in a New York paper and then as the title poem in The Raven and Other Poems (1845,) brought him great acclaim, but not financial security.
Poe died at the age of 40 following an alcoholic binge and a period of nervous instability. His posthumous standing and influence have been immense; he was much admired by French symbolist poets such as Charles Baudelaire (who translated many of Poe’s works) and in Britain by Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and others.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edgar Allan Poe
To be thoroughly conversant with a man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Despair
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Happiness, Expectation, Optimism, Positive Attitudes
If you wish to forget something on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Memory
No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter … than you and I; and all religion … is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Religion
There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Singing
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from the disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
—Edgar Allan Poe
It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Once upon a Midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
—Edgar Allan Poe
After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Discovery
I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Perfection
It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.
—Edgar Allan Poe
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Imagination, Dreams
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