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
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Dreams, Imagination
We loved with a love that was more than love.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Romance, Love
Of a water that flows,
With a lullaby sound,
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground—
From a cavern not very far
Down under ground.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Water
A lunatic may be “soothed,”… for a time, but in the end, he is very apt to become obstreperous. His cunning, too, is proverbial, and great…. When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Sanity
One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator’s sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Acting
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Reality
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
Thank Heaven! the crisis —
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last —
And the fever called “Living”
Is conquered at last.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Death, Dying, Crises
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
The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Genius
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
That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Coward, Cowardice
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Philosophy
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Imagination
Believe me, there exists no such dilemma as that in which a gentleman is placed when he is forced to reply to a blackguard.
—Edgar Allan Poe
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
To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Greatness, Insults, Slander
We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery—by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press—their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Journalism
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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
There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad humanity must assume the aspect of Hell
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Sadness
Because I feel that in the heavens above
The angels, whispering one to another,
Can find among their burning tears of love,
None so devotional as that of “Mother,”
Therefore, by that dear name I have long called you,
You who are more than mother unto me.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Mothers
In efforts to soar above our nature we invariably fall below it.
—Edgar Allan Poe
SLEEP – Those little slices of death, how I loathe them.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Sleep
The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Poetry
There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Animals
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Thinking, Thought, Beauty, Thoughts
All that we see or seen is but a dream within a dream.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Dreams, Illusion
If you wish to forget something on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Memory
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Beauty
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Poetry, Poets
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Sanity, Insanity
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
Topics: Reason
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “Artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—“My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Honesty
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Tyranny
The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
—Edgar Allan Poe
I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Opera
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Topics: Confidence
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
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