The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe; Volume 8

by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles F. Richardson

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

438 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

The overall rating of this book Volume VIII titled Criticisms is 5 Stars in that it provides invaluable sources of Edgar Allan Poe's critical writings of which as time has proven he was indeed an excellent critic. "Among Poe's ideas of literary criticism was the belief that a work should be reviewed for its own worth, and that non-literary criteria like a writer's background or social status should be irrelevant. Over a century later, literary critics such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and R.P. Blackmur adopted the same approach." https://www.nps.gov/articles/poe-lite....
My individual ratings of each piece are my own feelings and personal likes of how I reacted to the critiques of each individual.

William Ellery Channing - 4.5 Stars
J. Fenimore Cooper - 4 Stars
R. H. Horne - 3 Stars
Amelia Welby - 3.5 Stars
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett [Browning] - 3.5 Stars
William W. Lord - 4 Stars
Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House - 4 Stars
Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists - 3.5 Stars
Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Willis, and the Drama - 4.5 Stars
Elizabeth Oakes Smith - 3.5 Stars
William Gilmore Simms - 4 Stars
William Cullen Bryant - 3.5 Stars

The Literati
George Bush - 3.5 Stars
George H. Colton - 4 Stars
N. P. Willis - 4.5 Stars
William M. Gillespie - 3.5 Stars
Charles F. Briggs - 4 Stars
William Kirkland - 3 Stars
John W. Francis - 3 Stars
Anna Cora Mowatt - 4.5 Stars
George B. Cheever - 3 Stars
Charles Anthon - 4.5 Stars
Ralph Hoyt - 3.5 Stars
Gulian C. Verplanck - 3 Stars
Freeman Hunt - 3.5 Stars
Piero Maroncelli - 3 Stars
Laughton Osborn - 3.5 Stars
Fitz-Greene Halleck - 4 Stars
Ann S. Stephens - 3.5 Stars
Evert A. Duyckinck - 3.5 Stars
Mary Gove - 3 Stars
James Aldrich - 3.5 Stars
Henry Cary - 3.5 Stars