The Essential Poe: A Great Book for Fall or Halloween

by Edgar Allan Poe

[Poe's] poems have never gone out of print He has been translated into a vanety of lan- guages. Except for Frost, he may be the most popular American poet It is not too much to say that his yeaming for love, a home of utter peace, a place in the sun—cast against the grinding industrial explosion of the future— speaks not merely ot the American Dream but also of its latent, grotesque futility Poe understood the new world as an orphanage and himself as artist among the Philistines.
--back cover

Dreams 17
Imitation 18
The Lake—To— 19
Sonnet—To Science 20
Romance 20
To the River Po 21
Fairy-Land 21
Alone 23
To Helen 24
Israfel 24
The Sleeper 26
The valley of Unrest 28
The City in the Sea 29
To One in Paradise 31
The Coliseum 32
Bridal Ballad 33
The Haunted Palace 35
Sonnet—Silence 36
The Conqueror Worm 37
Lenore
Dream-Land 39
Eulalie A Song 41
The Raven 42
A Valentine 46
Ulalume—A Ballad 47
The Bells 51
To Helen 54
A Dream Within a Dream
For Annie 57
Eldorado 61
To My Mother 62
Annabel Lee 62
LETTER TO B
THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION
NOTES 87
ABOUT THE EDITOR

Genres: Poetry

93 pages, Paperback

Published September 17, 1999

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

[Alyshia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the introduction. I thought the selection of poetry to be okay.