Poems of Edgar Allan Poe: with Memoir

by Edgar Allan Poe

PREFACE TO THE POEMS 3
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 7
THE POETIC PRINCIPLE -jr
THE RAVEN . -. ^
LENORE 74
THE BELLS 7 6
ANNABEL LEE 80
ULALUME 81
THE COLISEUM 85
To HELEN 86
To 89
A VALENTINE 90
To MY MOTHER 9I
HYMN g l
AN ENIGMA 92
THE HAUNTED PALACE 92
THE CONQUEROR WORM 94
To ONE IN PARADISE 96
To F s S. O D 97
THE CITY IN THE SEA
97
SILENCE 99
THE SLEEPER 100
THE VALLEY OF UNREST 102
A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM . . . .103
DREAM-LAND 104
To ZANTE 106
EULALIE. . 1 06
ELDORADO 107
ISRAFEL IDS
FOR ANNIE .no
To F 114
BRIDAL BALLAD 114
To 116
SCENES FROM " POLITIAN " 116
POEMS WRITTEN IN YOUTH:
SONNET To SCIENCE 138
AL AARAAF .... . 139
To THE RIVER 156
TAMERLANE 156
FAIRY-LAND 165
To L. M. S 1 66
ROMANCE . . . . . . . 167
SPIRITS OF THE DEAD 168
To 169
A DREAM 169
THE LAKE. To 170
SONG 171
To HELEN 172
ALONE 172
THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION ... 175
THE POWER OF WORDS 193

198 pages, Library Binding

Published January 1, 1892

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...