Complete Poetical Works and Essays on Poetry, Together with His Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

by Edgar Allan Poe

Excerpt from Complete Poetical Works and Essays
In placing before the public this collection of Edgar Poe's poetical works, it is requisite to point out in what respects it differs from, and is superior to, the numerous collections which have preceded it. Until recently, all editions, whether American or English, of Poe's poems have been verbatim reprints of the first posthumous collection, published at New York in 1850.
In 1874 I began drawing attention to the fact that unknown and unreprinted poetry by Edgar Poe was in existence. Most, if not all, of the specimens issued in my articles have since been reprinted by different editors and publishers, but the present is the first occasion on which all the pieces referred to have been garnered into one sheaf. Besides the poems thus alluded to, this volume will be found to contain many additional pieces and extra stanzas, nowhere else published or included in Poe's works. Such verses have been gathered from printed or manuscript sources during a research extending over many years.
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230 pages, Paperback

Published January 12, 2010

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...