Edgar Allan Poe: Stories and Poems

by Edgar Allan Poe

Genres: Classics, Poetry

724 pages, Leather Bound

Published November 1, 2011

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

[🦋Aryelle🦋]

Yeah… so this is a dnf for now. It’s just so difficult to follow and I can’t concentrate. Maybe I’ll come back to it, but not now.

[Pasca Pasca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lus:
- The Gold Bug
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue
- The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
- The Oval Portrait
- The Purloined Letter
- The Black Cat
- The Fall of the House of Usher (!)
- The Masque of Red Death
- The Cask of Amontillado (!)
- The Pit and the Pendulum
- The Domain of Arnheim
- Landor's Cottage
- William Wilson
- The Tell-Tale Heart
- Berenice (!)
- Eleonora
- Ligeia
- Morella (!)
- A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
- Hop-Frog

- The Raven
- The Bells
- Ulalume (!)
- To Helen
- Annabel Lee
- To My Mother
- For Annie (!)
- Eulalie
- A Dream Within a Dream
- The City in the Sea
- The Sleeper (!)
- Lenore
- To One in Paradise
- The Haunted Palace
- The Conqueror Worm
- Dream-Land (!)
- Hymn
- Tamerlane
- To Helen
- The Valley of Unrest
- Israfel
...

[SadieWhiteCoat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Look. This is the most beautiful book I own. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is utterly gorgeous.

As for the content, well...

Edgar Allan Poe was a phenomenal poet. The Raven remains a classic piece of literature, and Poe's sense of structure and mood knows no equal.

His stories are another matter. His, dense, rambling prose reads like a pretentious mansplainer trying to find out if you're a real fan of nineteenth century ships. Years go by before he gets to the point, if there even is a point. And occasionally the point is that God might exist, or don't be perverse. And all is well-seasoned with outright racism.

That being said, there are some real gems in there. The Tell-tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, the Black Cat, the Fall of the House of Usher, Berenice, the Cask of Amontillado to name a few.

So unless you really like good-looking books and poetry, read his selected works.

[Rissa (rissasreading) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories - 3/5 ⭐ Overall. I enjoyed some of his stories a lot and others not so much. Some of them I couldn't even finish reading. I enjoyed how Edgar Allan Poe started so many genres (at least his works are some of the first examples of certain genres), it was really cool to read the story and then when reading up on it find that out.
Some of my favorites: The Murders in The Rue Morgue, The Fall of The House of Usher, The Masque of Red Death, The Premature Burial, The Tell Tale Heart, Ligeia
Poems - 4/5 ⭐ Overall. I think poetry is where Edgar shined the brightest. His descriptive and poetic writing shines the brightest within the lines of Poe-try.
I enjoyed this read even if it took me a long time to get through, it was well worth it. I did find Poe to be angsty, and satirical in the majority of his works, compared to what I was expecting. It was interesting to read!
Overall rating more of a 3.5 than a 4 but I appreciated the experience