Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection

by Edgar Allan Poe

The impossibility, in general, of getting pay from the booksellers for the copyright of books, has driven nearly all the American literateurs to Magazines contribution.

Who, to-day, is so weak as to value an anonymous opinion and, unluckily, our reviews are for the most part either disingenuous essays concocted from the material of the book reviewed, or summaries of sheer opinion.

First we have injury to our national literature by repressing the efforts of our men of genius:—for genius, as a general rule, is poor in worldly goods and cannot write for nothing. Our genius being thus repressed, we are written at only by our “gentlemen of elegant leisure,” and mere gentlemen of elegant leisure have been noted,

time out of mind, for the insipidity of their productions.

SOME SECRETS OF THE MAGAZINE PRISON-HOUSE.

Were we in an ill humor at this moment, we could a tale unfold which would erect the hair on the head of Shylock.

ANASTATIC PRINTING.

“There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, “without some strangeness in the proportions.”

STREET-PAVING.

THERE is, perhaps, no point in the history of the useful arts more remarkable than the fact, that during the last two thousand years, the world has been able to make no essential improvements in road-making.

We write this article with no books before us, and are by no means positive about the accuracy of our details.

AMERICAN POETRY.

THAT we are not a poetical people, has been asserted so often and so roundly, both at home and abroad, that the slander, through mere dint of repetition, has come to be received as truth. Yet nothing can be farther removed from it.

The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man,

It has become, indeed, the plain duty of each individual connected with the press, heartily to give whatever influence he possesses, to the good cause of integrity, and the Truth.

The French reviews, for example, which are not anonymous; preserve the unique spirit of true criticism.

A veteran reviewer loves the safety of generalities.

There is no one who, reading the “Poets and Poetry of America,” will not, in a hundred instances, be tempted to throw it

aside, because its prejudices and partialities are, in these hundred instances, altogether at war with his own.

He has omitted altogether some four or five whom we should have been tempted to introduce. On the other hand, he has scarcely made amends by introducing some four or five

dozen whom we should not have scrupled to treat with contempt. In several instances, he has rendered himself liable, we fear, to the charge of personal partiality—it

Mr. GRISWOLD

the boldness to praise an enemy and the more unusual courage to damn a friend.

An essential part of Poe's criticism. He lost friends and made enemies this way.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION.

It is to be hoped that common sense, in the time to come, will prefer deciding upon a work of Art, rather by the impression it makes—by the effect it produces—than by the time it took to impress the effect, or by the amount of “sustained effort” which had been found necessary in effecting the impression.

AUTOGRAPHY. PINAKIDIA. LITERARY SMALL TALK. INTEMPERANCE. A CHAPTER ON SCIENCE AND ART.

CABS. OMNIANA. PROSPECTUS OF THE PENN MAGAZINE. [AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.] A CHAPTER ON AUTOGRAPHY.

PROSPECTUS OF THE...

SOUVENIRS OF YOUTH. THE HEAD OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST. DOINGS OF GOTHAM. A MOVING CHAPTER. DESULTORY NOTES ON CATS. A C...

THE LITERATI. MR. POE’S REPLY TO MR. ENGLISH AND OTHERS. FIFTY SUGGESTIONS. PREFACE TO “TAMERLANE AND MINOR POEMS...

PREFACES AND INTRODUCTION TO “THE CONCHOLOGIST’S FIRST BOOK.” PREFACE TO “TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE.” PREFA...

PINAKIDIA.

We have chosen the heading Pinakidia, or Tablets, as one sufficiently comprehensive.

A single link is deficient in the chain—but the chain is worthless without it.

A religious hubbub, such as the world has seldom seen, was excited, during the reign of Frederic II, by the imagined virulence of a book entitled “The Three Impostors.”

The fullest account of the Amazons is to be found in Diodorus Siculus.

Marcus Antoninus wrote a book entitled Των εις εαυτον—Of the things which concern himself. It would be a good title for a Diary.

The tale in Plato’s “Convivium,” that man at first was male and female, and that, though Jupiter cleft them asunder, there was a natural love towards one another, seems to be only a corruption of the account in Genesis of Eve’s being made from Adam’s rib.

Hedelin, a Frenchman, in the beginning of the 18th century, denied that any such person as Homer ever existed, and supposed the Iliad to be made up ex tragediis,

The word assassin is derived according to Hyle from Hassa, to kill.

Goldsmith’s celebrated lines Man wants but little here below Nor wants that little long, are stolen from Young; who has Man wants but little, nor that little long.

Martin Luther in his reply to Henry VIIIth’s book by which the latter acquired the title of “Defender of the Faith,” calls the monarch very unceremoniously “a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a basilisk, a lying buffoon dressed in a king’s robes, a mad fool with a frothy mouth and a whorish face.”

Funny.

The word Jehovah is not Hebrew. The Hebrews had no such letters as J or V. The word is properly Iah-Uah-compounded of Iah Essence and Uah Existing. Its full meaning is tile self-existing essence of all things.

The “Song of Solomon” throwing aside the heading of the chapters, which is the work of the English translators, contains nothing which relates to the Savior or the Church. It does not, like every other sacred book, contain even the name of the Deity.

My second fave book of the Bible

The word translated “slanderers” in I Timothy iii, 2, and that translated “false accusers” in Titus ii, 3, are “female devils” in the original Greek of the New Testament.

The idea of “No light but rather darkness visible” was perhaps suggested to Milton by Spenser’s A little glooming light much like a shade.

Josephus, with Saint Paul and others, supposed man to be compounded of body, soul, and spirit. The distinction between soul and

spirit is an essential point in ancient philosophy.

ten tragedies which are attributed to Seneca, (the only Roman tragedies extant,)

Voltaire’s ignorance of antiquity is laughable.