Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

“At five that morning, Edgar Allan Poe met the fate anticipated in his poem “To Annie”: Thank Heaven! the crisis— The danger is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last— And the Fever called ‘Living’ Is conquer’d at last.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“The assembly proceeded to the new grave that would come to serve as a burial place for Edgar, Virginia, and Aunt Maria, reuniting the peculiar household that been Poe’s sorrow and solace in life. There they read aloud his final poem, “Annabel Lee”—and in its last lines, the farewell of an artist finally at rest: And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument,” Doyle later mused, “it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his “prose poem,” Eureka. “The Raven” was indeed Poe’s most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms—but as art it is distinctly backward-looking.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“On the morning of his funeral, the Baltimore Sun failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“Whether the world at large recognized him or his work, something had changed inside the shifting identity of the fugitive Edgar Allan Poe—something irrevocable. He was an author now.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living

“This backward construction was an authorial slight of hand that Poe understood well. Pondering what he called “tales of ratiocination”—his own name for detective stories—Poe later remarked, “People think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method. In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”
― Paul Collins, Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living