Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

“explained the genesis of the heavenly bodies by the gradual coalescence of a thin, luminous substance diffused through space. It is dedicated to the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose massive Cosmos attempted to harmonize a knowledge of the physical environment with a classical ideal of humanity. But it was actually much closer (as Daniel Hoffman points out) to the dubious revelations of his contemporaries, Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy, the founders of Mormonism and of Christian Science. Unlike most of Poe’s major works, Eureka fell stillborn from the press, was ignored by the general public and had absolutely no influence on scientific or philosophical thought.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“Though “The Gold-Bug” sold over 300,000 copies, he earned no more than the hundred-dollar prize money. He was paid only nine dollars for the endlessly reprinted “Raven.” He never found another job after 1845 and, without a regular place to publish, wrote—and earned—less.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“Poe not only insulted his Boston audience by reading an unintelligible poem, but also bragged about it to his hosts. Though his sponsors were confused and disappointed, they treated Poe with great courtesy and gave him a good supper. But, excited by the occasion and the free-flowing champagne, he boasted that he had deliberately hoaxed them with a poem he had written when he was only ten years old!”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“This undignified episode revealed Poe’s difficult relationship with his popular audience. Ambivalent about Boston and about literary readings that put him on exhibition like a showman, he was characteristically hypersensitive and nervous in that hostile atmosphere. Instead of making the best of the situation by reading a poem that would have impressed his listeners, he chose to expose their pretentiousness and to retaliate with rudeness for their low fee and lack of appreciation.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“By contrast, Thomas Wentworth Higginson—who was then a Harvard student and later became a Unitarian minister, a Civil War colonel and the editor of Emily Dickinson’s poems—was impressed and enchanted by Poe’s somewhat menacing appearance and by his unusual way of reading the long, early poem: I distinctly recall his face, with its ample forehead, brilliant eyes, and narrowness of nose and chin; an essentially ideal face, not noble, yet anything but coarse; with the look of oversensitiveness which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“the Transcendentalists “Frogpondians,” after the actual Frog Pond on the Boston Common, and urged Frederick Thomas to puncture their inflated egos: “They are getting worse and worse, and pretend not to be aware that there are any literary people out of Boston.”13 In his own savage fashion, Poe was determined to attack their complacency and teach them a salutary lesson, to express his enmity and remind them of his own existence.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“Poe, the perennial outsider, despised Boston’s literary coteries and its mutual admiration (analogous to the complacent superiority of the Bloomsbury Group in the modern era), and considered it “the chief habitation, in this country, of literary hucksters and phrase mongers.” More significantly, he disliked what he called the pretenders and sophists among the Transcendentalists; and condemned—as a rationalist—their fuzzy thought and lack of intellectual rigor. And he deplored the pernicious Germanic, especially Kantian influence that had filtered through their prophet, Thomas Carlyle. “Emerson belongs to a class of gentlemen,” Poe wrote of their leading thinker, “with whom we have no patience whatever—the mystics for mysticism’s sake. . . . His present rôle seems to be the out-Carlyling of Carlyle.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“In October 1845—while still enjoying the popularity of “The Raven,” his Tales and his numerous public lectures—Poe was invited to read an original poem before the Boston Lyceum for a fee of fifty dollars. James Russell Lowell had secured this invitation, despite Poe’s recent attack on him. Poe had mixed feelings about Boston, which had played a significant role in his life. He had been born in poverty in Boston while his parents had been on tour; had fled there from Richmond after quarreling with John Allan; had enlisted and served his first months in the army there; had published his first volume, “By a Bostonian,” there; he had criticized the integrity of one of their most prominent authors in the “Longfellow War”; and had for many years conducted a running battle in the literary reviews with the puritanical and provincial New England Transcendentalists. Boston, for Poe, was enemy territory. But he entered it with reckless audacity.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“applied with discrimination, and where the effects are fantastic, they are not unmeaningly so.”11 One of Poe’s French translators, Émile Forgues,”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“The sharp inward division between the impressive force of Poe's rational mind and the overpowering strength of his irrational apprehension was reflected not only in his poems and stories but also in his conflict with authority, his anxious welcome of personal disaster and his sad compulsion to destroy his own life.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

“For Poe, as for modern writers, the city does not represent industry, pleasure, and civilization, but rootlessness, isolation, and despair -- a population massed together with no sense of community.”
― Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy