Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849 )

American author and poet

• If we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.
  • Source: Maelzel's Chess-Player (c. 1830)
  • Poe stating his arguement that Maelzel's Chess-Player was a hoax.

• From childhood's hour I have not been
  As others were — I have not seen
  As others saw— I could not bring
  My passions from a common spring—
  From the same source I have not taken
  My sorrow— I could not awaken
  My heart to joy at the same tone—
  And all I lov'd— I lov'd alone—
  • Source: Alone.

• Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
  Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
  As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
  • Source: The Raven. (1844 )

• Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dreamed before.
  • Source: The Raven. (1844 )

• Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,— Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
  • Source: The Raven. (1844 )

• "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'"
  • Source: The Raven. (1844 )

• "Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!
  • Source: The Raven. (1844 )

• "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
  Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
  Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!
  Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
  Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."
  • Source: The Raven. (1844 )

• Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heart
  From its present pathway part not!
  Being everything which now thou art,
  Be nothing which thou art not.
  So with the world thy gentle ways,
  Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
  Shall be an endless theme of praise,
  And love - a simple duty.
  • Source: To Frances S. Osgood (1845 )

• Gaily bedight,
  A gallant knight,
  In sunshine and in shadow,
  Had journeyed long,
  Singing a song,
  In search of Eldorado.
  • Source: Eldorado. (1849 )

• 'Over the Mountains
  Of the Moon,
  Down the Valley of the Shadow,
  Ride, boldly ride,'
  The shade replied,—
  'If you seek for Eldorado!'
  • Source: Eldorado. (1849 )

• You are not wrong, who deem
  That my days have been a dream;
  Yet if hope has flown away
  In a night, or in a day,
  In a vision, or in none,
  Is it therefore the less gone?
  All that we see or seem
  Is but a dream within a dream.
  • Source: A Dream Within A Dream.

• O God! Can I not save
  One from the pitiless wave?
  Is all that we see or seem
  But a dream within a dream?
  • Source: A Dream Within A Dream.

• Thou wast all that to me, love,
  For which my soul did pine —
  A green isle in the sea, love,
  A fountain and a shrine,
  All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
  And all the flowers were mine.
  • Source: To One In Paradise. (1835 )

• And all my days are trances,
  And all my nightly dreams
  Are where thy dark eye glances,
  And where thy footstep gleams —
  In what ethereal dances,
  By what eternal streams.
  • Source: To One In Paradise. (1835 )

• The play is the tragedy, "Man",
  And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
  • Source: The Conqueror Worm. (1838 )

• BY a route obscure and lonely,
  Haunted by ill angels only,
  Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
  On a black throne reigns upright,
  I have reached these lands but newly
  From an ultimate dim Thule -
  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
  Out of SPACE - out of TIME.
  • Source: Dream-Land. (1844 )

• It was many and many a year ago,
  In a kingdom by the sea,
  That a maiden lived whom you may know
  By the name of Annabel Lee;—
  And this maiden she lived with no other thought
  Than to love and be loved by me.
  
  I was a child and She was a child,
  In this kingdom by the sea,
  But we loved with a love that was more than love -
  I and my Annabel Lee—
  With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
  Coveted her and me.
  • Source: Annabel Lee. (1849 )

• But our love it was stronger by far than the love
  Of those who were older than we -
  Of many far wiser than we -
  And neither the angels in Heaven above
  Nor the demons down under the sea
  Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:—
  • Source: Annabel Lee. (1849 )

• I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
  I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.
  • Source: The Poetic Principle.

• I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste.
  • Source: The Poetic Principle.

• Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.
  • Diddling: Considered As One Of The Exact Sciences.

• I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result.
  • The Angel Of The Odd: An Extravaganza.

• These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities - of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine," I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) "to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the 'singular' about it."
  • The Angel Of The Odd: An Extravaganza.

• "Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness."
  • Source: Letter to B—. (1836 )

• "Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve."
  • Source: A Few Words on Secret Writing. (1841 )

• "They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
  • Source: Eleonora. (1841 )

• "...Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
  • Source: The Masque of the Red Death. (1842 )

• "Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen—although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature."
  • Source: The Murders in the Rue Morgue. (1841 )

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