The Unknown Poe
by Edgar Allan Poe
On This Page
Description
An indispensable anthology of brilliant hard-to-find writings by Poe on poetry, the imagination, humor, and the sublime which adds a new dimension to his stature as a speculative thinker and philosopher. Essays (in translation) by Charles Baudelaire Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, & André Breton shed light on Poe's relevance within European literary tradition. These are the arcana of Edgar Allan Poe: writings on wit, humor, dreams, drunkenness, genius, madness, and apocalypse. Here is show more the mind of Poe at its most colorful, its most incisive, and its most exceptional. Edgar Allan Poe's dark, melodic poems and tales of terror and detection are known to readers everywhere, but few are familiar with his cogent literary criticism, or his speculative thinking in science, psychology or philosophy. This book is an attempt to present his lesser known, out of print, or hard to find writings in a single volume, with emphasis on the theoretical and esoteric. The second part, "The Friend View," includes seminal essays by Poe's famous admirers in France, clarifying hisinternational literary importance. America has never seen such a personage as Edgar Allan Poe. He is a figure who appears once an epoch, before passing into myth. American critics from Henry James to T. S. Eliot have disparaged and attempted to explain away his influence to no end, save to perpetuate his fame. Even the disdainful Eliot once conceded, "and yet one cannot be sure that one's own writing hasnot been influence by Poe." "Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day. He both amazed and antagonized his contemporaries, who could not dismiss him from the first rank of writers, though many felt his work to be morally questionable and in dubious taste, and though he scourged them in print regularly in the course of producing a body of criticism that is sometimes flatly vindictive and often brilliant." --Marilynne Robinson,The New York Times Review of Books Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. He is well known for his haunting poetry and mysterious short stories. Regarded as being a central figure of Romanticism, he is also considered the inventor of detective fiction and the growing science fiction genre. Some of his most famous works include poems such as "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "A Dream Within a Dream"; tales such as "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of Red Death," and "The Tell-Tale Heart." show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
Member Reviews
This slim volume contains much you will not find in your "unabridged" Poe collections. First, there is some Poe correspondence, prose and poems from his juvenilia, excerpts of his philosophical essay Eureka: A Prose Poem and more. This last is capstone to thread of the prose pieces where he minutely and even scientifically measures and analyses his imagination, admittedly one he finds easily fueled by alcohol. In a concluding section, Poe's criticism is sampled, including that of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Then, the analogy includes his supports especially among the french, his ardent promoter Charles Baudelaire, translator Stéphane Mallarmé, and others fans Paul Valéry, J. K. Huysmans, and André Breton. This is a unique anthology for show more the serious Poe fanatic.
Probably most interesting to me is how objectively and even scientifically Poe plumbed his psyche, charted the modes of his imagination. It recalled to me the words of Thoreau in Walden:
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography." show less
Probably most interesting to me is how objectively and even scientifically Poe plumbed his psyche, charted the modes of his imagination. It recalled to me the words of Thoreau in Walden:
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography." show less
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
3,802+ Works 107,334 Members
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. In 1827, he enlisted in the United States Army and his first collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published. In 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the show more Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. His works include The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, A Descent into the Maelstrom, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Raven. He struggle with depression and alcoholism his entire life and died on October 7, 1849 at the age of 40. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 818.309 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American miscellaneous writings in English Middle 19th Century 1830-61
- LCC
- PS2603 .F6 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 19th century
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 170
- Popularity
- 192,225
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.57)
- Languages
- English, Portuguese, Swedish
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 1
- ASINs
- 1
