The poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston (1809). He was the son of two actors, but both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a wealthy Scotch merchant named John Allan, who gave Edgar Poe his middle name. His foster father sent him to the prestigious University of Virginia, where he was surrounded by the sons of wealthy slave-owning families. He developed a habit of drinking and gambling with the other students, but his foster father didn't approve. He and John Allan had a series of arguments about his behavior and his career choices, and he was finally disowned and thrown out of the house.
He spent the next several years living in poverty, depending on his aunt for a home, supporting himself by writing anything he could, including a how-to guide for seashell collecting. Eventually, he began to contribute poems and journalism to magazines. At the time, magazines were a new literary medium in the United States, and Poe was one of the first writers to make a living writing for magazines. He called himself a "magazinist."
He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the "tomahawk man from the South." He described one poem as "an illimitable gilded swill trough," and he said, "[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops." He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.
Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. But soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.
But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn't make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe. There were periods when he and his wife lived on bread and molasses, and sold most of their belongings to the pawn shop.
It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote some of the greatest gothic horror stories in English literature, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Near the end of his wife's illness, he published the poem that begins,
"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."
It became his most famous poem: "The Raven."
*As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy a limitless succession of Universes. Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.
*Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
*Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
*Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
*I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
*I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
*I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
*I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
*I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
Edgar Allan Poe
*I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
*I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
*If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
*In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
*In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
Edgar Allan Poe
*It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
*It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.
*It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
*Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe
*Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
*Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
*Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
*Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
*Stupidity is a talent for misconception.
*That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
*That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
*The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
*The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe
*The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
*The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.
*The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
*The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.
*The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
*There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
*There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.
*There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
*They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
*Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.
*Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
*To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
*We loved with a love that was more than love.
*Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'
*With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
*Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
