A classic collection
From the exquisite lyric “To Helen,” to the immortal masterpieces “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” and “The Raven,” The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates the author’s gift for the form.
Collected in these two volumes are roe's legendary tales of terror that attest to his stylistic brilliance in evoking an atmosphere of gloom and obsession. Creatures, eyes, coffins, walls-all are symbols in roe's efforts to create an aura of evil. What reader would not share the anxiety of the traveler in The Fall of the House of Usher, who upon his first glimpse of the house, finds an "insufferable gloom pervading my spirit... an utter depression of the soul... an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart"? In volume 2 his nightmarish visions take us down untraveled paths revealing the dark side of the human experience.
'In his stories of mystery and imagination Poe created a world-record for the English language: perhaps for all languages.'
—George Bernard Shaw
Read throughout the world, admired by writers as different as Dostoevsky and H.G. Wells, translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer. All of Poe's best-known and most representative works are gathered here, as well as his masterly 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.'
Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today's most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author's life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes.
The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, volume number 19 in The Library of America series. It is joined in the series by a companion volume, number 20, Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews.
Edgar Allan Poe’s works, with their gothic and often obsessive themes,
have had a significant influence on American literature.
In this Norton Critical Edition, G. R. Thompson has fully introduced, annotated, and edited each text.
“Backgrounds and Contexts” includes fifty-seven carefully chosen documents that illuminate Poe’s prolific but short career, among them reviews, prefaces, and correspondence by Poe as well as thematic pieces dealing with Transcendentalism and alternative romanticism, sciences of the mind, sensation fiction, and the South and slavery.
Fourteen judiciously selected critical essays address Poe’s poetry,
fiction, politics, and psychology. Contributors include Floyd Stovall,
Robert C. McLean, Richard Wilbur, James W. Gargano, Joseph J.
Moldenhauer, Paul John Eakin, Grace Farrell, Liahna Klenman Babener,
Barton Levi St. Armand, Joseph N. Riddel, J. Gerald Kennedy, John Carlos Rowe, Terence Whalen, and John T. Irwin.
A Selected Bibliography is also included.
This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. "The Fall of the House of Usher" describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In "The Tell Tale Heart", a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Cask of Amontillado" explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate.
A visitor to a gloomy mansion finds a childhood friend dying under the spell of a family curse.
A fully revised collection of Poe's work
The first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945 presents a more complicated, perverse, and culturally engaged Poe. Along with the author's familiar masterworks in poetry and fiction, this new Portable Poe includes satirical tales that reflect his critique of American culture.
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