|
|
| |
"The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure ...: buffoons,... improvisatori,... ballet-dancers,... musicians,... Beauty,... wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death.""
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), U.S. author. "The Masque of the Red Death," Graham's Magazine (1842).
Illusions mobilized to oppose the death instinct. |
"As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles."
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845), U.S. poet, critic, short-story writer. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). |
"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic."
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845), U.S. poet, critic, short-story writer. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). |
"The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind."
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845), U.S. poet, critic, short-story writer. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). |
"In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me."
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845), U.S. poet, critic, short-story writer. letter, Jan. 17, 1841. |
"Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin—the creative and the resolvent."
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), U.S. author. "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Graham's Magazine (1841).
Idealizing mental disintegration. |
"The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive."
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845), U.S. poet, critic, short-story writer. letter, Feb. 14, 1849. |
"In the one instance, the dreamer ... loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions ... until ... he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,... forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance."
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), U.S. author. The narrator, in "Berenice," Southern Literary Messenger (1835).
Suggestive of the elusive connections between madness and reason in Poe's writings. |
"Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), U.S. poet. A Dream within a Dream (l. 12-13). . .
Complete Poems and Selected Essays [Edgar Allan Poe]. Richard Gray, ed. (1993) Everyman. |
""There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, "without some strangeness in the proportion.""
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), U.S. author. The narrator, in "Ligeia," American Museum (1838).
The strange foreshadowing the devolution of beauty into the grotesque. |
| |
|
|
|
|
Edgar Allan Poe
Free
Poetry E-Book: