Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dreamed before.

-:- Poe Reading List by Katharena -:-

Edgar Allan Poe: Main Page | an Impressive Edgar Allan Poe Poetry Sampler | Thought Provoking Quotes by Poe | Poe's Sumptuous Beauty and Suggestiveness | Edgar Allan Poe : mysterious, dreamlike, and often macabre forces | Poe's Later Life and Mature Works | Edgar Allan Poe : Books and Reviews | Poe had an air of Objectivity and Spontaneity | Poe Admired Originality | Edgar Allan Poe Concerned with Terror and Sadness | Poe's Puzzle a Secret Nevermore | Katharena's Essential Poe, for the Morbidly Curious

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Edgar Allan Poe, American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. Poe's tale The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. Poe's The Raven (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature.

As a critic, Edgar Allan Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the short story, in which he sought for the ancient unities: i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place. To these unities he added that of mood or effect. Poe was not extreme in these views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of decidedly minor writers.

Poe's genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States, of Poe's greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed Poe's role in French literature was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism. French Symbolism relied on Poe's "Philosophy of Composition," borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate the modern theory of "pure poetry."