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Essential Tales and Poems
Featured in these pages are Edgar Allan Poe's best-loved and most-feared literary the clever C. August Dupin, precursor to Sherlock Holmes; the terrifying ghouls of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ; as well as the tragic sensibilities of The Raven and Other Poems . This is an essential treasury for Poe novices and experts alike.
680 pages, Paperback
First published April 4, 2021
42 people are currently reading
187 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,876 books28.6k followersThe name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 16, 2024
what a sad little man
October 27, 2021
Done! Thank the gods and goddesses of horror and despair, I’m finally done. I remember not liking Poe in high school and figured I should give him a fair shake as an adult. Turns out, high school me was pretty on it. Poe is just not that good.
I know that line probably upset a lot of people, but stick with me here. How often does Poe get read in omnibus form versus as a single story? When everything is put back to back, it becomes readily apparent that he really does not have much to say. Every story is basically sad boy is crazy. Sad girl is sick and dies. Pages of rambling navel gazing. Someone gets buried alive. It’s all an allegory for death.
Yawn.
Oh, but sometimes it’s on a boat! A boat where nothing happens. But people are not nice. Sometimes there’s a storm. Sometimes there’s some casual racism. Then someone goes crazy. And it’s all an allegory for death.
This collection is broken into 5 sections: Tales of the Macabre, Tales of Suspense, The World’s Worst Novel Ever Written, Essays, and Poetry. There’s a handful of decent tales in the macabre section despite the overall sameness of the collection as a whole. The Tales of Suspense are mainly noteworthy for inspiring much, much better authors. Read the second Dupin tale and tell me you don’t want to pull out your own eyeballs just to have something to lob at Poe. The less said about the novel, the better. The essays, on the other hand, might have actually been my favorite part? And finally there’s Poetry. It’s all right. Just, again, so samey. It just ends up feeling cheesy by the end.
So, yeah. This book is so dull it took me well over a month to slog through. The writing is terrible, the pacing a disaster, the figurative work lazy, and the handful of cool ideas so overused as to become sleep inducing rather than hair raising. It’s lucky dude looks so cool and his life gets so misrepresented because without that whole tragic Gothic thing he has going for him, I’m not convinced anyone would still care. Yes, it’s the soil from which so many great authors grew (Verne, Christie, Doyle), but at the end of the day who wants to eat a dirt sandwich when you could pick some actual freaking fruit from the plants instead?
I know that line probably upset a lot of people, but stick with me here. How often does Poe get read in omnibus form versus as a single story? When everything is put back to back, it becomes readily apparent that he really does not have much to say. Every story is basically sad boy is crazy. Sad girl is sick and dies. Pages of rambling navel gazing. Someone gets buried alive. It’s all an allegory for death.
Yawn.
Oh, but sometimes it’s on a boat! A boat where nothing happens. But people are not nice. Sometimes there’s a storm. Sometimes there’s some casual racism. Then someone goes crazy. And it’s all an allegory for death.
This collection is broken into 5 sections: Tales of the Macabre, Tales of Suspense, The World’s Worst Novel Ever Written, Essays, and Poetry. There’s a handful of decent tales in the macabre section despite the overall sameness of the collection as a whole. The Tales of Suspense are mainly noteworthy for inspiring much, much better authors. Read the second Dupin tale and tell me you don’t want to pull out your own eyeballs just to have something to lob at Poe. The less said about the novel, the better. The essays, on the other hand, might have actually been my favorite part? And finally there’s Poetry. It’s all right. Just, again, so samey. It just ends up feeling cheesy by the end.
So, yeah. This book is so dull it took me well over a month to slog through. The writing is terrible, the pacing a disaster, the figurative work lazy, and the handful of cool ideas so overused as to become sleep inducing rather than hair raising. It’s lucky dude looks so cool and his life gets so misrepresented because without that whole tragic Gothic thing he has going for him, I’m not convinced anyone would still care. Yes, it’s the soil from which so many great authors grew (Verne, Christie, Doyle), but at the end of the day who wants to eat a dirt sandwich when you could pick some actual freaking fruit from the plants instead?
October 24, 2023
4 stars. lengthy collection of short stories, essays, poems, and Poe's only novel. some fantastic classics, some more difficult to decipher. love having this on the shelf to revisit.
October 16, 2024
Edgar Allan Poe’s work is classic for a reason: the stories in this book are truly timeless. Each one is created by one of literature’s greatest minds (in my opinion, at least), and are vibrant and sometimes terrifying tales. The poems in this book are perhaps my favorite part (and it was nice to get to read through those after finishing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which was a rather heavy read).
The combination of his most famous works and some of his less well known writings makes this collection of stories feel very informative. While many other collections may contain famous stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven, this particular collection of Poe’s stories feels more complete. I have only met one other person who has read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Reading Edgar Allan Poe’s deep cuts made me feel like almost an expert. The timeline of his life in the beginning of the collection also had that effect, and that is another reason I love this particular collection of his stories. The one thing I disliked about the way the stories were organized was that The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat were situated next to one another, which made the stories a little less satisfying, as they have very similar endings.
The cover of this collection of stories is also spectacular. It is great quality and the cover art is beautiful. I particularly liked the quote on the back and the raven feathers on the front and back.
While the poetry in this book is by far my favorite, I do have a particular favorite among the poems. Dream-Land reminds me of some of my other favorite stories with the quote, “There the traveler meets aghast, Sheeted Memories of the Past… White-robed figures of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth–and Heaven.” All of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems have such a satisfying rhythm to read, which makes sense of course because he was the one who stressed the point of rhythm mattering so much in poetry.
This collection of stories begins with the timeline of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, as I mentioned before. This is followed by the introduction usually included with any classic, and a note on the text. After that are twenty-two Tales of the Macabre, each disturbing in its own way. Three of Poe’s Tales of Detection are placed just after this section, two of them resembling the Sherlock Holmes style story of a genius detective and his less extraordinary friend, the narrator. After this are some of his Sketches and Essays, one of the things that sets this collection apart from many others. Essays written by Poe are included as well as his works of fiction. The last two sections, making up a substantial portion of this 650+ page book, are Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and the poems. This collection of Poe’s works is the best I’ve found, and I loved it.
The combination of his most famous works and some of his less well known writings makes this collection of stories feel very informative. While many other collections may contain famous stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven, this particular collection of Poe’s stories feels more complete. I have only met one other person who has read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Reading Edgar Allan Poe’s deep cuts made me feel like almost an expert. The timeline of his life in the beginning of the collection also had that effect, and that is another reason I love this particular collection of his stories. The one thing I disliked about the way the stories were organized was that The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat were situated next to one another, which made the stories a little less satisfying, as they have very similar endings.
The cover of this collection of stories is also spectacular. It is great quality and the cover art is beautiful. I particularly liked the quote on the back and the raven feathers on the front and back.
While the poetry in this book is by far my favorite, I do have a particular favorite among the poems. Dream-Land reminds me of some of my other favorite stories with the quote, “There the traveler meets aghast, Sheeted Memories of the Past… White-robed figures of friends long given, In agony, to the Earth–and Heaven.” All of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems have such a satisfying rhythm to read, which makes sense of course because he was the one who stressed the point of rhythm mattering so much in poetry.
This collection of stories begins with the timeline of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, as I mentioned before. This is followed by the introduction usually included with any classic, and a note on the text. After that are twenty-two Tales of the Macabre, each disturbing in its own way. Three of Poe’s Tales of Detection are placed just after this section, two of them resembling the Sherlock Holmes style story of a genius detective and his less extraordinary friend, the narrator. After this are some of his Sketches and Essays, one of the things that sets this collection apart from many others. Essays written by Poe are included as well as his works of fiction. The last two sections, making up a substantial portion of this 650+ page book, are Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and the poems. This collection of Poe’s works is the best I’ve found, and I loved it.
October 12, 2023
Edgar Allen Poe is absolutely amazing with imagery and tone shifts!! This collection was beautiful and a great way to grow admiration for him as a writer (I may or may not have skipped his sketches and essays 💀).
January 23, 2024
Classic and timeless. Poe’s works stand the test of time.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews