The Bells and Other Poems

by Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Dulac (Illustrator)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Horror

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1912

About the author

The 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...

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Catching up on some POE today and was delighted to find this little poem entitled THE BELLS. When so much of his work is dark and sad this one brings to mind Christmas and happy times.

Hope he had some.

From my big book of POE.

[Le Maistre Chat · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Raven and Other Poems AKA The Bells and Other Poems
Hardcover, illustrated by Edmund Dulac

There's a Fall River (Barnes & Noble) edition with a 2011 date and a Calla (Dover) that's newer but also out of print. The B&N introduction calls it "this expanded edition" of the 1912 edition by Dulac that did not include all of Poe's poems.
As a poet, Poe is best known for romantic themes of loss. I would guess every Anglophone has heard "the fair and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore" who the narrator of "The Raven" pines for and "I was a child and she was a child in that kingdom by the sea, I and my Annabel Lee".
In other poems, he twisted this theme from loss of young love beyond the man's control to ignoring the beloved to focus on power ("Tamerlane"), death more generally ("The Conqueror Worm") and completely unrelated themes like the effect of science on the life of the mind or "The Bells", which sort of does free association with the four metals silver, gold, copper/bronze and iron, starting with Christmasy lyrics and ending with horror.
It was a fertile theme for Edmund Dulac, who illustrated the poems with 28 watercolor plates and 9 B&W sketches. I'm assuming the specific edition I own is long out of print, but there's a Dover Calla Edition available on Amazon etc.

[Louise]

Not quite for me poetry-wise, I think I'd much rather read one of his stories!