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The Unknown Poe
An indispensable anthology of brilliant hard-to-find writings by Poe on poetry, the imagination, humor and the sublime which adds a new dimension to his stature as a speculative thinker and philosopher. Essays (in translation) by Charles Baudelaire Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and André Breton shed light on Poe’s relevance within European literary tradition. These are the arcana of Edgar Allan writings on wit, humor, dreams, drunkenness, genius, madness and apocalypse. Here is the mind of Poe at its most colorful, its most incisive and its most exceptional. Edgar Allan Poe's dark, melodic poems and tales of terror and detection are known to readers everywhere, but few are familiar with his cogent literary criticism, or his speculative thinking in science, psychology or philosophy. This book is an attempt to present his lesser known, out of print or hard to find writings in a single volume, with emphasis on the theoretical and esoteric. The second part, "The Friend View," includes seminal essays by Poe's famous admirers in France, clarifying his international literary importance. America has never seen such a personage as Edgar Allan Poe. He is a figure who appears once an epoch, before passing into myth. American critics from Henry James to T. S. Eliot have disparaged and attempted to explain away his influence to no end, save to perpetuate his fame. Even the disdainful Eliot once conceded, "and yet one cannot be sure that one's own writing has not been influence by Poe." "Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day. He both amazed and antagonized his contemporaries, who could not dismiss him from the first rank of writers, though many felt his work to be morally questionable and in dubious taste, and though he scourged them in print regularly in the course of producing a body of criticism that is sometimes flatly vindictive and often brilliant."—Marilynne Robinson, The New York Times Review of Books Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. He is well known for his haunting poetry and mysterious short stories. Regarded as being a central figure of Romanticism, he is also considered the inventor of detective fiction and the growing science fiction genre. Some of his most famous works include poems such as "The Raven," "Annabel Lee" and "A Dream Within a Dream"; tales such as "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of Red Death" and "The Tell-Tale Heart."
124 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,885 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 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 13, 2019
While I did enjoy reading this short collection of works written by or, at least, related to Edgar Allan Poe, I will say: these works remain 'unknown' for a reason. I believe I will stick to his better known works in the future.
December 30, 2023
Poe's own writing had me groaning in pleasure and awe. Didn't enjoy the French view
April 29, 2025
In my final semester of college, I took two seminars fairly seriously—one in Art History on Symbolism and the other on the 19th Century in Literature. In both, it turned out a central figure was Charles Baudelaire. For the Symbolists—an art movement centered in France that moved away from naturalism and impressionism into a more romantic abstraction and freedom of style in the representation of the mind and ideas—Baudelaire was a key inspiration. And within the 19th Century, Baudelaire’s poetics came to be seen as insightfully reflective of a new phase in our world’s irreversibly onward history.
For Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Poe was his kindred spirit and chief model. In fact, The Unknown Poe states that of Baudelaire’s twelve volumes of complete works, five are filled with his translations of Poe into french. Why this might be so was always a mystery to me, and that curiosity was deepened by the reality that I didn’t have any real sense at all of Poe, despite myself also being from Virginia. All I had was a vivid mental image of the black cat from childhood.
Living in Richmond down the block from the Poe Museum, as I did last year, I often wandered through the Poe Museum and its garden looking for clues. I learned all about his life, that he was quite charming, that he somehow invented science fiction and the detective story, endeavored to be the first to make a living as a real writer in America, was among the first to explore the dark bent of the human mind in literature, and that the famous portrait of him was a daguerreotype at a late and dark time in his life. I also read Eureka half-comprehendingly.
But it is with this book that I come to love him—through which I feel I understand him—from all Poe’s writings, as well as Baudelaire’s portraits of him, herein carefully presented, as I lived in them. At that, I’ll leave off with some fragments that struck something in me, with a note that I’ll be flipping through these pages for a good time to come.
“In looking at the world as it is, we shall find it folly to deny that, to worldly success, a surer path is Villainy than Virtue.”
“The truth seems to me that genius of the highest order lives in a state of perpetual vacillation between ambition and the scorn of it.”
“Were I to define briefly, very briefly, the term “Art,” I should call it “the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the Soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature entitles no man to the sacred name of “Artist.””
“When music affects us to tears, seemingly causeless, we weep not, as Gravina supposes, from “excess of pleasure”; but through excess of an impatient, petulant sorrow that, as mere mortals, we are as yet in no condition to banquet upon those supernal ecstasies of which music merely affords us a suggestive and indefinite glimpse.”
“I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6,000 years ago.”
“Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced. But the person appreciating it may be utterly incompetent to reproduce the work, or anything similar, and this is solely through lack of what may be termed the constructive ability.”
“In general, our first impressions are true ones—the chief difficulty is in making sure which are the first. In early youth we read a poem, for instance, and we are enraptured with it. At manhood we are assured by our reason that we had no reason to be enraptured. But some years elapsed, and we returned to our primitive admiration, just as a matured judgement enables us precisely to see what and why we admired.”
Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.
For Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Poe was his kindred spirit and chief model. In fact, The Unknown Poe states that of Baudelaire’s twelve volumes of complete works, five are filled with his translations of Poe into french. Why this might be so was always a mystery to me, and that curiosity was deepened by the reality that I didn’t have any real sense at all of Poe, despite myself also being from Virginia. All I had was a vivid mental image of the black cat from childhood.
Living in Richmond down the block from the Poe Museum, as I did last year, I often wandered through the Poe Museum and its garden looking for clues. I learned all about his life, that he was quite charming, that he somehow invented science fiction and the detective story, endeavored to be the first to make a living as a real writer in America, was among the first to explore the dark bent of the human mind in literature, and that the famous portrait of him was a daguerreotype at a late and dark time in his life. I also read Eureka half-comprehendingly.
But it is with this book that I come to love him—through which I feel I understand him—from all Poe’s writings, as well as Baudelaire’s portraits of him, herein carefully presented, as I lived in them. At that, I’ll leave off with some fragments that struck something in me, with a note that I’ll be flipping through these pages for a good time to come.
“In looking at the world as it is, we shall find it folly to deny that, to worldly success, a surer path is Villainy than Virtue.”
“The truth seems to me that genius of the highest order lives in a state of perpetual vacillation between ambition and the scorn of it.”
“Were I to define briefly, very briefly, the term “Art,” I should call it “the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the Soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature entitles no man to the sacred name of “Artist.””
“When music affects us to tears, seemingly causeless, we weep not, as Gravina supposes, from “excess of pleasure”; but through excess of an impatient, petulant sorrow that, as mere mortals, we are as yet in no condition to banquet upon those supernal ecstasies of which music merely affords us a suggestive and indefinite glimpse.”
“I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6,000 years ago.”
“Men of genius are far more abundant than is supposed. In fact, to appreciate thoroughly the work of what we call genius, is to possess all the genius by which the work was produced. But the person appreciating it may be utterly incompetent to reproduce the work, or anything similar, and this is solely through lack of what may be termed the constructive ability.”
“In general, our first impressions are true ones—the chief difficulty is in making sure which are the first. In early youth we read a poem, for instance, and we are enraptured with it. At manhood we are assured by our reason that we had no reason to be enraptured. But some years elapsed, and we returned to our primitive admiration, just as a matured judgement enables us precisely to see what and why we admired.”
Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.
July 7, 2009
Interesting and bizarre. If you only know Poe's poetry and short stories, I encourage you to read this. His literary criticisms, the drama and fiery feuds he had with his contemporaries, and his obsession with breakthroughs in the scientific and crime investigation worlds really help to round out the picture of who he was.
May 3, 2009
I loved it--the marginalia, the supplemental essays by Poe's contemporaries and admirers alike, the rare illustrations. Poe's insights and analysis into various subjects as art, philosophy, music, profane and prosaic existence, &c., get delightfully obtuse but intuitively and easily recognisable. This book is indispensable for any fan of Edgar Allan Poe.
December 29, 2015
I'll always give E. A. Poe 5 stars. I love the illustrations and personal letters the most. The letter to his mother when he was sick is so heartbreaking!
December 3, 2022
This is a fun supplement to the Poe we think we all know. While offering nothing groundbreaking for the Poe aficionado, this would be a great book to keep on hand for those looking to further their Poe studies.
This book offers some early and dashed off poems (some serious, some in whimsy), fragments of letters that give insight into the real mind and emotions of Poe the man, and selections of Poe's Marginilia, which read like if Poe had a blog to comment on whatever topic crossed his mind. This slim volume finishes off with essays and French criticisms of Poe.
An interesting find was the origin of a quote often attributed to Poe: “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” Here, in the essay "Of Beauty," Poe is paraphrasing Sir Francis Bacon! The original Bacon was, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
This book offers some early and dashed off poems (some serious, some in whimsy), fragments of letters that give insight into the real mind and emotions of Poe the man, and selections of Poe's Marginilia, which read like if Poe had a blog to comment on whatever topic crossed his mind. This slim volume finishes off with essays and French criticisms of Poe.
An interesting find was the origin of a quote often attributed to Poe: “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” Here, in the essay "Of Beauty," Poe is paraphrasing Sir Francis Bacon! The original Bacon was, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
March 24, 2021
I loved this little book. It's a great read for anyone who wants to know more about Poe, and/or read bits of his writings that don't tend to be included in productions like 'selected writings' and such. It's really interesting.
August 16, 2018
4.5 stars.
January 27, 2025
2.5 stars. The parts by Poe were mostly good, though several felt like (and possibly were) rough drafts. The parts about Poe were overall not that interesting.
February 2, 2016
This slim volume contains much you will not find in your "unabridged" Poe collections. First, there is some Poe correspondence, prose and poems from his juvenilia, excerpts of his philosophical essay Eureka: A Prose Poem and more. This last is capstone to thread of the prose pieces where he minutely and even scientifically measures and analyses his imagination, admittedly one he finds easily fueled by alcohol. In a concluding section, Poe's criticism is sampled, including that of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Then, the analogy includes his supports especially among the french, his ardent promoter Charles Baudelaire, translator Stéphane Mallarmé, and others fans Paul Valéry, J. K. Huysmans, and André Breton. This is a unique anthology for the serious Poe fanatic.
Probably most interesting to me is how objectively and even scientifically Poe plumbed his psyche, charted the modes of his imagination. It recalled to me the words of Thoreau in Walden:
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
Probably most interesting to me is how objectively and even scientifically Poe plumbed his psyche, charted the modes of his imagination. It recalled to me the words of Thoreau in Walden:
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."
May 17, 2008
Nowadays, Poe seems like such an academic throwaway, and no doubt the horror inspired school curriculum, in which "Usher" and the "Tell-tale Heart", are required reading in order to hurl us into the mind of a madman, does not help us understand the man any better. This is an ideal edition to navigate through his mind and influential heritage, most particularly that of the French Symbolists, who actually made an effort to take him seriously as a thinker. I have always thought that the "Imp of the Perverse" (included in this slim volume) was Poe's most significant breakthrough into psychology and seems to be a looming prophecy on ideas put forth in "Crime and Punishment", and later, in Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle". The other works collected here are minor in comparison, although many of aphorisms and brief philosophical musings are an enlightening way to discover his extremely rational method of composition. His recollection of a very surreal dream is both sorrowful and shocking.
October 10, 2012
I loved it, you can see how he was a "normal" person, and when he started going mad and drinking. How he didn't drink because he did not like the effects on him. How his family kicked him out and said he would never inherit their wealth, so he died alone, drunk on the street.
February 10, 2013
I like this book because it gives a lot of insight into Poe that is otherwise often unknown. Of particular interest to me are Poe's views on literary criticism, and then the way French critics approach Poe and his works.
January 5, 2008
POEEEEEEEEEE. <3 this book has unpublished letters and musings and columns and.. lKJ:LKJ:ldkjs;ldkjflsdkf
November 9, 2008
"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses percieve in Nature through the veil of the soul.'" -51
August 6, 2010
Fantastic stuff in here -- but it left me wanting more
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews