Poe Knows Read online

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  ISBN 978-1-4549-4635-9

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  Interior design by Kevin Ullrich

  Cover design by Jo Obarowski

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  BEAUTY

  DEATH

  DREAMS

  EMOTION

  HUMAN NATURE

  HORROR

  MADNESS

  PHILOSOPHY

  SOLITUDE

  SORROW

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  I’ve been a thinking, whether it were best

  To take things seriously or all in jest

  —“Oh Tempora! Oh Mores!”

  Can you believe that Edgar Allan Poe, that master of the macabre and the morose, tossed off lines as flippant as these? The truth is Poe was a master of the bon mot, and all of his works—fiction, poetry, and essays—are laced with witticisms and irresistibly quotable passages. This volume collects more than 200 quotes, aphorisms, and Poesque displays of verbal virtuosity, culled from his fiction, poetry, essays, nonfiction, and letters—just about everything Poe produced. We’ve divided the contents into ten thematic chapters that show the range and diversity of just what Poe was a thinking.

  Of course, death and darkness predominate in Poe’s writing—or at the very least in the works best known to most readers. The man had a preoccupation with premature burial that bordered on the morbid—so much so that he wrote a story under that title in which he imagined himself a character who nearly suffers the same fate as the victims of live burial he describes in the tale. Numerous quotes in this compilation suggest that Poe was not a true believer in a firmly fixed boundary between life and death, which is why characters in some of his stories speak or manifest from beyond the grave. Ask him what accentuated the beauty of a woman in a poem, and he would tell you, with a perfectly straight face, her death.

  It will surprise many readers of this volume that Poe also had a wicked sense of humor. Who else but someone preoccupied with the dark side would have a character chortle gleefully about how War and Pestilence are actually beneficial to mankind, or say in praise of Purgatory that “a man may go farther and fare worse.” There’s even a trace of the whimsical in the ravings of Poe’s mad characters, who are so convinced of their lucidness that they give away their condition by harping on it giddily.

  If the quotes compiled for this volume show anything, it is the scope of Poe’s intellect and the brilliance with which he commented on everything from the character of genius to the complexity of coincidence, the speciousness of spirituality, and the perversity of human nature. It will surely astound you to discover just how much Poe knew.

  It is indisputable that Edgar Allan Poe appreciated beauty. References to beauty and the beautiful are omnipresent in “The Philosophy of Composition,” the famous essay in which he referred to poetry as an expression of rhythmical beauty. It was in that same essay that he identified the death of a beautiful woman as the most poetic topic in the world. Most of us would think that just a tad morbid, but it certainly explains why so much of Poe’s poetry and fiction features ladies and lovers on death’s doorstep—or across the threshold. For Poe, death and the maiden were inextricably intertwined. What a killjoy!

  I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.

  —The Poetic Principle

  THE DEATH . . . OF A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IS, UNQUESTIONABLY, THE MOST POETICAL TOPIC IN THE WORLD.

  —The Philosophy of Composition

  That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful.

  —The Philosophy of Composition

  BEAUTY OF WHATEVER KIND, IN ITS SUPREME DEVELOPMENT, INVARIABLY EXCITES THE SENSITIVE SOUL TO TEARS. MELANCHOLY IS THUS THE MOST LEGITIMATE OF ALL THE POETICAL TONES.

  —The Philosophy of Composition

  The magic of a lovely form in woman—the necromancy of female gracefulness—was always a power which I had found it impossible to resist.

  —The Spectacles

  THERE IS NO EXQUISITE BEAUTY . . . WITHOUT SOME STRANGENESS IN THE PROPORTION.

  —Ligeia

  When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or of heart.

  —The Philosophy of Composition

  TO GENIUS BEAUTY GIVES LIFE—REAPING OFTEN A REWARD IN IMMORTALITY.

  —Fifty Suggestions

  The pure Imagination chooses, from either Beauty or Deformity, only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined.

  —Marginalia

  Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty.

  —The Poetic Principle

  HOW IS IT THAT FROM BEAUTY I HAVE DERIVED A TYPE OF UNLOVELINESS?—FROM THE COVENANT OF PEACE, A SIMILE OF SORROW?

  —Berenice

  In his more metaphysical musings, Poe pondered the boundary that separates life and death, asking where the one ends and the other begins. You could say it was something of an obsession with him—as was the horror of premature burial. Yet he simply refused to acknowledge the finality of the feast of the conqueror worm. In one of his tales, a man hypnotized as he is dying continues to converse in his mesmeric fugue for days from beyond the grave. In several other stories, dead lovers return to possess their successors. In Poe’s work, the dead just won’t stay down.

  There are two bodies—the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death,” is but the painful metamorphosis.

  —Mesmeric Revelation

  Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations—they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.

  —How to Write a Blackwood Article

  THE PLAY IS THE TRAGEDY, “MAN,” AND ITS HERO, THE CONQUEROR WORM.

  —The Conqueror Worm

  EVEN IN THE GRAVE ALL IS NOT LOST.

  —The Pit and the Pendulum

  To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!

  —The Assignation

  AND THEN THERE STOLE INTO MY FANCY, LIKE A RICH MUSICAL NOTE, THE THOUGHT OF WHAT SWEET REST THERE MUST BE IN THE GRAVE.

  —The Pit and the Pendulum

  Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.

  —Mesmeric Revelation

  I SAW THAT SHE MUST DIE—AND I STRUGGLED DESPERATELY IN SPIRIT WITH THE GRIM AZRAEL.

  —Ligeia

  Thank Heaven! the crisis—

  The danger is past,

  And the lingering illness

  Is over at last—

  And the fever called “Living”
r />   Is conquered at last.

  —For Annie

  SHE CAME AND DEPARTED AS A SHADOW.

  —Ligeia

  I AM DYING, YET SHALL I LIVE.

  —Morella

  The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before.

  —Ligeia

  Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!—to the earth art thou not forever dead?

  —William Wilson

  To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.

  —The Premature Burial

  In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.

  —William Wilson

  THE BOUNDARIES WHICH DIVIDE LIFE FROM DEATH ARE AT BEST SHADOWY AND VAGUE. WHO SHALL SAY WHERE THE ONE ENDS, AND WHERE THE OTHER BEGINS?

  —The Premature Burial

  It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death.

  —The Premature Burial

  Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful—but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us—they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.

  —The Premature Burial

  DARKNESS AND DECAY AND THE RED DEATH HELD ILLIMITABLE DOMINION OVER ALL.

  —The Masque of the Red Death

  EVEN WITH THE UTTERLY LOST, TO WHOM LIFE AND DEATH ARE EQUALLY JESTS, THERE ARE MATTERS OF WHICH NO JEST CAN BE MADE.

  —The Masque of the Red Death

  There can be no more absolute waste of time than the attempt to prove, at the present day, that man, by mere exercise of will, can so impress his fellow, as to cast him into an abnormal condition, of which the phenomena resemble very closely those of death, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the phenomena of any other normal condition within our cognizance.

  —Mesmeric Revelation

  IN PACE REQUIESCAT!

  —The Cask of Amontillado

  Dreams are not just dreams in Poe’s poetry and prose. They are sometimes idyllic captures of an idealized past or the means by which individuals glimpse eternities and truths obscured to the waking world. In Poe’s work, people dream not only by night but also by day. No wonder he challenged the integrity of our waking reality by famously asking whether all that we see or seem is “but a dream within a dream.” Of course nightmares are also dreams, and they also can be found in abundance in his writings. But let’s not ruin the mood here.

  IT IS A HAPPINESS TO WONDER;—IT IS A HAPPINESS TO DREAM.

  —Morella

  They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awaking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil.

  —Eleonora

  Is all that we see or seem

  But a dream within a dream?

  —A Dream Within a Dream

  Yet if hope has flown away

  In a night, or in a day,

  In a vision, or in none,

  Is it therefore the less gone?

  —A Dream Within a Dream

  Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.

  —The Pit and the Pendulum

  Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life—

  As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife

  Of semblance with reality which brings

  To the delirious eye more lovely things

  Of Paradise & Love—& all our own!

  —Dreams

  Ah! what is not a dream by day

  To him whose eyes are cast

  On things around him with a ray

  Turned back upon the past?

  —A Dream

  By a route obscure and lonely,

  Haunted by ill angels only,

  Where an Eidolon, named Night,

  On a black throne reigns upright,

  I have reached these lands but newly

  From an ultimate dim Thule—

  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

  Out of Space—out of Time.

  —Dream-Land

  OH! THAT MY YOUNG LIFE WERE A LASTING DREAM!

  —Dreams

  THOSE WHO DREAM AS I, ASPIRINGLY, ARE DAMNED, AND DIE.

  —Introduction

  My hopes are dying

  While, on dreams relying,

  I am spelled by art.

  —To Miss Louise Olivia Hunter

  My draught of passion hath been deep—

  I revell’d, and I now would sleep.

  —Introduction

  Now, when one dreams, and, in the dream, suspects that he dreams, the suspicion never fails to confirm itself, and the sleeper is almost immediately aroused.

  —A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

  The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

  —Berenice

  IT IS BY NO MEANS AN IRRATIONAL FANCY THAT, IN A FUTURE EXISTENCE, WE SHALL LOOK UPON WHAT WE THINK OUR PRESENT EXISTENCE, AS A DREAM.

  —Marginalia

  For all his morbidness of mood and somberness of thought, Poe was an incurable romantic. His characters believe in love at first sight. They mourn the passing of youthful passion but remain love-smitten all their lives. So many of Poe’s characters are persons of sentiment who revel in the intensity of their feelings, even though their excitement is beyond their rational understanding. But these emotions are often a double-edged sword for them. Hope occasionally proves a torture when it goes unfulfilled, and love is sometimes felt most acutely when it is lost. To be a feeling character in Poe’s work is to be vulnerable.

  YEARS OF LOVE HAVE BEEN FORGOT IN THE HATRED OF A MINUTE.

  —To — —

  I have no words—alas!—to tell

  The loveliness of loving well!

  —Tamerlane

  Many years ago, it was the fashion to ridicule the idea of “love at first sight”; but those who think, not less than those who feel deeply, have always advocated its existence. Modern discoveries, indeed, in what may be termed ethical magnetism or magnetœsthetics, render it probable that the most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections, are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy—in a word, that the brightest and most enduring of the psychal fetters are those which are riveted by a glance.

  —The Spectacles

  IN THE STRANGE ANOMALY OF MY EXISTENCE, FEELINGS WITH ME, HAD NEVER BEEN OF THE HEART, AND MY PASSIONS ALWAYS WERE OF THE MIND.

  —Berenice

  Young Love’s first lesson is—the heart.

  —Tamerlane

  O, human love! thou spirit given,

  On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!

  —Tamerlane

  THERE ARE CHORDS IN THE HEARTS OF THE MOST RECKLESS WHICH CANNOT BE TOUCHED WITHOUT EMOTION.

  —The Masque of the Red Death

  A sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.

  —The Fall of the House of Usher

  Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed.

  —Mesmeric Revelation

  I had so worked upon my imagination as really to beli
eve that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

  —The Fall of the House of Usher

  While, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth.