Description
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is internationally renowned as a pioneering master of the macabre. He is regarded as one of the world's great short story writers as well as a great lyric poet, and is credited with inventing the detective story and the modern gothic horror tale. He has been an important influence on many major American and European writers including William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, H. P. Lovecraft, and William Butler Yeats, among many others.
The novelist Henry James once stated that "an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection." Although he meant it as a criticism of Poe's often outrageous and grisly stories, today it can be seen as a compliment for Poe was one of the first modern writers to explore the darker side of human nature and depict disturbed psychological states. He stripped away man's social veneer and focused on his obsessive and primal desires. Murder, incest, and necrophilia bubble to the surface in his eerie, shocking tales and poems, in which the landscape and imagery resemble not the normal everyday world, but the inner, subjective one of nightmares.
Poe's poetry, which is collected in this volume, is more personal than his prose. The themes of love, death, and despair which recur throughout reflect the anguish he suffered in his own troubled life. "Annabel Lee" is a haunting lament to his young wife, Virginia, who died of tuberculosis. "The Bells" is an eerie and melancholy meditation which recreates with brilliant musical language the hypnotic, funereal aura of ringing bells. "The Raven" is a comic tour de force in which the protagonist turns his strange visitor into a symbol of his own sorrow and loss. Poe's best poems remain some of the most popular and technically accomplished in the English language.
ISBN: 9780517215128
