Quote

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe
Age: 40 †
Born: 1809
Born: January 19
Died: 1849
Died: October 7
Author
Crime Writer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Theorist
Lyricist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Poe
Edgar Poe
E. A. Poe
Must
Held
Excited
Poetry
Compensations
Mankind
Commendation
Passion
Paltry
Purpose
Compensation
Eye
Passions
Cannot
Reverence

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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?
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Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors ... on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.
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Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.
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Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
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You are not wrong who deem That my days have been 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? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
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Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries
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In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.
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Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want.
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Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells, From the bells, bells, bells.
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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
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In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
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To see distinctly the machinery--the wheels and pinions--of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist.
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I have been happy, though in a dream. I have been happy-and I love the theme: Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
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The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow
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Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
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A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
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In the tale proper--where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident--mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel.
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The rain came down upon my head - Unshelter'd. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.
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Were I called on to define, 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.'
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Sensations are the great things, after all. 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.
Edgar Allan Poe