Gathers Poe's essays on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, the role of the critic, leading nineteenth-century writers, and the New York literary world.

Explore the transcendent world of unity and ultimate beauty in Edgar Allan Poe’s verse in this complete poetry collection. Although best known for his short stories, Edgar Allan Poe was by nature and choice a poet. From his exquisite lyric “To Helen,” to his immortal masterpieces, “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” and “The Raven,” Poe stands beside the celebrated English romantic poets Shelley, Byron, and Keats, and his haunting, sensuous poetic vision profoundly influenced the Victorian giants Swinburne, Tennyson, and Rossetti. Today his dark side speaks eloquently to contemporary readers in poems such as “The Haunted Palace” and “The Conqueror Worm,” with their powerful images of madness and the macabre. But even at the end of his life, Poe reached out to his art for comfort and courage, giving us in “Eldorado” a talisman to hold during our darkest moments—a timeless gift from a great American writer. Includes an Introduction by Jay Parini and an Afterword by April Bernard

The American poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) has suffered as many posthumous buffets and reversals in his reputation as he did in his life. Even before Baudelaire translated his stories and Mallarme his poems, he was revered in France, while in Britain and even in America his work came to seem haunted, weird, its merits subsumed in the gothic drama of a life drunk (in every sense) to the lees, and early over. Many readers know his poems by heart but are wary of confessing an enthusiasm for lines so sonorous and unfashionable. This edition includes all Poe's poetry and three of his most influential essays. C.H. Sisson in his introduction makes measured claims for an original and challenging writer, siding with Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarme and Valery in singling out the unlikely and powerful qualities in Poe's language, qualities inherent in his subject-matter and realised in his verse. 'There is, ' Sisson declares, 'a small handful of Poe's poems which are of clarity and luminosity which make most of the poetry of the nineteenth century look muddy.' His poetry, 'enjoyable but not explicable', attempts 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'.