Annotated translations of passages in French, Latin, Greek or other foreign languages, along with Poe’s own notes The Pit and the Pendulum Along with the seventy-three short stories, essays and a novel, he wrote forty-nine poems which were often fuelled with his alcoholism and difficulty in finding a female partner. His poem Annabel Lee may have been inspired by four different women he was with during that period. His most famous poem is the brilliant Raven “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting Poe is a weirdo writer and I am all over weirdos, specially brilliant ones. His poetic gothic writing is so hunting and beautiful, the way he describes things and people is just amazing, although he has this thing where he loves to challenge the readers not to use a dictionary pretty often, but you'd never hate him for that because his words are all sentimental and idealistic and somehow you will feel smart reading them.. Never Bet the Devil Your Head": 3 - read 1/1/2022. Oscar Wilde definitely followed this philosophy, as evident by "Dorian Gray": "provided the morals of an author are pure, personally, it signifies nothing what are the morals of his books."

It is reported that Poe's mood swings and grandiose opinion of himself could render him insufferable to others. In life, he seems more like the dinner guest that you hope is placed at the far end of the table so that you may hear his comments, but not become his target. The Masque of the Red Death is no story about plot or characters. It's a story about atmosphere, about mood, about the symbolisms of colorful descriptions. That's what Poe was able to write perfectly, and that's what I can recommend this story for. O scriere etică, cu un caracter de basm (din care lipseşte însă intervenţia supranaturalului), a cărei morală este aceea că n-are nicio relevanţă dacă eşti rege sau "ultimul om de pe pământ". Cu toţii, de la împărat până la plebeu, trebuie să respectăm anumite norme de conduită, norme care ne-au făcut din animale oameni şi, dacă le neglijăm, tindem să regresăm. Căci tribunalul, călăuzindu-se după principiile generale privitoare la dovezi, principii recunoscute şi legiferate, este departe de a se lasă influenţat de cazurile mai deosebite." When divorced from his single-minded prosody, Poe's mastery of the language elegantly serves the needs of mood, characterization, and action. This is not always the case: his Ligeia retains his poetic narrowness, but his detective stories have a gentleness and wit found nowhere else in his oeuvre.

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He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.” This short story is a marvel. It appears confusing and contradictory, but if you stop and consider who is actually speaking then its true nature is revealed. Admittedly, on my first read I was a little lost, though after a second read I began to see it for what it was. This is not as approachable as some of Poe’s other works, and it really isn’t an advisable starting point for the author. But, the short story is wonderful, truly wonderful. It highlights the working of the mind in a state of sheer depravity; it is disturbing and brilliant. The Raven is a macabre poem depicting a man driven to excruciating loneliness and grief from being unable to let go of the memories of his dead lover Lenore. It's a tragic tale full of death and sorrow, a tale of how one's unwillingness to let go of dark memories and past tragedies will only push them to the edge of insanity.

In “The Balloon-Hoax”, a hoax is achieved by describing a voyage in “the minutest particulars”. Once again, credibility and credulity are both achieved by particularity and detail. 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…” The stolen letter has been concealed, but all logicał attempts to locate it have failed. Dupin comes to the conclusion that, “to conceal the letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.” The Mystery of Marie Roget": 1 - read 1/22/2022. Based on the real murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in NYC in 18141. DNF. Found it boring, lots of tell don't show. I don't enjoy police procedurals/detective stories that much.

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Another aspect of Poe is the unreliable narrator, and it was Cask that I had a teacher use to teach this technique. Fun fact, the term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth, and while Poe isn’t the first to use the technique he certainly perfected it and without a term for it yet I like to imagine people in 1846 reading Cask and after some pondering proclaiming ‘wait a gosh darn minute, that rat bastard was trying to pull one over on me, too!” Because you gotta shout your epiphanies. Okay, "the tales part", well... The Fall of House of Usher is my favorite; I could relate a lot to how the narrator feels toward this creepy, gloomy dark house, which makes me wonder if the House of Usher is not a mere house, but maybe a state of being, like some sort of heavy weight pressing down one's chest. From the very start of the story, the narrator describes the way he feels as well as the things he observes while approaching the house, Poe uses such poetic, complex, deep words to describe this. Take a look; The story satirises both science and knowledge, poking fun at Egyptology on the way. The prevailing attitude of the time was that in the Western world humanity had reached the height of civilization and knowledge due to scientific and industrial revolutions. The mummy is able to prove them mistaken at every point, and that his society's inventions were far from being inferior, and frequently superior. The only progress which is unquestionable seems to be the invention of cough drops. A nice touch is that the mummy of the title is called "Allamistakeo".

The Tell-Tale Heart": 4 - read 9/18/2021. Love the Spongebob adaptation of this with the squeaky boots. Poe's original is good too. I'm not sure how screwed up Mr. Poe really was as I have read that a lot of the criticisms of him were exaggerated. But screwed up or not the man could write. Fears and tears all are here for the reader. Cred că e prima opera prin excelenţă romantică ce aparţine lui Poe pe care eu o citesc. Personaje excepţionale, hipersensibile, în situaţii excepţionale. Condiţia artistului şi moartea pentru causa prima: iubirea!The Masque of the Red Death - a wonderfully written allegory about life and death, and no matter how rich you may be or what you have in the world, you can't avoid death The final episode describes a murder which then reveals itself as a reflection in a mirror, saying, "In me didst thou exist - and in my death, see how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." Poe sent a copy of this story to Washington Irving, so the ending may well be an homage to a specific story of Irving's, in which the main character kills his double with his sword, only to see his own face behind the mask. In “The Imp of the Perverse”, the narrator murders a friend, only to be plagued by the temptation to confess his crime. The spirit of the perverse condemns us to do what we should not, even if it threatens our own safety. 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. On the other hand, Poe adds that “by undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.”

E sumbru, e aproape strigător la cer cât de mult te poate influenţa o operă. Aceste proze scurte, aceste scrieri ale groazei şi ale grotescului nu-mi trezesc interesul direct într-un mod deosebit, dat fiind că relaţia mea cu supranaturalul e una şubredă, însă citirea lor inundă sufletul cititorului cu melancolie neagră. ochii celor mulţi nu pare profund decât acela care le înfăţişează lucruri în contradicţie acută cu părerea tuturor."Ceea ce am remarcat la Poe, în toate scrierile în care naratorul înfăptuieşte o crimă, e dorinţa lui de a tăia cadavrul în bucăţi şi a-l îngropa sub podea sau în perete. Griswold then convinced Poe’s mother-in-law to sign over the rights to all of Poe’s work to him and published a collected works along with a biography of Poe that was full of outright lies. He invented stories that depicted Poe as a drunkard that preyed on women for sodomy and finacial ruin amonst numerous outlandish claims of immorality and insanity, which was then bolstered by publishing Poe’s personal letters filled with fictional insertions of his own design. People were like wow this scary stories guy was a dangerous loon and overtime this was said less in disgust and more in comical appreciation, because people seem to love the idea that the artists behind inventive art are drug addled and unhinged. So the joke was on Griswold because practically nobody knows who he is and his plans to defame Poe actually solidified him as an iconic household name. am blestemat cu blestemul tăcerii apa şi nuferii, şi vântul şi codrul, şi cerul şi trăsnetul, şi suspinele nuferilor. Nişte pagini care, pe lângă faptul că m-au făcut să uit cu desăvârşire de "realitate", au trezit în mine spiritul de detectiv. O chestiune interesantă: deşi am fost extrem de atent astfel încât să pot anticipa crima şi făptaşul ei, am rămas buimăcit la aflarea verdictului dat de narator.