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While the angels, all pallid and wan,Uprising, unveiling, affirmThat the play is the tragedy, 'Man',And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
Edgar Allan Poe -
The happiest day - the happiest hourMy sear'd and blighted heart hath known,The highest hope of pride and power,I feel hath flown.
Edgar Allan Poe
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As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester - and this is my last jest.
Edgar Allan Poe -
It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.
Edgar Allan Poe -
Helen, thy beauty is to meLike those Nicean barks of yore,That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,The weary, wayworn wanderer boreTo his own native shore.On desperate seas long wont to roam,Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,Thy Naiad airs have brought me homeTo the glory that was GreeceAnd the grandeur that was Rome.
Edgar Allan Poe -
A dark unfathom'd tide Of interminable pride - A mystery, and a dream, Should my early life seem.
Edgar Allan Poe -
While, like a ghastly rapid river,Through the pale doorA hideous throng rush out foreverAnd laugh - but smile no more.
Edgar Allan Poe -
In the greenest of our valleysBy good angels tenanted,Once a fair and stately palace - Radiant palace - reared its head.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.
Edgar Allan Poe -
Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen -; although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature.
Edgar Allan Poe -
There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified - more supremely noble than this very poem - this poem per se - this poem which is a poem and nothing more - this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
Edgar Allan Poe -
That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.
Edgar Allan Poe -
'Doubtless,' said I, 'what it utters is its only stock and store,Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful DisasterFollowed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore.
Edgar Allan Poe -
Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.
Edgar Allan Poe
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For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not - and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.
Edgar Allan Poe -
To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
Edgar Allan Poe -
The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.
Edgar Allan Poe -
Lo! Death has reared himself a throneIn a strange city lying aloneFar down within the dim West,Where the good and the bad and the worst and the bestHave gone to their eternal rest.
Edgar Allan Poe -
There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.
Edgar Allan Poe -
'Over the MountainsOf the Moon,Down the Valley of the Shadow,Ride, boldly ride,'The shade replied, - 'If you seek for Eldorado!'
Edgar Allan Poe
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So blend the turrets and shadows thereThat all seem pendulous in air,While from a proud tower in the townDeath looks gigantically down.
Edgar Allan Poe -
Here once, through an alley Titanic,Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul - Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
Edgar Allan Poe -
The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age, since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader's way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.
Edgar Allan Poe -
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sittingOn the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.
Edgar Allan Poe