Edgar Allan Poe

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.

By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule —

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?

Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.

While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, "Man", And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.

"The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind."

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.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity …

A carpet is the soul of an apartment.

While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh — but smile no more.

This—all this—was in the olden Time long ago.

In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace — Radiant palace — reared its head.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found …

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 …

And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams — In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams.

Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine — A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine, All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine.

Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld! Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night! I feel ye now — I feel ye in your strength.

Come! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung! — An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young — A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell