The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Viking Portable Library)

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Genre: Literary studies: from c 1900 -; Other prose: 19th century; Literature: Classics; Literature - Classics / Criticism; American English; English; USA; Classics; Short Stories (single author); Fiction / Literary;

Average Review: 4 stars

Review: The essential Poe : This volume contains the essential Poe, the stories and poems for which he is most well- known. Like all American schoolchildren I had to read Poe when I was quite young. And I remember how his tales did not provide the kind of pleasure and insight I had found in other literature. "The Gold Bug" confounded me , and "The Tell- Tale Heart" frightened me, and the truth is even in adult years I have never taken much delight in the reading of the fictions of Poe. The horror of real life has always seemed to me more than enough, and I have never particularly enjoyed the mood and tone of Poe's fictions. I must admit too that Poe always seemed to me even when reading him as a child , 'extremely weird' to use a children's word. And ' weird' not simply with the connotation of ' strange' but of 'frighteningly so'. In any case there is a Poe that I have treasured. It might not be in the whole of the poem, but in the rhythmn of 'Nevermore' there did strike a kind of fascinating note. And there are in the poetry of Poe great lines, 'the beauty that was Greece, the glory that was Rome'. And a sadness and a feeling of tragedy in some of the love- poetry. Poe is of course much else to most other readers than to me, and the lovers of mystery stories, and detectives, of fictional conundrums tending toward horror, and of strange obsessions with beauty that dies young, will find more than they ask for in this anthology.