Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions)

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The complete tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe is a beautiful collection of stories and poems brought together within this beautiful, gothic book. The narrator addresses the “unwarranted popular feeling of” disbelief by trying to relate the facts, based on contemporaneous notes, “either condensed or copied verbatim”. 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. Poe had a troubled personal life, marked by financial struggles, alcoholism, and the loss of several loved ones, including his wife Virginia, who died of tuberculosis at a young age.

Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe | Goodreads The Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe | Goodreads

Being the most terrifying story I've read so far from Poe, this one can be highly recommended to be read. When divorced from his single-minded prosody, Poe's mastery of the language elegantly serves the needs of mood, characterization, and action. I love the first paragraph; so far it's my favorite opener: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. Despite the cogent rational descriptions, the narrator seems almost to be haunted by his namesake, and is losing his sanity. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.I love “The Philosophy of Composition” (detailing how he came to compose “The Raven”), “Letter to B-,” “Preface to Tamerlane,” and “Preface to The Raven. I didn’t know anything about his writing, except that I expected it to be a kind of guilty pleasure. It is however not nearly as successful as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", possibly because the standpoint taken is that of the narrator seeking to expose the true murderer, so that the element of mystery is missing. A man with many enemies amongst his contemporaries, though beloved in France by authors such as Charles Baudelaire who wrote in his journal that each morning he prayed to God and Poe, Poe lives on as an essential figure of US Literature that still delights and frightens readers today. While I can’t say all of his stories achieve this, you’ll find in the best of them a noble attempt to pull it off, Cask of Amontillado and Fall of the House of Usher being of the most successful.

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes

The stories and poems in this complete anthology probe to the depths of the human psyche and include the infamous – and arguably the first ever – detective story ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’; the disturbing classic, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and the horrifyingly claustrophobic, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" - A novel about a young man's journey to the South Pole and the horrors he encounters along the way.The mirroring is mocked as the pair both howl at one another, Montressor repeating his final words ‘ for the love of God’ back to him.