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Edgar Allan Poe: Essays & Reviews

Edited by G. R. Thompson

“[Poe’s] most thoughtful notices set a level of popular book reviewing that has remained unequalled in America, and that led George Bernard Shaw to call him ‘the greatest journalistic critic of his time.’”— Kenneth Silverman

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson”

Story of the Week Story of the Week: Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle”

Story of the Week Edgar Allan Poe, “Morning on the Wissahiccon”

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This is the most complete one-volume edition of Poe’s essays and reviews ever published. Here are all his major writings on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, and the duties of a critic: “The Rationale of Verse,” “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle,” and “About Critics and Criticism.” Articulating Poe’s passion for technical proficiency and his theory of poetic method, these essays show why he so strongly influenced the French symbolists toward the end of nineteenth century and, through them, the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane.

Included in this collection are Poe’s reviews and candid opinions of the leading literary figures of his day: Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Margaret Fuller, among others. Here also are reviews of long-forgotten writers, reviews that are interesting not so much for their subjects as for Poe’s unflinching and witty candor. Many of his then controversial judgments have been vindicated by time.

Poe particularly relished his prolonged critical war with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard and America’s most respected poet of the nineteenth century, whom he accused of conventionality and plagiarism. The skirmishes in this campaign are represented here in full.

Poe wrote many articles describing the literary world in which he circulated: “The Literati of New York,” the “Editorial Miscellanies” from the Broadway Journal, “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” and his long running series “Marginalia.”

Also included are a wealth of articles on a wide variety of topics: South Sea exploration, cryptography, drama, geography, music, transcendentalism, phrenology, ancient languages, and modern cities.

As a reviewer Poe was direct, discriminating, and feared; as an essayist he was alert to any possibility that in literature there might be found a sense of unity missing from life. This volume restores an essential and often neglected part of our literary heritage.

G. R. Thompson, volume editor, is professor of English at Purdue University. He was editor of Poe Studies from 1968 to 1980 and is the author of Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Edgar Allan Poe: Essays & Reviews is kept in print by a gift from Candace K. and Frederick W. Beinecke to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson”

Story of the Week Story of the Week: Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle”

Story of the Week Edgar Allan Poe, “Morning on the Wissahiccon”

Story of the Week Edgar Allan Poe, “The Angel of the Odd”

News Edgar Allan Poe’s “extraordinary nonsense” inspires an ingenious modern art exhibition
Table of Contents

Theory of Poetry

Reviews of British and Continental Authors

Reviews of American Authors and American Literature

Magazines and Criticism

The Literary and Social Scene

Articles and Marginalia

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ISBN: 978-0-94045019-6 1544 pages

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N° 20 Library of America Series

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