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Title	:	The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Author	:	Edgar Allan Poe
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 1024 pages
Published	:	September 1st 2004 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 1849)
Categories	:	Classics. Poetry. Fiction. Horror. Short Stories. Gothic. Writing. Essays

The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Paperback | Pages: 1024 pages

Rating: 4.3 | 1547 Users | 20 Reviews

Interpretation Toward Books The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

The poetry and stories of Edgar Allan Poe deal in grotesque murders, the dead returning to life, appalling revenges that go unpunished, shipwrecks and supernatural phenomena. On another level, they deal with the effects of alcohol and drug addiction, hyper-sensitivity, obsessiveness, isolation and insanity. Perhaps it is this dual quality that explains their appeal. While Poe’s writing was horrific by the standards of the nineteenth-century, it has been far surpassed by the graphic and gruesome horror literature of our own age. There are only a few specific lines in Poe’s works that are specifically gory or unpleasant. The rest of it is atmosphere. We cannot look to explain Poe’s appeal by considering them as explicit horror stories then. If that is how you like your horror, then you may not enjoy Poe. Perhaps a more accurate explanation is that Poe’s works are sensationalist in the fullest sense of the word. They appeal to our senses and sensations. Whether poetry or prose, the works spend more time on atmosphere and mood than they spend on storyline. This has been a problem for anyone who wishes to adapt a work by Poe into a movie. There is scarcely enough material in any poem or short story by Poe to fill a half-hour TV drama, let alone a feature length film. Poe’s works are evocative, building up feelings in the reader whilst offering them only the bare bones of a story. That story is certainly creepy, and we remember its outcome, but the reader who examines the story again will perhaps be astounded to find how little substance there is in the plot. Most of Poe’s efforts go into the style of the story. Notably the best movie version of Poe works are those which preserve an unreal and dream-like quality, spinning out images as if from the unconscious mind. Even that most populist of moviemakers Roger Corman designed his Poe cycle of films in this way. I can’t speak for others, but this is the reason for Poe’s appeal to me. His prose is painstakingly written, with much effort going into the description. Like H P Lovecraft or Ray Bradbury (two writers who owe Poe a huge debt), he writes for the love of writing itself more than love of the story. This may lead to excesses and over-written passages, but even this is better than shoddy or hastily-scribbled works. There is also the uncertain quality of what we are reading. Does Ligeia really come back to life, or is this the addled brain of the opium addict? How much of The Tell-Tale Heart or The Black Cat should be trusted, given the unreliability of the insane narrators? Did the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum really see these instruments of torment, or was his solitude playing tricks on his mind? Reality is uncertain, and so is everything else. Morality is uncertain. The avengers of Hop-Frog and A Cask of Amontillado go unpunished. In Ligeia, a live woman is replaced by a dead woman. The hinterland between life and death is uncertain in tales such as Ligeia, Eleonora and The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar. Even the more rational tales have an element of something macabre or anti-intellectual in them. Poe’s detective Dupin was the earliest example of an amateur private detective, and his works greatly influenced detective fiction to come. The Murders in the Rue Morgue is the first instance of a murder committed in a locked room, an idea that frequently occurs in mysteries. Arthur Conan Doyle used in his novel, The Sign of Four. Conan Doyle also drew on the idea of a fake crisis to distract someone in order to locate a hidden document in his story, A Scandal in Bohemia. This idea first occurs in Poe’s story, The Purloined Letter. Nonetheless the stories do not exist in a certain world. The crimes in Rue Morgue are unusually ghastly, and the explanation is hardly saner. In The Purloined Letter, Dupin positively rejects mathematical rationality in favour of a more poetic sensitivity. The Gold-Bug also contains a detective element in it, but for a while the sanity of the investigator is questioned by those around him. Some of the stories strain towards an allegorical interpretation. The most obvious example is The Masque of the Red Death. As the locals die from a mysterious unpleasant disease, Prince Prospero and his courtiers seal themselves into an abbey and celebrate hysterically until the Red Death somehow gets into their sanctuary and they all perish. Could it be a metaphor for death, or the foolishness of a ruling class that fails to address the disease of poverty that is killing their subjects? The Fall of the House of Usher also approaches allegory. The house falls in a double sense. The entire family dies out, and the house itself collapses, as guilt, sickness, necrophilia and incest lurk beneath the surface. Is the House a symbol of Usher himself, his death bringing down his entire house? Is this about a sick hereditary class that will die away? Poe would probably reject such specific interpretations, as he did not favour didactic literature. The stories exist in themselves as works of art, nothing more. Still we cannot help drawing some of these conclusions from the stories, even if they are only imperfectly there. The poetry is a little less to my taste, but there is a rhythmic intensity to The Raven and Annabel Lee that elevates them and makes them memorable to me. I will be honest and say that I did not read the essays in this volume, and cannot comment on them. Still what is foremost here is the power and intensity of Poe’s work. His mind may be neurotic and gloomy, obsessed with dark and unpleasant images, but perhaps somewhere lurking in the unconscious mind there is something about that which can be found in us all, and Poe’s stories tap into this.

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ISBN:	0393972852 (ISBN13: 9780393972856)
Edition Language:	English

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Ratings: 4.3 From 1547 Users | 20 Reviews

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Not all Poe produced was gold, but there are soms real gems in his oeuvre. For me especially "The Pit and the Pendulum" and the realism of the "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" excelled. That last, longer story is really hallucinating, very detailed, pseudo realistic, enhanced by scientific-sounding descriptions. And that written even before the middle of the 19th century!

Full disclosure, I only read the poem "Evening Star" and the following short stories: The Fall of the House of Usher, The pit and the Pendulum, William Wilson, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar, and Hop-Frog. Norton Anthologies are always solid in my opinion. They don't bog you down with literary criticism, and instead they only help you out when there is a phrase, word, or reference that would be unclear to modern readers. Poe's stories are really fun to read. They took

I absolutely love Poe's works! For a while I had some of his poems framed up on my walls. My favourite has got to be Annabel Lee. I enjoyed each of his tales as well, laced with so much cleverness and humour as well as the dark themes that he's known for! I own several different collections of his that I picked up before finding a complete collection!

That's a weird puppy that Poe. I wondered when I was assigned Poe in school what they were thinking giving this stuff to kids. Great writing I guess. Horror never quite was my thing or suspense either, but you've got to hand it to him. He has quite a following.

It's amazing how much one likes all these stories are after you're out of school and grown.

I'm reading one story or poem a day...this is not a book you sit down and read cover to cover. Masque of the Red Death yesterday....still as good as I remember it.

I've read many different Poe stories and poems over the years. I have this collection, but I didn't actually read these stories out of the collection. From this collection I have read:To HelenThe RavenAnnabell LeeThe BellsFall of the House of UsherThe Red Masque of DeathThe Tell Tale HeartThe Cask of Amontillado