Literary Critics

"Qui stultis videri eruditi volunt stulti eruditis videntur."

"Pectus est enim quod disertos facit, et vis mentis."

"Nihil enim rerum ipsa natura voluit magnum effici cito, praeposuitque pulcherrimo cuique operi difficultatem: quae nascendi quoque hanc fecerit legem, ut maiora animalia diutius visceribus parentis continerentur."

"Historia et scribitur ad narrandum non ad probandum."

"Modesto tamen et circumspecto iudicio de tantis viris pronuntiandum est, ne, quod plerisque accidit, damnent quae non intellegunt."

"Quare non ut intellegere possit sed ne omnino possit non intellegere curandum."

"We must bear in mind, indeed, that the attention of the judge is not always so much on the alert as to dispel of itself the obscurity of our language, and to throw the light of his intellect on our darkness, but that he is often distracted by a multiplicity of other thoughts, which will prevent him from understanding us, unless what we say be so clear that its sense will strike his mind as the rays of the sun strike the eyes, even though his attention be not immediately fixed upon it."

"Primum est igitur ut apud nos valeant ea quae valere apud iudicem volumus, adficiamurque antequam adficere conemur."

"Vtrubique autem orator meminisse debebit actione tota quid finxerit, quoniam solent excidere quae falsa sunt: verumque est illud quod vulgo dicitur, mendacem memorem esse oportere."

"Adeo facilius est multa facere quam diu."

"I now feel it impossible to realize the full extent of the misery which I endured."

"I do not know why you or indeed anybody should want to illustrate Poe. ... I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound. The rest of him seems to be vulgar and commonplace."

"Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth."

"It is to save our faces that we've given him [Poe] a crazy reputation, a writer from whose classic accuracies we have not known how else to escape."

"Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete and its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe's verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity towards nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat."

"Poe...was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry."

"Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens."

"There comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge."

"Poe, who was fortunate in little else, was almost without exception fortunate in his foreign interpreters-the rarest good luck to befall poets. That the French acclaimed his genius long before it was recognized by his fellow countrymen-if, indeed, we may say we have ever recognized it—was due as much to Baudelaire's sympathetic and haunting versions of his poems as to the beauty of the originals. Poe's Spanish interpreter and occasional translator, José Asunción Silva, was, no less than Baudelaire, qualified by tragic experience of life as well as by sympathy and surpassing ability to embody in liquid and lingering Castilian the conception of poetry that was to help in altering to some extent the South American picture of the United States as a land where genius could not exist. To some extent only, unfortunately, for whenever a norteamericanófilo-a creature as rare as the name-has cited Poe as an example of what we might rise to artistically, there has always been a chorus ready to shout, with discouraging truthfulness, "Yes, but they let him die in beggarly obscurity!" Poe is much more alive today south of the Rio Grande than in Virginia or New York: more loved, more reverenced, more often read and beyond comparison more often quoted-both as to his poetry and his theory of poetry."

"He was an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded the horror and the warning of his own doom."

"Most literary agents advise young writers to avoid writing short stories. [...] If Edgar Allen Poe were alive today, his agent would constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, "Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this middlelength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap!""

"An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher, the neglect of whose golden utterances stamped his native land with infamy. Nevertheless, Poe was vastly the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius."

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"Edgar Allan Poe, whom I admire enormously, set a model for the American short story which is very tough to break. He is the one who established that the traditional short story has to be like this...The fantastic, as Poe understood it, deals with the subconscious, with the nearness of madness. Our vision is altered, much like what the Surrealists believed, and we see things in a different way. But that doesn't mean they exist this way in the outside world. In magical realism miracles do happen, and our literature takes part in them."

"I started writing when I was mute. I always thought I could write because I loved to read so much. I loved the melody of Poe and I loved Paul Laurence Dunbar. I had memorized so much of Dunbar, Poe, Shakespeare, James Weldon Johnson, Longfellow. When my son was able to be quiet enough to listen, I taught him those poets. A few years ago he gave a reading of his poetry and he started the reading by saying "First, let me recite to you some of the poets my mother raised me on...""

"We see that in Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabelle Lee."...we see that love sometimes suffocates, sometimes smothers in an attempt to keep the beloved."

"Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them."

"The best things in life make you sweaty"

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry!"

"I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth."

"There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble than this very poem — this poem per se — this poem which is a poem and nothing more — this poem written solely for the poem's sake."

"I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms. I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length."

"A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul."

"And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride, In her sepulcher there by the sea — In her tomb by the sounding sea."

"But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we — Of many far wiser than we — And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee"

"I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love — I and my Annabel Lee — With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me."

"It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; — And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me."

"Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom."

"Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul — Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul."

"The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere — The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year."

"The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover."

"Now the object Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose."

"Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem."

"since the interest of an analysis or reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analysed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works was put together."

"And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted — nevermore!"

"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door."

"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil!"

""Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore."

"Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore — Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."