59 Best Quotes By Edgar Allan Poe

Poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his dark and mysterious poems and stories like “The Raven,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In fact, his death at the age of 40 is still a mystery; the cause of his death is still a mystery as well.

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Who Is Edgar Allan Poe?

Short stories, poems, and critical theories by Edgar Allan Poe have made him one of the world’s most important literary figures, establishing an influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction.

He was born on the 19th of January in Boston in the year 1809. Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actress, and David Poe, Jr., an actor born in Baltimore, were Poe’s parents, but he never met them.

The Allans, a successful Richmond, Virginia tobacco merchant couple, took Poe in after he was split up from his siblings William and Rosalie.

He was a prolific poet by the time he was 13, but his headmaster and John Allan, who preferred that Poe follow him in the family business, discouraged him from writing.

Poe reportedly wrote poetry on the backs of some of Allan’s business papers because he preferred poetry to money.

He is widely regarded as the architect of the modern short story, but Poe was also a major proponent of the “art for art’s sake” movement in European literature of the late 19th century.

Before Poe, critics tended to focus on general issues of morality or ideology, whereas Poe focused on the specifics of style and construction that had an impact on a work’s success or failure.

His writer’s work shows a mastery of language and technique, as well as an inventive and imaginative imagination.

Poetry and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe influenced the late 19th-century French Symbolists, who in turn changed the course of modern literature.

Quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

For the most part, Edgar Allan Poe wrote stories of mystery and imagination that used macabre themes, such as premature burial, reanimation of the dead, slow decapitation of the body, and the effects of decomposition.

Poe’s literary pieces were hugely popular and still are. He was a key figure in the development of detective fiction, and many of his stories were forerunners of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales. For their contributions to science fiction, they are also credited.

Poe’s work lends itself to film and television adaptations, particularly in light of the current gothic craze.

Films about the macabre are a lucrative business, and many of them draw inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s bizarre tales.

Furthermore, here are the best Edgar Allan Poe quotes based on his literary pieces and life experience:

Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Art & Literature

It is with literature as with law or empire – an established name is an estate in tenure or a throne in possession.

–Letter to Mr. B

It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

–The Poetic Principle

Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

–The Philosophy of Composition

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.

–Letter to Frederick W. Thomas

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

–Preface, The Raven and Other Poems

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

–The Philosophy of Composition

How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings! -Marginalia

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

–Letter to Mr. B

A poem deserves its title only in as much as it excites, by elevating the soul.

–The Poetic Principle

“There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

–The Premature Burial

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

–The Narrative of Arthur Gordyn Pym

Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Dreams

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

–Eleanora

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

–Marginalia

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

–The Raven

And all my days are trances

And all my nightly dreams

Are where thy grey eye glances

And where thy footstep gleams—

In what ethereal dances

By what eternal streams.

–To One in Paradise

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

–A Dream Within a Dream

Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.

–The Pit and the Pendulum

Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Death

The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. -The Philosophy of Composition

Deep in earth my love is lying

And I must weep alone.

–A couplet

To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!

–The Assignation

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

–The Premature Burial

Come! let the burial rite be read–the funeral song be sung!—An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young—A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

–Lenore

Thank Heaven! the crisis—The danger is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last—And the fever called “Living,” Is conquered at last.

–For Annie

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

–The Premature Burial

Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.

–Attributed, Survival

Edgar Allan Poe Quotes About Love

We loved with a love that was more than love… With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me.

–Annabel Lee

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

–The Black Cat

Because I feel that, in the Heavens above, The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of ‘Mother.

–To My Mother

Yes, I now feel that it was then on that evening of sweet dreams—that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight half of anxiety.

–Letter to Sarah Helen Whitman

The most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy.

–The Spectacles

Love like mine can never be gotten over.

–Letter to Maria Clemm

I was never really insane except upon occasions where my heart was touched.

–Letter to Maria Clemm

And so being young and dipt in folly

I fell in love with melancholy.

–Romance

But we loved with a love that was more than love

I and my Annabel Lee

–Annabel Lee

More Of Edgar Allan Poe’s Quotes

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

Believe nothing you hear and only one half that you see.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
I have great faith in fools – self-confidence my friends will call it.

I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.

Believe nothing you hear and only one half that you see.

From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.

Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Invisible things are the only realities.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.