“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
— Letter to George Eveleth (1848)
From a personal letter written during one of Poe's darkest periods. The inversion — sanity as the horror, madness as the relief — is characteristically Poe.
Author Quotes
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre.
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
— A Dream Within a Dream (1849)
The final lines of Poe's poem, published the year of his death. A distillation of his lifelong obsession with the boundary between reality and illusion.
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
— The Raven (1845)
From the poem that made Poe famous overnight. The narrator stands at the threshold of the unknown — fear and desire perfectly balanced.
“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
— The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)
Poe's aesthetic manifesto in miniature: language must carry the shock of the real. Mere description fails; the reader must feel the thing described.
“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
— The Philosophy of Composition (1846)
From Poe's essay on writing "The Raven." A notorious statement that reveals both his aesthetic principles and the gender politics of Romantic literature.