Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring — From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone — And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —

It is a happiness to wonder; — it is a happiness to dream.

Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.

Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting — “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.

Not hear it? — yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long — long — long — many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it — yet I dared not — oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! — I dared not — I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb!

"THOU wast all that to me, love,
For which my soul did pine:
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope, that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
"On! on!" — but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast.

For, alas! alas! with me
The light of Life is o'er!
No more — no more — no more — (Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,
Or the stricken eagle soar.

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy gray eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams — In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams."

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!

Shadows of Shadows passing... It is now 1831... and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless.

I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams — In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams!

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

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.