The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings

And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the Soul of the Plot

The lines from ‘Ligeia’ epitomize the familiar Poe, the arch-priest of Gothic horror, author of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. That Poe, unquestioned master of ‘the Grotesque and Arabesque’, is fully represented here, but the volume also includes generous selections from his poetry and critical writings. Together they amount to a portrait Rf a complex personality, that of a conscious aesthete, the most exotic of American writers, who was at the same time keenly engaged in an astonishihg variety of interests. Nor are the ‘Grotesque’ tales the simple manipulations of terror that they seem; David Galloway’s introduction reveals their author as a profoundly serious writer, whose investigations of extreme states of consciousness have a particular relevance for our time.

Originally published under the title Selected Writings

Table of Contents
Introduction
Note on the Text
1. POEMS
Stanzas
Sonnet — To Science
A1 Aaraaf
Romance
To Helen
Israfel
The City in the Sea
The Sleeper
Lenore
The valley of Unrest
The Raven
Ulalume
For Annie
A Valentine
Annabel Lee
The Bells
Eldorado
2. TALES
Manuscript Found in a Bottle
Ligeia
The Man that was Used Up
The Fall of the House of Usher
William Wilson
The Man of the Crowd
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
A Descent into the Maelström
Eleonora
The Oval Portrait
The Masque of the Red Death
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Gold-Bug
The Black Cat
Purloined Letter
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The Cask of Amontillado
Hop-Frog
3. ESSAYS AND REVIEWS
Letter to
Georgia Scenes
The Drake—Halleck Review (excerpts)
Watkins Tottie
The Philosophy of Furniture
Wyandotté
Music
Time and Space
Twice-Told Tales
The American Drama (excerpts)
Hazlitt
The Philosophy of Composition
Song-Writing
On Imagination
The Veil of the Soul
The Poetic Principle (excerpts)
Notes