The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

Enormously popular and widely admired, Edgar Allan Poe occupies an extraordinary place in American literature. Technically skillful and spiritually haunting, Poe’s body of work poems, tales, a novel, and essays—awakens readers to the darker side of humanity. This Norton Critical Edition includes Poe’s most important writing, introduced, annotated, and edited by leading Poe scholar G. R. Thompson.

“Backgrounds and Contexts” includes fifty-seven judiciously chosen documents that illuminate Poe’s short but prolific career, among them Poe’s reviews, prefaces, and related correspondence as well as thematic pieces dealing with Transcendentalism and alternative Romanticism, psychological science, sensation fiction, and slavery and the South.

Fourteen critical essays address the major themes and genres of Poe’s work. Among the contributors are Richard Wilbur, Grace Farrell, Barton Levi St. Armand, J. Gerald Kennedy, and John T. Irwin. A Selected Bibliography and an Index to Works and First Lines of Poems are also included.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Edgar A. Poe—An American Life (1809-1849)
A Note on Texts and Annotations
The Texts of The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
POEMS
Introduction
Tamerlane
Dreams
Spirits of the Dead
Evening Star
Imitation
Stanzas: In Youth
A Dream
The Happiest Day
The Lake
Sonnet—To Science
Al Aaraaf
Introduction
Fairyland [1]
Fairyland [2]
Alone
To Helen [Stanard]
Israfel
The Sleeper
The Valley of Unrest
The City in the Sea
The Coliseum
Sonnet—Silence
Dream-Land
The Raven
Ulalume—A Ballad
The Bells
To Helen [Whitman]
A Dream Within a Dream
For Annie
Eldorado
Annabel Lee
TALES AND SKETCHES
Introduction
Metzengerstein
Loss of Breath [A Decided Loss]
MS. Found in a Bottle
The Assignation [The Visionary]
Lionizing [Some Passages in the Life of a Lion]
Shadow
Silence
Berenice
King Pest
Ligeia
How to Write a Blackwood Article
A Predicament [The Scythe of Time]
The Man That Was Used Up
The Fall of the House of Usher
William Wilson
The Man in the Crowd
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
A Descent into the Maelström
The Colloquy of Monos and Una
Never Bet the Devil Your Head
The Oval Portrait [Life in Death]
The Masque of the Red Death
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Gold-Bug
The Black Cat
The Premature Burial
The Purloined Letter
Some Words with a Mummy
The Power of Words
The Imp of the Perverse
The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar
The Cask of Amontillado
Hop-Frog
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Selections from Eureka
Backgrounds and Contexts
Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tamerlane and Other Poems
Edgar Allan Poe—To B__________ (July 1836)
Edgar Allan Poe—To Joseph T. and Edwin Buckingham (May 4, 1833)
Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tales of the Folio Club
Edgar Allan Poe—To T. W. Hite (April 30, 1835)
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Theodore Fay, Norman Leslie
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Morris Mattson, Paul Ulric
J. P. Kennedy—To Edgar Allan Poe (February 9. 1836)
Edgar Allan Poe—To J. P. Kennedy (February 11, 1836)
J. K. Paulding—To T. W. White (March 3, 1836)
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Drake & Halleck (April 1836)
Edgar Allan Poe—To Harrison Hall (September 2, 1836)
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Robert M. Bird, Sheppard Lee (September 1836)
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Undine (September 1839)
Edgar Allan Poe—To Philip P. Cooke (September 21, 1839)
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Thomas Moore, Alciphron
Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to Tales of the Groesque and Arabesque
Edgar Allan Poe—Prospectus for Penn Magazine
Edgar Allan Poe—To William E. Burton (June 1, 1840)
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Edward Lytton Bulwer, Night and Morning
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Lambert A. Wilmer, Quacks of Helicon
Edgar Allan Poe—Excordium to Critical Notices
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ballads and Other Poems
Edgar Allan Poe—Two Reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
Edgar Allan Poe—To J. E. Snodgrass (June 4, 1842)
Edgar Allan Poe—To James Russell Lowell (July 2, 1844)
Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to the Marginalia series
James Russell Lowell—Our Contributors . . . Edgar Allan Poe
Anonymous [Edgar Allan Poe]—Review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Thomas Hood, Prose and Verse
Unsigned Review—Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe—Preface to The Raven and Other Poems
Edgar Allan Poe—The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe—To P. P. Cooke (August 9, 1846)
Edgar Allan Poe—Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse
Edgar Allan Poe—The Poetic Principle
Edgar Allan Poe—A Reviewer Reviewed
George Graham—The Later Edgar Poe
Charles Baudelaire—Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works
Walt Whitman—[Edgar Poe’s Significance]
TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ALTERNATIVE ROMANTICISM
Introduction
Frederic Henry Hedge—On Immanuel Kant and German Transcendentalism
Friedrich Schlegel—Fragments from Lyceum, Athenaeum, and Dialogue of Poesie
August Wilhelm Schlegel—The Tragic; The Comic
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter—Humoristic Subjectivity
SCIENCES OF THE MIND
Introduction
Lavater, Gall, and Spurzheim—From Physiognomical System of Dr. Gall and Spurzheim
Orson S. Fowler—From Fowler’s Practical Phrenology
Thomas C. Upham—From Outlines of Imperfection and Disordered Action
POPULAR FICTION: BLACKWOOD’S AND THE SENSATION TALE
Introduction
Anonymous—Extracts from Gosschen’s Diary
Anonymous—The Buried Alive
William Maginn—The Man in the Bell
THE SOUTH AND SLAVERY
Introduction
James E. Heath—Southern Literature
Anonymous—Slavery
Edgar Allan Poe—To Beverley Tucker (May 2, 1836)
J. V. Ridgely—The Authorship of the Paulding-Drayton Review
Edgar Allan Poe—To J. E. Snodgrass (June 17, 1840)
Criticism
Introduction
Floyd Stovall—[Poetry, Imagination, and Cosmos: Poe’s Debt to Coleridge]
Robert C. McLean—[Poetic Theory and Affective Poetry: Poe and George Tucker]
Richard Wilbur—The House of Poe
James W. Gargano—The Question of Poe’s Narrators
Joseph J. Moldenhauer—Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe’s Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision
Paul John Eakin—Poe’s Sense of an Ending
Grace Farrell—The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym
Liahna Klenman Babener—The Shadow’s Shadow: The Motif of the Double in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”
Barton Levi St. Armand—The “Mysteries” of Edgar Poe: The Quest for a Monomyth in Gothic Literature
Joseph N. Riddel—The “Crypt” of Edgar Allan Poe
J. Gerald Kennedy—Phantasms of Death in Poe’s Fiction
John Carlos Rowe—Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism
Terence Whalen—Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary
Nationalism
John T. Irwin—Detective Fiction as High Art: Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson on “The Purloined Letter”
Selected Bibliography