‘Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore –
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!’
        Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the poet of the night world, of the inexplicable, the uncanny. His poems do not analyse, they do not explain: they exist with the intensity of hallucinations. In the breathtakingly seductive beauty of ‘To Helen’ – ‘Like those Nicéan barks of yore, / that gently o’er a perfumed sea...’, or the claustrophobic horror of ‘The Raven’, Poe offers haunting alternative realities, as strange – and strangely familiar – as our dreams and nightmares.

Yet Poe was more than a poet of American gothic. He was translated by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, becoming a key figure in French Symbolism; he was an influential critic. This edition contains all Poe’s poetry and his three most important essays. With an introduction by the poet C.H. Sisson, it is an indispensable collection of the work of one of the nineteenth century’s most compelling and original poets.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Poems
To Helen
The Raven
The Vallye of Unrest
Bridal Ballad
The Sleeper
The Coliseum
Lenore
Catholic Hymn
Israfel
Dreamland
Sonnet: To Zante
The City in the Sea
To One in Paradise
Eulalie
T F---s S. O---d
To F---
Sonnet: Silence
The Conqueror Worm
The Haunted Palace
Scenese from Politian

Poems Written in Youth
Sonnet to Science
Al Aaraaf
Tamerlane
A Dream
Romance
Fairyland
To---
To the River---
To Lake. To---
Song

Later Poems
A Dream within a Dream
The Bells
To Helen
A Valentine
An Enigma
To--- ---
To my Mother
Eldorado
To---
To M.L.S---
For Annie
Ulalume
Annabel Lee

Essays on Poetry
The Poetic Principle
The Rationale of Verse
The Philosphy of Composition