26 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes on Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe quotes on poetry

5. And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.

8. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

9. Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.

19. In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace - Radiant palace - reared its head.

20. While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh - but smile no more.

29. By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule - From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE - out of TIME.

34. Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

35. The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

42. O God! Can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

43. Thank Heaven! the crisis - The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last - And the fever called 'Living' Is conquered at last.

44. Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells.

49. So blend the turrets and shadows there That all seem pendulous in air, While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down.

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

78. '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.'

79. 'Doubtless,' said I, 'what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore.

80. 'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!'

85. Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul - Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

86. Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom.

87. It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee; - And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

88. I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love - I and my Annabel Lee - With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

89. But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we - Of many far wiser than we - And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

90. In her sepulcher there by the sea - In her tomb by the sounding sea.

91. 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.

92. There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified - more supremely noble than this very poem - this poem per se - this poem which is a poem and nothing more - this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

93. I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

101. There comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge.