Poe Knows

Book 0: Literary Wit and Wisdom

by Edgar Allan Poe

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

An illustrated wit-and-wisdom-style packaging of quotes and excerpts from the fiction and nonfiction of Edgar Allan Poe, organized by theme and presented in a lighter-than-Poe context.
This book will collect several hundred quotes and aphorisms from Poe’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Quotes will be organized in thematic chapter groupings, and each chapter will be prefaced with several introductory paragraphs that discuss Poe’s preoccupation with their subject matter in a lighter vein. Chapter subjects will include such themes as “Madness,” “Dreams,” “Revenge,” “Mortality,” and “Premature Burial.” Spot illustrations will be distributed through the text.

Release date: July 5, 2022

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 256

Sample

I’ve been a thinking, whether it were best

To take things seriously or all in jest

—“Oh Tempora! Oh Mores!”

Can you believe that Edgar Allan Poe, that master of the macabre and the morose, tossed off lines as flippant as these? The truth is Poe was a master of the bon mot, and all of his works—fiction, poetry, and essays—are laced with witticisms and irresistibly quotable passages. This volume collects more than 200 quotes, aphorisms, and Poesque displays of verbal virtuosity, culled from his fiction, poetry, essays, nonfiction, and letters—just about everything Poe produced. We’ve divided the contents into ten thematic chapters that show the range and diversity of just what Poe was a thinking.

Of course, death and darkness predominate in Poe’s writing—or at the very least in the works best known to most readers. The man had a preoccupation with premature burial that bordered on the morbid—so much so that he wrote a story under that title in which he imagined himself a character who nearly suffers the same fate as the victims of live burial he describes in the tale. Numerous quotes in this compilation suggest that Poe was not a true believer in a firmly fixed boundary between life and death, which is why characters in some of his stories speak or manifest from beyond the grave. Ask him what accentuated the beauty of a woman in a poem, and he would tell you, with a perfectly straight face, her death.

It will surprise many readers of this volume that Poe also had a wicked sense of humor. Who else but someone preoccupied with the dark side would have a character chortle gleefully about how War and Pestilence are actually beneficial to mankind, or say in praise of Purgatory that “a man may go farther and fare worse.” There’s even a trace of the whimsical in the ravings of Poe’s mad characters, who are so convinced of their lucidness that they give away their condition by harping on it giddily.

If the quotes compiled for this volume show anything, it is the scope of Poe’s intellect and the brilliance with which he commented on everything from the character of genius to the complexity of coincidence, the speciousness of spirituality, and the perversity of human nature. It will surely astound you to discover just how much Poe. . .