Edgar Allan Poe
1809-1849
American author, poet, editor
and literary critic
[American Romantic Movement]
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Stupidity is a talent for misconception.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
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