Reviews - The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

605 reviews for:

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

4.34 AVERAGE

rienkat's review against another edition

3.25

dark emotional informative mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: N/A

Strong character development: N/A

Loveable characters: N/A

Diverse cast of characters: N/A

Flaws of characters a main focus: N/A

paovnss's review against another edition

4.0

Me encantaron.

idratherbereading542's review against another edition

4.0

*Note: This rating/review is based on a partial read of only some of the stories in this anthology. If/when I read the others I will revise my rating/review accordingly.

The Tell-Tale Heart was one of the first Edgar Allen Poe stories I read and I did so in high school for an English class. I remember being surprised that I actually liked something that they were making me read in high school. From there I read a few of his other works but recently acquired this gorgeous anthology and I'm going to try to go through them all over time (no rush lol).

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POEMS:

Alone: (3.5 stars)
Read November 13, 2013
This poem kind of confuses me. I get that the first half of it is about him feeling different and "weird" compared to everyone else. Everything he loves other people don't and things other people love he doesn't like. But the second half of the poem simply feels unfinished to me. I read it several times and even outloud a few times and I still don't get it. Is he possessed maybe? If you have any insight please feel free to comment! But yeah, a little confusing for me even though it read beautifully.

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The Raven: (4 stars)
Read November 13, 2013
This was another Poe that I read in high school and loved. I'll admit to one embarrassing thing about myself: I wrote really bad poetry in high school. I was one of those kids. lol I mean, I won't even show it to anyone, I don't even know if I kept my poetry book or if I threw it out because it was mostly about ex-boyfriends. Don't know. But, I remember appreciating this one because I had a heart for poetry then. Now, I still love poetry but really don't read it as much.

Anyways, back to The Raven. I'm no pro at interpretation but I personally belive that the raven represents the writer's grief at the loss of his Lenore. "Nevermore" will he be the same without her, "Nevermore" will he stop thinking about her, "Nevermore" will he cease wondering where she is now and if he'll ever see her again. "Nevermore" will he ever be without his grief (the raven). I could be totally wrong, but that's just what it means to me. I love this poem. So beautiful in sound, word, and meaning.

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For Annie: (3 stars)
Read November 13, 2013
A poem about a man who is sick but hanging on to life for his beloved Annie. She is what keeps him going, what keeps him strong, and what keeps him feeling alive. Even though it's about being sick, it's also about him getting better because of his love of Annie pulling him through.

This is probably the most positive poem or work I've read by Poe. I haven't read everything, mind you, which is why I'm reading this anthology (out of order btw). But everything I have read has been about death and dying and murder (which is what Poe tends to do best). This one is about hope and that's kind of rare within Poe's portfolio (at least from what I've read so far). So that's a good thing. But, because of that it also lacks that certain *something* that Poe's darker works end up having. I know, I'm so morbid to like the depressing stuff more. But hey, it is what it is. This is still good though and I think it would be inspiring to someone who is sick and trying to get better

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Annabel Lee: (4 stars)
Read November 13, 2013
Perfectly formed as it is I instantly remembered this poem from when I read it as a teen as soon as I started it. It's one of those kinds of poems that the words just stick with you because it reads so lyrically.

As for the poem itself it's pretty sad and morbid. The writer loses his love and has a woe-is-me kind of outlook on life. After she dies he either sleeps next to her corpse each night (if you take the poem literally) or he kills himself to be with her. Knowing Poe's works are most definitely not always literal, I personally believe he killed himself to be with her. Although written beautifully it's a pretty melodramatic choice: kids, don't do this at home. :)

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STORIES:

The Masque of the Red Death: (4 stars)
Read November 13, 2013
Although I've read this one in high school much of it was forgotten for me. I remembered something about a party and the rooms, and I even read a loosely re-told YA book based on this short story, but still I had forgotten most of it. So as I read this I had mostly the emotions and feelings of someone reading it for the first time.

I think I read somewhere that this was about the plague in Europe. Not sure. But I think more than that it also is about no one being out of reach of death. This party was for the most elite of the elite in their society who were rich and powerful enough to separate themselves from those who the Red Death had already taken a hold of. But death barges into their over-the-top party and kills them all. To me, that represents death not caring if your rich or poor or young or old. It's one of the few things in life that is inevitable no matter who you are. Depressing, but true.

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The Tell-Tale Heart: (4 stars)
Read November 13, 2013
The Tell-Tale Heart is a story about a perfectly well-planned murder by a completely insane woman who fancies herself completely sane. Perhaps the fact that she feels some guilt in the form of hearing her dead husband's beating heart is a testament to her not being completely mad. Although I don't know for sure if I feel like she has any remorse so much as fear of being caught. Sometimes waiting for bad things to happen can be worse than the actual thing you're dreading (in this case her dreading being caught for murdering her husband).

I loved this story as a teen and still do now. If only she could've just gotten a divorce, huh? Makes you appreciate those who just do that rather than killing each other. lol

purple_pages's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark mysterious reflective sad tense

spenkevich's review against another edition

5.0

‘Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.’

I simply cannot let the Halloween season pass without at least once pulling down the tales of Edgar Allan Poe to cozy myself into the unsettling words of the gothic master. A man that became much like a mythological figure in his own right, Poe is best known for his tales of horror and poems like The Raven that have embedded themselves into the public consciousness as classics of spooky storytelling, though he also wrote tales of early science-fiction and practically invented the mold of the detective story with his character Dupin. His stories are feasts of tone that grab you by heart and shake you around. A man with many enemies amongst his contemporaries, though beloved in France by authors such as [a:Charles Baudelaire|13847|Charles Baudelaire|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1652257436p2/13847.jpg] who wrote in his journal that each morning he prayed to God and Poe, Poe lives on as an essential figure of US Literature that still delights and frightens readers today.

I’ve always been particularly charmed by how the cruel intentions of his enemies to sully his name after Poe’s death essentially helped secure his notoriety and transform him into something not unlike a legend. ‘Poe is one of the writers who make us who we are,’ [a:E.L. Doctorow|12584|E.L. Doctorow|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387414707p2/12584.jpg] wrote about Poe’s legacy on US literature, though for a long time stories about the man made him into a mockery to be scorned before people began to see these stories as part of what makes him such a fascinating individual. In fact, much of what we know about Poe today is through the framing of his enemies, which he had many including his own cousin whom he considered the rival for the affections of Virginia Eliza Clemm who later became his wife (and was…uhh…also his cousin) . Most notably is Rufus Wilmot Griswold, with whom Poe had a working relationship and even favorably reviewed Griswold’s anthology, though not favorably enough to Griswold’s tastes. Upon the death of Poe, Griswold published an obituary under the name Ludwig that began:

’Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.’

Griswold then convinced Poe’s mother-in-law to sign over the rights to all of Poe’s work to him and published a collected works along with a biography of Poe that was full of outright lies. He invented stories that depicted Poe as a drunkard that preyed on women for sodomy and finacial ruin amonst numerous outlandish claims of immorality and insanity, which was then bolstered by publishing Poe’s personal letters filled with fictional insertions of his own design. People were like wow this scary stories guy was a dangerous loon and overtime this was said less in disgust and more in comical appreciation, because people seem to love the idea that the artists behind inventive art are drug addled and unhinged. So the joke was on Griswold because practically nobody knows who he is and his plans to defame Poe actually solidified him as an iconic household name.

Speaking of Poe’s death, he was found in poor condition wearing clothes that were not his own and taken to a hospital where he would die a few days later (Oct 7, 1849). In the end, he repeatedly called out the name Reynolds—nobody is certain who that was—and his dying words were ‘Lord help my poor soul.’ All the medical records and his death certificate have been lost, so even in dying Poe has left us one last mystery to keep him in our memories.

“But what about his stories!?”you are probably saying, are those worth being an icon of literature? Depends on who you ask, really. Personally, I think yes. Red Death is an absolute banger of a story, Pit and the Pendulum is white-knuckle intensity, these hold up so well. Not all would agree. [a:Aldous Huxley|3487|Aldous Huxley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1547138835p2/3487.jpg] accused Poe’s style of vulgarity and bad taste, writing in an essay ‘we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this…we notice the solecism and shudder.’ He questioned the French writers, who extolled Poe such as [a:Paul Valéry|141425|Paul Valéry|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1218052145p2/141425.jpg] saying ‘Poe is the only impeccable writer. He is never mistaken.’, wondering if they simply had no ear for English, though literary critic [a:Harold Bloom|236|Harold Bloom|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1212940902p2/236.jpg] has asserted that Poe might actually translate quite well and read as more poetic in translation. Though I find that much of Poe’s charm comes from how nearly overdramatic much of the prose can be, and while admittedly I’m not big on his actual poetry, it often reads like a gimmick that works well. I mean ‘O God! can I not save / One from the pitiless wave? / Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?’ does in fact slap.

There are a few techniques that Poe really works with that help make his stories so unsettling or successful. Poe was a believer in what has been termed Poe’s Single Effect Theory, which is drawn from his review of [a:Nathaniel Hawthorne|7799|Nathaniel Hawthorne|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1291476587p2/7799.jpg]’s [b:Twice-Told Tales|47061|Twice-Told Tales|Nathaniel Hawthorne|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403189952l/47061._SY75_.jpg|1337429]:

‘A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents–he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.’

Basically, all elements of a short story should be cohesive. You’ve probably heard of this in literature courses. While I can’t say all of his stories achieve this, you’ll find in the best of them a noble attempt to pull it off, Cask of Amontillado and Fall of the House of Usher being of the most successful. I mean, look at the opening to Usher: ‘It was a dark and soundless day near the end of the year, and clouds were hanging low in the heavens,’ and this melancholy of grayness and dread permeate every note of the story. In Cask, my personal favorite with it’s incredible opening sentence ‘the thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge,’ we have all the elements right away: injury, insult and vengeance, all of which will be visited upon Fortunado as a reversal, something I’ll speak more on in a moment.

So with Poe, we have tone being so central to his stories. The Masque of the Red Death drives almost on tone alone, details compounding upon details until the big reveal at the end with the falling action literally being everyone falling down super dead. Half the enjoyment is just in the atmosphere though, especially in stories like The Tell-Tale Heart where most of the narrative is insisting that he is not ‘a madman’ and listing all the ways he meticulously plots and executes his murder as a sure sign he is in full control of his faculties. It isn’t convincing, of course, and the irony of it is practically the original “could a depressed person make this?!” meme. Here, let’s revise it:

Anyways, what works so well to make Heart frightening is less the preternatural elements but the absurdity of impetus; like in Cask where it is the vague ‘thousand injuries’ that like, okay, were there really buddy?, in Heart the whole purpose of the crime was because he didn’t like this old guy’s blind eye. A guy he even said is rather lovely. In this eye though, the perceived ugliness might just be an image of himself he finds so threatening. Much like in Black Cat where the aggression is an outward expression of inward hatred (alcoholism in that one). And the truly terrifying idea is not the beating heart but that one might betray themselves in a rapid turn of events that leads the narrator to suddenly betray his own crime to the police. All that careful planning to find an uncontrollable urge that takes you down from within. Scary.

Another aspect of Poe is the unreliable narrator, and it was Cask that I had a teacher use to teach this technique. Fun fact, the term was coined in 1961 by [a:Wayne C. Booth|89419|Wayne C. Booth|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], and while Poe isn’t the first to use the technique he certainly perfected it and without a term for it yet I like to imagine people in 1846 reading Cask and after some pondering proclaiming ‘wait a gosh darn minute, that rat bastard was trying to pull one over on me, too!” Because you gotta shout your epiphanies.

But Cask is another perfect example of a different motif in Poe, the idea of the double or mirrored self. This is best exemplified in William Wilson, a story much loved by [a:Fyodor Dostoevsky|3137322|Fyodor Dostoevsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1629693671p2/3137322.jpg] I am told (he did love a good Double narrative), where in slaying his double who is a physical manifestation of his own conscience, he slays himself. Pretty great stuff, and indicative of how much the degradation of the self is a theme throughout Poe. In Cask we have the reversal of fortunes between the aptly named Fortunato and our narrator, Montressor. I love this story, it starts off playing on Fortunato’s ego and proceeds through a lot of humorous moments of Montressor toying with him giving clues along the way like foreshadowing of the deeds to come. I mean, he literally shows him the tool with which he will wall Fortunato up with claiming to be a Mason and he says his family crest is a heel crushing a snake that is biting the heel. When Fortunato asks his family motto he replies ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’ (no one attacks me with impunity) to which Fortunato responds ‘good!’ This is pure gold, honestly. But the crest is so symbolic of them as a sort of intertwined double, together in injury. While one could say Montressor is the foot stomping out the serpent that bit him, I suggest it is the opposite: the foot as the unwitting beast totally unaware it had stepped upon the serpent until too late when the poisoned fangs have already sunk in. This seems supported in the text as Fortunato seems to only casually know who Montressor is, leading you to question the ‘thousand injuries’ he has supposedly inflicted and if they were an act of malice as Montressor seems to claim or simply collateral damage. The mirroring is mocked as the pair both howl at one another, Montressor repeating his final words ‘for the love of God’ back to him.

I love most how, as in this story, Poe is always addressing you, the reader. In lines such as ‘You, who so well know the nature of my soul,’ he makes us complicit but also implies that we, too, are capable of dark deeds. The monster is already in us, and he is poking it with his stick.

‘I had walled the monster up within the tomb!’

The catacombs in Cask are very much a Gothic trope where mysterious passageways and hidden chambers build unease on the idea of enclosed spaces as the claustrophobia of death closing in around you. Motifs abound, with spooky buildings, sudden death and murder, and lots of disease. Another motif that appears throughout Poe’s work is that of the dead woman in her tomb, which then hints at the idea of unattainable perfection as characters such as the speaker in the poem Annabel Lee long for a love lost to death, perfect in the memory that cannot age like the living, cannot argue against him, cannot spurn him. He even sleeps with her corpse, who can’t say no. It’s super creepy stuff, so much so that [a:Vladimir Nabokov|5152|Vladimir Nabokov|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651442178p2/5152.jpg] does a bit of a retelling of it as the opening in [b:Lolita|7604|Lolita|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377756377l/7604._SY75_.jpg|1268631] for the narrator to explain the way he is. House of Usher has Roderick and Madeline fall into death in one another's arms after she had previously been walled up alive like Fortunato (or the wife’s body in Black Cat along with the screaming cat).

Death is, in fact, the central horror in Poe’s tales of horror. It is the center of the Maelstrom like in the story of that name, one considered an early work of science fiction. Which like, yea, dude wrote more than just horror, with that story being the first of what Poe termed his ‘tales of ratiocination’. Dupin was a precursor to serialized detective stories like Sherlock Holmes and stories like The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ using logic and reasoning to come to a conclusion about a mystery with the detective not solving the crime for job or money but for the desire to solve a puzzle. The third Dupin story, The Purloined Letter is often considered an allegory for literary interpretation and sparked a debate a hundred years after publication between the great Jacques of criticism: [a:Jacques Lacan|42907|Jacques Lacan|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1383807062p2/42907.jpg] and [a:Jacques Derrida|4132|Jacques Derrida|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1449735131p2/4132.jpg]. Lacan’s argument that the contents of the letter don’t actually matter is an idea we see often, such as the suitcase in the movie Pulp Fiction. Lest it go unmentioned, Poe’s one actual novel was a seafaring story. So the guy had a wide range, his horror tales being the ones that have mostly remained in the public conscience.

But I’ve taken far too much of your time now that could have been spent reading some Poe. It is almost Halloween, so either revisit a favorite or try him for the first time. Read it aloud in a Vincent Price voice, or maybe a thick Boston accent (Poe was from Boston, who knows). And of course I’m going to five star this collection. Who am I to scoff “well it wasn’t perfect enough for me’ like I’m adjusting my tie and tweed jacket, and as we’ve learned from Poe being insufficiently favorable can lead to being forever known as a drunk pervert in your own biography, so 5 stars it is.

5/5