Poe quotes

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquidsand Imight even be said to possess a mind.I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me† When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imaginationindeed, everything and anything except me.

- RalphWaldo Ellison
  Invisible Man, prologue.

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

-James Russell Lowell
  'A Fable for Critics'.

Where do you get your taste in authorsThat damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear.) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and O'Neill Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I've three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.

- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
^41  Tyrone. Long Day's Journey Into Night, act 4 (published 1956).

'Poe,' I said,'was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry.

-James Grover Thurber
  Alarms and Diversions,'The Moribundant Life, or, Grow Old Along withWhom?'.