Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Title: The Complete Tales and Poems
Year of publication: 1827-1849
Page count: 1040
Rating: ★★
I first came in touch with Poe’s writing when I was around thirteen and bought a collection of his stories solely because of the title, which translated to something like “fascination for dread“, which was right up my emo alley at the time. I never made it through that one—I remember that I couldn’t fight my way through The Gold Bug, which came right after The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and was also kind of a chore to read back then (it’s still definitely not a favorite, but I did appreciate it a little bit more than when I was a teenager). I read and absolutely adored The Pit and the Pendulum when I was in high school, and wrote an essay about it that got me the best grade in American Lit that anyone managed to get that semester, and I was familiar with his most famous stories.
I’m rating it two stars because overall I was underwhelmed, and the other option would be to not rate it at all—how do you rate someone’s life’s work? You can’t. So I’ll write down my thoughts on the four sections the book is divided in:
POETRY
I don’t read a lot of poetry, so this wasn’t a great way to start off—and his poems are mostly dense, inaccessible and/or highly problematic. After all, in The Philosophy of Composition he famously reasoned “of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy? Death, was the obvious reply. And when is this most melancholy of topics most poetical? When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: 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“. Which is, well, gross, and results in a lot of very emo poems written about/for a lot of different maidens (whether dead or not, I can’t attest to).
I liked The Raven, A Dream Within A Dream, as well as Alone, which I didn’t know before picking this up, so that means I truly enjoyed three out of sixty-three poems, not the best odds. What I thought was odd was that his only (and unfinished) play Politan was included in the poetry section as well, rather than having its own, but it’s not the only odd grouping choice in this edition.
FICTION
Most of the works collected here were short stories, which he is credited with having pioneered/popularized. He is best known for his psychological horror tales, which are by far his most outstanding works. I was let down by a lot of the short stories included, and didn’t find very many new favorites.
The first atypical tale that I came across and enjoyed was The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, which was published in a magazine in 1835 as a hoax, because that’s the kind of asshole that Poe was (it wasn’t the only hoax he published, either, the second one was about the exact same subject matter—could you be a little more original? It retroactively tainted my enjoyment of the first).
He is credited with writing the first detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The same main character recurs in The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter, which were just okay. I’ve never liked the genre, and while I can appreciate it as the pioneering work that it is, those kind of tales are absolutely not my cup of tea.
My favorite is still The Pit and the Pendulum, followed, in no particular order except that of appearance in this book, by these: Berenice, Morella, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Oval Portrait, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, “Thou Art The Man”, The thousand-and-second-tale of Scheherazade, and The Cask of Amontillado. You’ll notice that all of these are tales of psychological horror; I have no use for his satires, fables and parables. I also felt that some of the works included read like essays, and I’m confused as to why they were collected under the fiction chapter, like Some Account of Stonehenge, the Giant’s Dance, Instinct VS. Reason—A Black Cat, The Philosophy of Furniture or Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.
EUREKA: A Prose Poem
As someone who completed scientific studies and has great respect for the scientific process, this is the most painful thing I’ve ever had to read. It is adapted from a lecture he presented, clocks in at nearly 40k words, and describes… well, what Poe thinks the nature of the universe is, without having done any scientific work to reach his conclusions or back them up. He considered it his masterpiece and is quoted to having written to his aunt that he had no further desire to live after finishing it, because he could accomplish nothing more. Frankly, the most infuriating thing about it is that he actually anticipated some scientific discoveries and theories (e.g. the Big Bang). It’s been interpreted in many different ways—some say that he wasn’t serious, another hoax, so-to-speak, others think it was a sign of his declining mental health (he died the next year), but either way, it was received very unfavorably, with friends even cutting ties with him over it, and I hated every single word of it.
THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET
His only finished novel, which I enjoyed until the last third or so—the beginning was just okay, I really liked the section aboard the Grampus, but it went downhill—mostly due to the blatant racism—once they voyage further south after being rescued by the crew of the Jane Guy. It read like two separate narratives, and it would’ve been vastly improved by scrapping the latter.
Overall, reading his complete works kind of killed the love I thought I had for Poe. His psychological horror tales are truly excellent and most of my favorite books wouldn’t exist without him having paved the way… but those stories are few and far between. I’ll stick to those in the future—as for his other works, I have no desire whatsoever to revisit them.
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