"The Portable Poe" compiles Poe's greatest writings: tales of fantasy,terror,death,revenge,murder,and mystery,including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the world's first detective story.In addition,this volume offers letters,articles,criticism,visionary poetry,and a selection of random "opinions" on fancy and the imagination,music and poetry,intuition and sundry other topics.

The first new edition of this landmark anthology since 1945,The Partable Edgar Allan Poe presents a more complicated,perverse,and culturally engaged Poe.Once perceived as a writer profoundly detached from time and place,the most otherworldly of early American authors,Poe emerges,through the texts collected and annotated here,as a figure alive to the controversies of American culture but also determined to defy convention,shock his readers,confound his critics,and resist the pressures of literary nationalism through haunting depictions of primal ordeals.Along with Poe's familiar masterworks in poetry and fiction,The Portable Edgar Allan Poe includes a selection of satirical tales and a suggestive sampling of Poe's letters.

Introduction by J.Gerald Kennedy

Chronology

A Note on Texts

TALES

Predicaments

 MS.Found in a Bottle

 A Descent into the Maelstr6m

 The Masque of the Red Death

 The Pit and the Pendulum

 The Premature Burial

 The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar

Bereavements

 The Assignation

 Berenice

 Morella

 Ligeia

 The Fall of the House of Usher

 Eleonora

 The Oval Portrait

Antagonisms

 Metzengerstein

 William Wilson

 The Tell-Tale Heart

 The Black Cat

 The Imp of the Perverse

 The Cask of Amontillado

 Hop-Frog

Mysteries

 The Man of the Crowd

 The Murders in the Rue Morgue

 The Gold-Bug

 The Oblong Box

 A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

 The Purloined Letter

Grotesqueries

 The Man That Was Used Up

 The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

 Some Words with a Mummy

POEMS

The Lake--To

Sonnet--To Science

Fairy-Land

Introduction

"Alone"

To Helen

The Sleeper

Israfel

The Valley of Unrest

The City in the Sea

Lenore

Sonnet--Silence

Dream-Land

The Raven

Ulalume--A Ballad

The Bells

A Dream within a Dream

For Annie

Eldorado

To My Mother

Annabel Lee

LETTERS

CRITICAL PRINCIPLES

On Unity of Effect

On Plot in Narrative

On the Prose Tale

On the Design of Fiction

The Object of Poetry (from "Letter to B--")

"The Philosophy of Composition"

The Effect of Rhyme

"The Poetic Principle" (excerpts)

American Criticism

OBSERVATIONS

Literary Nationalism

"Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House"

American Literary Independence

The Soul and the Self

Imagination and Insight

Poetical Irritability

Genius and Proportionate Intellect

Reason and Government

Adaptation and the Plots of God

Works of Genius

National Literature and Imitation

Language and Thought

Magazine Literature in America

The Name of the Nation

The Unwritable Book

Imagination

Art and the Soul

Superiority and Suffering

Matter,Spirit,and Divine Will

Notes

Selected Bibliography