Edgar Allen Poe: The Complete Poems

From the beginning of his career, Edgar Allen Poe considered himself first and foremost a poet. In his prose works Poe is best remembered for his tales of psychological horror and suspense, but it is in his poetry that we find the true artist, struggling with the themes that were the most important to him and the closest to his bones. These themes included the loss of childhood innocence, alienation, despair, death, and loss of love. His greatest poems are expressions of one and sometimes several of these themes. Many of his poems, especially "Ulalume - A Ballad," "To Helen," "Annabel Lee," "The City in the Sea," "The Raven," "The Bells," and "The Haunted Palace" are among the most universally admired poems in English. D.H. Lawrence wrote that Poe "was an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded the horror and the warning of his own doom." The Complete Poems is a testament to the strange genius of one of America's most original men of letters.