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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
One of the last poems Poe completed, the poem reflects the audacities and the ironies of “The Conqueror Worm.” Set to a riveting and compelling galloping rhythm, the poem delights the ear with its clever wordplay and its subtle weave of sounds, the joy it displays in the sheer fun of recitation. It is all-too-easy to get caught up in the carefully crafted sounds of each line. Yet, like “The Conqueror Worm,” Poe uses such gaudy and happy wordplay to explore a progressively darker vision of how a person ages, the relentless movement from childhood to mortality, each of our signal live-moments set to the giddy irrepressible “tintinnabulation” of the “bells, bells, bells.”
“Dejection: An Ode” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802)
Written by one of Britain’s iconic dark Romantics, the poem paved the way for fledgling poets of Poe’s era to explore our darkest and more forbidding thoughts. The world here is the familiar wordscape of Poe himself, a forbidding and empty expanse where joy is ironic and thoughts center inevitably on the gloomy, the morbid, and the grotesque, Poe’s signature “midnight of the soul” (a phrase Poe borrowed from this poem).
By Edgar Allan Poe
A Dream Within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe
Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe
Berenice
Edgar Allan Poe
Hop-Frog
Edgar Allan Poe
Ligeia
Edgar Allan Poe
Tamerlane
Edgar Allan Poe
The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe
The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
The Gold Bug
Edgar Allan Poe
The Haunted Palace
Edgar Allan Poe
The Imp of the Perverse
Edgar Allan Poe
The Lake
Edgar Allan Poe
The Man of the Crowd
Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Edgar Allan Poe
The Oval Portrait
Edgar Allan Poe
The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe