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Edgar Allan Poe (Critical Survey of Poetry)

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Edgar Allan Poe wrote several major essays of literary criticism, in addition to numerous book reviews for magazines. Especially important are his reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, containing Poe’s theory of short fiction, and his reviews of the works of English and American poets, which explain much of his theory of the poetic imagination. Poe’s philosophical speculations are found in his book-length Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848) and in his “Marginalia.” In the former he attempts no less than a complete theory of God and the universe. Although...

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