Poe, Edgar Allan

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49),
American poet and story-writer. Comments on Shakespeare occur in ‘Letter to B—’, from the preface to Poems (1831) and in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), where he contrasts the ‘hideous and unwieldy’ spirit of Samuel Johnson with the ‘airy and fairy-like’ creations of the ‘immortal Shakespeare!’

Tom Matheson