Poe

Where do you get your taste in authorsöThat damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear.) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and O'Neill Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I've three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.

—O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone

'Poe,' I said,'was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry.

—Thurber,James Grover

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

—Lowell,James Russell

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquidsöand Imight even be said to possess a mind.I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me† When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imaginationöindeed, everything and anything except me.

—Ellison, RalphWaldo