Poe has always been an inspiration for me. I love the gothic scenes and strange mixture of misery, glee and gloom in his verses. He has most certainly always been one of my favourite poets.

Love this man!

Really wish I'd just picked up a selection of his terror tales, rather than slogging through this. The first 400 hundred pages are core Poe, and the rest, except for the 100 pages of poetry at the end, are just pablum he cranked out to put food in his belly. The poems, with a few exceptions (the famous ones), were tedious.

One of the books that shaped my childhood.

What the heck did I just read? Okay I knew Poe was a little dark- not all of his stories are some are very imaginative (like taking a hot air balloon to the moon). But quite a few stories go on for several pages (like 100) with NO CONCLUSION! I did enjoy 2/3 detective stories. Several of his short stories went over my head. In a few stories, he wrote using dialects one of them being Irish (I think) but I had a hard time reading it. As he did write in the 1800s some stories don’t age well as they portray minorities negatively. Poe was a smart dude he had knew several language and there are whole quotes in French, Latin, Italian, an others but- he didn’t always translate the quotes to English. I wish he had. He was very much a shock writer the story would go like this: description….description… dialogue…description…big shock reveal. I found most of the endings to be abrupt. I also found most of the stories to be boring. I definitely understand how he led the way for Stephen King. I think I am more likely to watch a movie based on his works than to read them again. Also most of his poems are awful.

My only complaint is that the audio volume is soooo low that I was blasted with sound every time I switched back to the radio. Vincent Price's voice reading some Poe tales that I haven't heard before... that was the best part. I liked the stories better than the poems. Poems do sound good when read aloud, but I think the sense is somewhat lost -- on me anyway -- because the words on the page and my ability to look over them are missing. I know The Raven well enough to really enjoy hearing that, but his other poems I would rather just read. The stories, though, were really well chosen.