Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
Edgar Allan PoeYou are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan PoeThy soul shall find itself alone โMid dark thoughts of the gray tombstoneโ Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. Be silent in that solitude, Which is not lonelinessโfor then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around theeโand their will Shall overshadow thee: be still. [...]
Edgar Allan PoeI must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition-I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.
Edgar Allan Poe