Poe for Pennies

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

Eldorado. The ultimate state of being. The land of perfection. When I feel the need to search for Eldorado I read The Bells or Annabelle Lee or The Raven. Some of Poe's poems are as close to perfection as I've ever seen.

Poe has an inate sense of rhythm and flow. His stories feel like poetry and his poems sound like music. Every syllable, each word, the phrases all join together in a celebration of sound and language. The lines have natural ebbs and flows, breakpoints and sections that go on so long you have to struggle to breathe.

Poe's vocabulary was amazing, and he could be trusted to choose the most lyrical, most flowing words possible to convey his intended message. Read The Bells out loud and you will hear yourself almost singing a capella.* Try it now with the first verse:

Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Even with his extended vocabulary Poe is accessible to everyone. Now with the Dover Thrift Classic The Raven and Other Favorite Poems everyone can afford to own a copy of his works. For one dollar or less you can own your own copy of 41 of Poe's best poems. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

Granted, the volume isn't a leather bound hardcover book nor does it contain pages and pages of commentary about Poe and his works. But it is a relatively attractive softcover book. It has a dark blue front cover with rows of black ravens that immediately makes me think of Poe when I look at it and a rather nice large typeface within for easy reading. It's well worth the very cheap asking price.

The book is 64 pages and contains an alphabetical listing of poems included as well as an alphabetical list of their first lines and these poems:

To --
Dreams
Spirits of the Dead
Evening Star
A Dream within a Dream
Stanzas
A Dream
The Happiest Day - The Happiest Hour
The Lake To -
Sonnet - To Science
Romance
To -
To the River-
To -
Fairy-Land
To Helen
Israfel
The City in the Sea
The Sleeper
Lenore
The Valley of Unrest
The Coliseum
To One in Paradise
To F -
Sonnet - to Zante
The Haunted Palace
Sonnet - Silence
The Conquerer Worm
Dream-Land
The Raven
Eulalie - A Song
To M.L.S. -
Ulalume
To - -
To Helen
Eldorado
For Annie
To My Mother
Annabel Lee
The Bells
Alone
__________

* Phil Ochs felt so strongly that The Bells was a song on paper that he actually set it to music and recorded the song, retaining all of Poe's original remarkable words as well as their cadence and flow.