About the Author

American · 1809–1849

He was one of the first great American horror writers. His dark poems and tales of terror are still widely read today.

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About This Edition

This edition of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart. Project Gutenberg houses over 70,000 freely available e-books whose copyrights have expired in the United States, and every text has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions.

On Libreya, the text has been carefully formatted for comfortable reading on any screen — with consistent chapter navigation, adjustable font sizes, and four reading themes: light, sepia, dark, and night mode. Your reading position is saved automatically when you sign in, so you can pick up exactly where you left off across any device. The original text has not been altered in any way; what you read here is the same work as it appeared in its original published form.

About Classic Poetry

Poetry is the oldest literary form, and the great poems of the Western and world traditions have never lost their capacity to move, surprise, and illuminate. Classical epic poetry — Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost — works on a vast scale, telling stories of gods, heroes, and the fate of civilizations across thousands of lines of sustained verse. Lyric poetry — from the ancient Greek anthology to the English Romantic poets and Walt Whitman — operates at the opposite scale, capturing a single moment of feeling or perception with crystalline precision and extraordinary economy. Reading poetry in the public domain means access to the full sweep of this tradition: ancient verse, Renaissance sonnets, Romantic odes, Victorian narrative poems, and the earliest modernist experiments that transformed what poetry could be. Poetry rewards slow reading and re-reading in a way that few other forms match. Each reading of a great poem can reveal something that was not visible before.