'At sixteen I discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe. I happened to read first his biography, and the sadness of his life made a great impression on me. I felt an enormous pity for him, because in spite of his talent he had never been happy.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Hitchcock Print: Book
'When I came home from the office where I worked, I went straight to my room, took out the cheap edition of "Tales Grotesque and Arabesque", and began to read.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Hitchcock Print: Book
'I still remember my feelings when I finished "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". I was afraid, but this fear made me discover something I've never forgotten since: fear, you see, is an emotion people like to feel when they know they are safe.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Hitchcock Print: Book
'When old enough to read for herself, Rose Macaulay entered into other realms of fictitious brave adventure. She devoured Masterman Ready, Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Coral Island, Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Prince and the Page
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Rose Macaulay Print: Book
'Next to Robinson Crusoe, Rider liked the Arabian Nights, The Three Musketeers and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Macaulay. His two favourite novels were Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities and The Coming Race, a fantasy novel by Bulwer Lytton (the uncle of Sir Henry Bulwer, a Norfolk neighbour and friend of Squire Haggard who was to play a decisive part in Rider's life).'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Rider Haggard Print: Book
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin Print: Book
'Tom... introduced me to Poe's "Tales", to my first detective stories and to the early novels of H.G. Wells.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'Sat at home in the evening mourning over my face and lazily reading the improbabilities of Allan Poe, went to bed very early.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Buckley Castieau Print: Book
'Is not this verse pretty?
Thou wast that all [sic] to me, love,
For which my soul did pine --
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'I have made myself so ill with a story of Poe?s − ?King Pest?, by name. I did not sleep last night and I have scarcely been able to eat today.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'This is E. A. Poe:
Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find, among their burning terms of love,
None so devotional as that of "Mother,"
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you-
You who are [italics]more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts.[end italics] [?]'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
Richard Hengist Horne to Edgar Allan Poe, 17 May 1845:
'Miss Barrett has read the "Raven" and says she thinks there is a fine lyrical melody in it. When I tell you that this lady "says" [...] I mean "writes" -- for although I have corresponded with Miss Barrett these 5 or 6 years, I have never seen her to this day.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
Elizabeth Barrett to Thomas Westwood, 6 September 1845:
'I shd. have written long since to you, if but to thank you for Edgar Poe's ballad .. of which [...] [italics]two[end italics] copies were lying by me when yours came, .. one from some anonymous American, & one from the author himself [...] For the ballad [...] I do not exactly know how to make up my mind to a conclusion about it. There is a certain power in it, no doubt, -- but if the writer had been mad .. professedly mad you know .. I shd. have appreciated the power better. It is not the madness of [italics]passion[end italics], I think .. it is as of an intellect dis[t]raught. There is a ludicrousness which tickles me through & through the melancholy. The "Sir or Madam" for instance! -- how do you bear [italics]that[end italics]?'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Print: Newspaper
'The poets John read at Highgate Junior School included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Campbell and Edgar Allan Poe'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: John Betjeman Print: Book
'I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers. They were imitations of anything I happened to be reading at the time: Sir Thomas Brown, de Quincey, Henry Newbolt, the Ballads, Blake, Baroness Orczy, Marlowe, Chums, the Imagists, the Bible, Poe, Keats, Lawrence, Anon., and Shakespeare. A mixed lot as you see, and randomly remembered'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Dylan Thomas Print: Book
'[Conrad]admitted he was a Victorian, and that most of his reading was in nineteenth-
century authors. He had [...] read Poe in French. He was fond of Emerson and
Whitman and had read Fenimore Cooper'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Conrad Print: Book
