ELDORADO Gaily bedight A gallant knight In sunshine and in shadow Had journeyed long Singing a song In search of Eldorado But he grew old This knight so bold And o’er his heart a shadow Fell as he found No spot of ground That looked like Eldorado And as his strength Failed him at length He met a pilgrim shadow Shadow said he Where can it be This land of Eldorado Over the Mountains Of the Moon Down the Valley of the Shadow Ride boldly ride The shade replied If you seek for Eldorado From The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe
FOREWORD FOREWORD The man who wrote tales of horror unrivaled in American fiction faced extraordinary demons often of his own making A member of the so-called American Gothic move ment Edgar Allan Poe 1809 49 has been described alternately as visionary melan choly and unhinged Even by his own account he became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity Most famous for his tales of darkness and murder Poe wrote much-heralded essays that drew their inspiration from French poets whom he admired and who admired him In his more popular works he delivered what the masses wanted tales of mystery and the macabre He created the detective story genre And his poems such as Annabel Lee and especially The Raven instantly appealed to many Over time Poe’s fevered brain rendered his stories darker still Driven to succeed he raced along and fell off the knife edge of remembrance and forgetting neither of which afforded him inner peace All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream he wrote Many of Poe’s characters bedeviled by extreme anxiety seem to parallel his own exis tence Like the tormented painter Vincent van Gogh Poe was and still is considered to be a romantic artist whose life was synonymous with personal misfortune Despite a creative genius whose expression some in polite society dismissed as rank self-promotion Poe was something of a rock star of his generation popular naughty and doomed After his death intellectuals could not agree on Poe’s reputation A few of the epithets thrown at him were provincial Henry James vulgar W B Yeats and the jingle man Ralph Waldo Emerson Yet T S Eliot thought him highly gifted It is difficult to name another writer of his or any age who wore so many masks Like his life Poe’s death even today confounds his biographers His last words report edly were Lord help my poor soul Was it drink drugs heart disease rabies or suicide that stopped his genius at forty Or was he simply a victim of melancholy No one can say for certain I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat Poe once said He got his wish J Patrick Lewis United States Children’s Poet Laureate 2011 13 5
