In today's Tulsa World we have a review of new short biography of Edgar Allan Poe, whose bicentennial is this year -- a milestone that got a bit lost amidst all the fuss over his fellow birthday boys, Lincoln and Darwin.
But Poe is someone worth celebrating. Maybe not for his life, which as Peter Ackroyd's slim volume emphasizes was about as close to a 40-year waking nightmare as might be imagined (and made all the more distressing to the observer for being a self-induced nightmare -- Eddie Poe was not the most amiable of fellows), but certainly for the many marvelous stories and poems he produced in his "Life Cut Short."
Such as this one:
A Dream Within A Dream
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You 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.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
