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All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry!

— Edgar Allan Poe Disputed

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Notes from Wikiquote

According to John A. Joyce's much-criticized biography Edgar Allen Poe (1901), this was said by Poe to William Barton. Google Books link

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More quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

The Premature Burial (1844)

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

The Raven (1844)

Years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute.

A dark unfathom'd tide
Of interminable pride —
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Eleonora (1841)

All Edgar Allan Poe quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edgar Allan Poe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.