title: Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays: A Library of America College Edition (Library of America College Editions)
author:  Edgar Allan Poe 
description: Read throughout the world, translated by Baudelaire, and admired by writers as different as Dostoevsky and H. G. Wells, <b>Edgar Allan Poe</b> has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer.<br /><br /><b>Patrick Quinn</b>, volume editor, is Professor of English at Wellesley College. He is the author of<i>The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe</i>.<br /><br /><b>G. R. Thompson</b>, volume editor, is professor of English at Purdue University. He was editor of<i>Poe Studies</i>from 1968 to 1980 and is the author of<i>Poes Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales</i>.
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  ## Never Bet the Devil Your Head
  
  
    
  
  
  ### Edgar Allan Poe
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Never Bet the Devil Your Head
  
  
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  _by Edgar Allan Poe_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  "Con tal que las costumbres de un autor," says Don Thomas de las Torres, in
  the preface to his "Amatory Poems" "sean puras y castas, importa muy poco que
  no sean igualmente severas sus obras"—meaning, in plain English, that,
  provided the morals of an author are pure personally, it signifies nothing
  what are the morals of his books. We presume that Don Thomas is now in
  Purgatory for the assertion. It would be a clever thing, too, in the way of
  poetical justice, to keep him there until his "Amatory Poems" get out of
  print, or are laid definitely upon the shelf through lack of readers. Every
  fiction should have a moral; and, what is more to the purpose, the critics
  have discovered that every fiction has. Philip Melanchthon, some time ago,
  wrote a commentary upon the "Batrachomyomachia," and proved that the poet's
  object was to excite