The fanlisting for...

Edgar Allan Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head

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"Never Bet the Devil Your Head," often subtitled "A Tale With a Moral," is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1841. The satirical tale pokes fun at the notion that all literature should have a moral and spoofs Transcendentalism.

"Never Bet the Devil Your Head" is a clear attack on Transcendentalism, which the narrator calls a "disease" afflicting Toby Dammit. The narrator, in fact, sends the bill for Dammit's funeral expenses to the Transcendentalists, who refuse to pay because of their disbelief in evil. Despite specific mentions of Transcendentalism and its flagship journal The Dial, Poe denied that he had any specific targets. Elsewhere, he certainly admitted a distaste for Transcendentalists, whom he called "Frogpondians" after the pond on Boston Common. He ridiculed their writings in particular by calling them "metaphor-run," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake." Poe once wrote in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers that he did not dislike Transcendentalists, "only the pretenders and sophists among them."

Source: Wikipedia.org

Poe Society of Baltimore
The Poe Decoder

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