I can't remember exactly what Edgar Allen Poe once said regarding genious person. It started with - "Peple call me mad but who can say ......". I will be vewry much pleased if some one complete the sentance.

Aloke

-- Anonymous, May 14, 2002

Answers

It sounds suspiciously like the protest of the murderer in "The Tell-Tale Heart" which is easy to find, though not what you had in mind.

-- Anonymous, May 14, 2002

"Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect." --Edgar Allan Poe

-- Anonymous, July 19, 2002

Mr Wilson is quite right with the quotation. It comes from the opening paragraph of Poe's tale "Eleonora" published in "The Gift" for 1842 (issued in fall of 1841). Note that the "I" of this romantic sketch is, as always, not Poe himself, but a fictional narrator created by Poe, here perhaps to convey some of his own reflections about love, death, beauty, intellect, nature &c. Note, too, that he prolonged the same quoted matter in his "Marginalia" (the item LXXXIII in the classic "Griswold"-1850 corpus) given to the Southern Literary Messenger for June, 1849, some four months before his death. Surely an attractive point for all those who like to guess autobiographical hints amid Poe's various writings... Yours sincerely, Raven's Shade (Belgium).

-- Anonymous, July 20, 2002

Sorry, but yesterday I forgot to mention another important text Poe gave about the same subject in the first part of his "Fifty Suggestions" (item XXIII, published in "Graham's Magazine" for May, 1849). Yours, Raven's Shade (Belgium).

-- Anonymous, July 21, 2002