Reading some classics [Poe]

Shortly before getting my new job, I bought a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, which I've been reading on the tram rides to and from my locus of employment.

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Between the works of his I'd already read (The Raven; The conqueror Worm; The masque of the red death) and the 5 short stories from this book, I could already notice a number of themes and patterns that reverb across Poe's works.

• Men struck in terror before forces beyond their reckoning or means of contending with.
• Men in the grasp of ruinous obsession.
• Metempsychosis/Reincarnation as something haunting, attaching to the survivor of a pair.
• Corrupt nobility, and their fall to strange phenomena reflective of their depravity.
• Women overcoming their own mortality through abominable means.
• Husbands who merely happened into marriage. Wives withering away to some unknown disease.

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Some of the stories feel positively lovecraftian ("MS Found in a Bottle" especially), and it got me to look up whether Lovecraft was inspired in any way by Poe. And wouldn't you know it, he literally said something along the lines of "Poe was the OG, I owe him everything" (wording mine).

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Some of my favorite quotes:

We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity without taking a final plunge into the abyss.

-MS Found in a Bottle

Distinctly, coldly, calmly distinct fell those few simple sounds within my ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain. Years - years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch - never! Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine - but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me, like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only... Morella.

-Morella