Poe thought of himself as fundamentally a poet, even though he felt that economic pressures had prevented him from devoting himself fully to what "under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice." In his poems can be found the most distilled expression of that quest for supernal realities that he took as his aesthetic credo. Richard Wilbur has collected here the whole canon of Poe's mature poetry, along with a selection of prose writings that illuminate his poetic goals.