It's the end of an era.I've had this book on my currently-reading shelf since October 25, 2008. I've been "currently reading" this book longer than two of my children have existed.I have some rules when it comes to goodreads - if I don't finish a book, I don't review it. I often see one-star reviews that say, "Uggg... I couldn't make it through the first paragraph." I think that means the reviewer is giving the first paragraph one star... not the entire book.If I stop reading a book, I take it off my "currently reading" shelf - unless I've read a lot of it... or a good chunk. Then I want to give myself credit for reading it. I want to be able to go back and look at what I've read and be able to claim it. So, Poems by Edgar Allen Poe fell into my goodreads no-mans-land.I had to put the book down, because I signed on to read poetry - not thoughts on poetry. Not rules about how to write poetry. Not "The Rationale of Verse." It was essentially 40 pages of sentences like this one:"It may be urged, however that our prosodist's intention was to speak of the English metres alone and that, by omitting all mention of the spondee and pyrrhic, he has virtually avowed their exclusion from our rhythms....With lots of Latin and Greek mixed in. With all sorts of phonetic symbols for the letters. Honestly, I couldn't tell you the difference between an à, á, â, ã, ä, å, or æ... Does that make me a horrible person? It certainly made the last third of the book boring for me to read.Poe obviously knows his stuff when it comes to rhyme, meter, syllable length, feet, etc... Annabel Lee may be the best example of internal rhyme in the English language. And who hasn't tried to memorize portions of The Raven? Or the whole thing? But I was expecting them all to be grand-slams. And they weren't - at least not for me. So, I was disappointed with the poetry overall before I got to his essays at the end.
