Edgar Allan Poe — "Grin: — Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but him…"
Grin: — Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but himself. He grins when his daily work is done — when his allotted labors are accomplished — at night in his own closet, and altogether for his own private entertainment. He goes home. He locks his door. He divests himself of his clothes. He puts out his candle. He gets into bed. He places his head upon the pillow. All this done, and your diddler grins.
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American Gothic poet and short-story writer who invented the detective story (Murders in the Rue Morgue) and shaped horror literature.
Closely associated with
Nathaniel Hawthorne (fellow American Gothic) and Charles Baudelaire (his French translator and torch-bearer).
For an intellectual contrast, see
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalist optimist of self-reliance — Poe wrote essays attacking the entire Transcendentalist circle as didactic and intellectually thin — he derisively called them 'Frogpondians' and treated their cheerful mysticism as the literary opposite of his macabre realism.
Details
From 'Diddling Considered as One of The Exact Sciences'