Whether Poe was being sincere or melodramatic, this line of thinking was characteristic of his era. You could say the big artistic and intellectual mood of the first half of the nineteenth century was all about experience and imagination. Feelings triumphed over reason, dogma, tradition, religion—basically, over whatever your stodgy dad believed.
Both Poe and his own youthful antihero, George Gordon, Lord Byron (the wildly promiscuous, bisexual, own-half-sister-banging poet), lived out their Romantic values, and then some.#706•
When they weren't swooning, they were grieving. When they weren't grieving, they were swooning (to get over the grief). They understood themselves to contain both man's greatness and his wretchedness, and they were obsessed with obsession, love, youth, nature, fate, loss, despair, death, and such weird, floating states as might lie beyond death.#704•
"All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance," as Dr. Johnson once said. That is, the lack of precedent will create the drama. So long as your experiences leave you feeling doomed, depressed, bereft, haunted, and hopeless, then you're on your way.#709•