Critical Reception
When Poe wrote to Washington Irving asking for a word of endorsement, he specifically requested a response to "William Wilson", calling it "my best effort". Irving responded, "It is managed in a highly picturesque Style and the Singular and Mysterious interest is well sustained throughout". Thomas Mann said of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Double: A Petersburg Poem, which explores a similar doppelgänger theme, "by no means improved on Edgar Allan Poe's 'William Wilson,' a tale that deals with the same old romantic motif in a way far more profound on the moral side and more successfully resolving the critical in the poetic".
Read more about this topic: William Wilson (short Story)
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards—material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the Garden of Eden.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)