The Imp of the Perverse

"The Imp of the Perverse" is a short story by 19th-century American author and critic Edgar Allan Poe. Beginning as an essay, it discusses the narrator's self-destructive impulses, embodied as the symbolic metaphor of The Imp of the Perverse. The narrator describes this spirit as the agent that tempts a person to do things "merely because we feel we should not." The narrator explains at length his...