Edgar Allen Poe

Pinpointing which Poe stories and poems could appear on the GRE is very hard to do. If Poe appears, an obscure story is just as likely as a well known one. Don't spend an inordinate amount of time familiarizing yourself with Poe's works if you don't already know it. It is worht noting that Poe was a strong admirer of Shelley, and D.H. Lawrence was fond of Poe.

From wikipedia:

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short story writer, editor and critic and one of the leaders of the American Romantics. He is best known for his tales of the macabre and his poems, as well as being one of the early practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of Gothic fiction in the United States. Poe died at the age of 40, the cause of his death a final mystery. His exact burial location is also a source of controversy.

"The Murders on the Rue Morgue"

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story from 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe. It features the brilliant deductions of Auguste Dupin and is one of the first detective stories (“The Purloined Letter” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” also feature Dupin). "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is almost certainly the first locked room mystery (a story in which the reader is presented with a puzzle and encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution).

The detective Auguste Dupin investigates a series of baffling murders, whose victims are brutally killed in apparently inaccessible rooms along the rue Morgue, a street in Paris. Dupin reaches the astounding conclusion that killings were not murder per se but were carried out by a wild "Ourang-Outang," (orangutan) the escaped pet of a sailor.

"Annabel Lee

Annabel Lee is the last poem composed by American author Edgar Allan Poe. Written in 1849, it was not published until shortly after Poe's death that same year, appearing in two newspapers.

Like Poe's most famous poem, The Raven, it tells of a man mourning a dead lover. It is unclear whether the Annabel Lee character referred to a real person. Some say it was written for his wife, some for a lover, and others that it was the product of Poe's gloomy imagination.

Annabel Lee is six stanzas, three with six lines and three with eight, with the rhyme pattern differing slightly in each one.

The poem begins as if from a storyteller's point of view, where Edgar Allan Poe begins to explain the couple's love, which dates from their growing up together.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee-

Annabel Lee dies because "the angels" envied the couple's great love.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me -
Yes! - that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

However, unlike The Raven, in which the narrator believes he will "nevermore" be reunited with his love, Annabel Lee says the two will be together again:

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee