When the Badlands Look Like Poe Sounds
I was watching Ken Burns's The Roosevelts: An Intimate History — Episode 1, "Get Action." Roosevelt was out West after his wife and his mother died on the same day, and the film read a line I had to rewind.
Theodore Roosevelt. Edgar Allan Poe. In the same sentence.
So I went and found the book.
"And when one is in the Bad Lands he feels as if they somehow look just exactly as Poe's tales and poems sound."
— Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1885), p. 12, Chapter I, "Ranching in the Bad Lands"
It's real. It's his. And it's the best one-line review of a landscape I've ever read.
Model photo created with AI. The printed line is real.
"…who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…" Theodore Roosevelt, 1910. Shop the tee →
Where he was when he wrote it
Not South Dakota. Roosevelt's ranches were in the Bad Lands of the Little Missouri, in what's now western North Dakota.
He went there in the 1880s. He ran cattle. He wrote this book about it.
Chapter I opens on the ranch house. Then he gets to the bookshelves.
The bookshelf paragraph
He names the books on hand. Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell. Then Ike Marvel, Burroughs, Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, Sherwood Bonner.
Then the Poe sentence.
That's all he tells us. He doesn't say he read Poe by the fire. He doesn't say he packed him. He just says the land looks the way Poe sounds — and lets you feel it.
What "looks like Poe sounds" means
Think of the Bad Lands. Cut clay buttes. Bands of color. Wind. Nothing moving for miles.
Now think of the opening of "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, September 1839). A "dull, dark, and soundless day." A lone rider. A house with a crack running down its front.
Or "The Raven" (1845). Midnight. One voice. A word repeated until it hollows out.
Strange, lonely, beautiful. A little too quiet. That's the match.
Model photo created with AI. The printed line is real.
"And all I lov'd—I lov'd alone—" Edgar Allan Poe, "Alone." Shop the tee →
Why I love this line
Roosevelt is the "man in the arena." Loud, bold, all action.
And here he is, alone on a ranch, reaching for Poe to explain what he saw.
The tough guy had a dark-romantic streak. He knew it. He wrote it down.
Model photo created with AI. The printed line is real.
"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." Edgar Allan Poe, 1849. Shop the tee →
We check the original
Lines get passed around. Some of them aren't real. (Poe has plenty of fakes — here are the ones we found.)
This one is. It's on page 12 of the 1885 first edition, and the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore lists it on its Bits and Pieces page.
Want more Poe that isn't the bird? Try the best Poe quotes that aren't The Raven. And if you need Roosevelt for someone who won't quit, he's in gifts for someone who won't quit.
For the reader who sees both
Bold and haunted. Roosevelt and Poe. Turns out they fit on the same shelf.
Shop Theodore Roosevelt → · Shop Edgar Allan Poe →
About the Author
Vickie MacFadden founded Quoteiac after years of chasing lines back to their first appearance on the page. She still gets a little thrill when a quote checks out — and when two writers who shouldn’t share a shelf suddenly do. This one started with a Ken Burns rewind and ended in Roosevelt’s 1885 ranch book.
