Wit & Attitude Quote by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s line is a grenade lobbed into the parlor of polite self-regard: an “I” that sounds like admiration, then swivels into indictment. “Great faith” reads like a virtue, the kind you’re supposed to possess in a young republic high on progress and personal destiny. But the object of that faith is “fools,” and the pivot is cruelly elegant. He isn’t praising stupidity; he’s exposing how often certainty is mistaken for wisdom. The punchline - “self-confidence my friends call it” - makes the real target clear: the social habit of laundering arrogance into a compliment.

The subtext is Poe at war with the era’s sunny confidence, a writer who made a career out of showing how thin the floorboards are under the genteel interior. In his fiction and criticism, rationality is forever being upstaged by compulsion, vanity, and the desperate need to appear in control. Here, “friends” isn’t warm; it’s a small, sharp word that implies complicity. People don’t just have self-confidence, they get it affirmed, labeled, made respectable by a chorus that benefits from the performance.

Context matters: Poe lived precariously, watching the American literary marketplace reward bravado, moral posturing, and loud certainty more readily than meticulous craft. The quote functions like a cultural diagnosis: the fool isn’t merely an individual, it’s a type empowered by a crowd that prefers conviction to complexity. Poe’s wit lands because it doesn’t sermonize; it smirks, letting the reader feel the sting of recognition before they can mount a defense.