Why did Edgar Allan Poe write his stories in a horrible, cruel and cold-blooded way? Did his biographical background affect him?

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Those stories are such a small part of one of America's most enigmatic literary giants. A complicated individual, Poe was characterized by a wide range of incompatible traits; his reputation among his literary peers varied a great deal, too. He was unquestionably a man of culture, yet surprisingly on target in his view of literary reputations, he was possessed of old-fashioned Southern courtesy, but he was notoriously hard to get along with, finicky, and often extreme in his judgments. Walt Whitman is the only major American man of letters who attended a memorial service for Poe in the 1870s. Although he was Poe's virtual opposite, Whitman had a surprising grasp of Poe's genius.

Poe's poems are astonishing in their technical polish and hypnotic cadences, and there is a kind of magic when we listen to them."The Bells" is Poe's most extreme phonic experiment, a poem that maniacally repeats and captures the actual sound of bells. "Eldorado" is one of Poe's briefest, most haunting pieces about man's eternal quest; the goal of which can be whatever we wish—heaven, truth, or beauty. At the same time, we know that Poe's poem of 1849 was specifically addressed to a major social event of his time, the California Gold Rush. "Annabel Lee" is one of Poe's most lovely creations, stirring the minds of subsequent writers such as Nabokov, evoking a tragic past. "The Raven" is, of course, Poe's most famous poem. The piece is an ingenious example of complex rhyme and metric schemes.

Poe's great contribution to literary theory is his conception of Poet as Maker vs. Poet as Seer; in this we see a drastic calling-into-question of Romantic assumptions. "The Philosophy of Composition" or "How I Wrote the Raven" (1846) is the (perhaps spoofing) famous account of Poe's poetic practice. Poe is splendidly technical in his essay; he shows us exactly how and why the refrain and metric scheme of "The Raven" are as they are.

Poe essentially created the detective story; he considers the powers of ratiocination as the opposite pole to pure sensation. This "split" marks much of his thinking. Auguste Dupin, Poe's genial Parisian detective, reigns in Poe's seminal detective stories, "Murders of the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter." The genre has been launched. Ratiocination and scientism characterize Poe's detective fiction, and we see here the desire for a world that is utterly transparent to the highly intelligent detective, a world where "details" become "clues."

Science fiction is also one of Poe's "inventions." A number of his stories involve (bogus) scientific discoveries (trips into space, under the seas) that will be played out more fully in the future: Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, etc.

Although he was a poet, Poe gives us, in some stories, a blueprint for urban sociology. His tale "The Man of the Crowd" sketches an entire theory of crowd mentality, and this piece figures profoundly in the poems and prose of Baudelaire.

Poe's greatest achievement lies in the area of psychological narrative. In writing his remarkable horror stories, Poe touches on nerves that still quiver today. Poe is the man most responsible for today's horror films. Poe is the great writer of the American collective unconscious: reading him entails digging in our own cellars, which is a central activity in a number of his pieces.