Historical Reviews
“He is, perhaps, the most original writer that ever existed in America. Delighting in the wild and visionary, his mind penetrates the inmost recesses of the human soul, creating vast and magnificent dreams, eloquent fancies and terrible mysteries.”
– George Lippard, 1843
“Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius. No man could ever tell us precisely what it is, and yet there is none who is not inevitably aware of its presence and its power.”
– James Russell Lowell, 1845
“The writings of Mr Poe are a refreshment. . . . His narrative proceeds with vigor, his colours are applied with discrimination, and where the effects are fantastic they are not unmeaningly so.”
– Margaret Fuller, 1845
“You might call him ‘The Leader of the Cult of the Unusual’.”
– Jules Verne, 1864
“An enormously talented writer.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1873
“Through many a year his fame has grown,—
Like midnight, vast, like starlight sweet,—
Till now his genius fills a throne,
And nations marvel at his feet.”
– William Winter, dedication of the Poe Memorial in Baltimore, 1875
“Hunger was ever at his door, and he had too imperious a desire for what we call nowadays the sensational in literature.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, 1875
“Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demonic undertone behind every page — and, by final judgement, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.”
– Walt Whitman, 1882
“This marvelous lord of rhythmic expression.”
– Oscar Wilde, 1886
“The human mind became, in his estimation, a treasure-house of undreamed-of possibilities, which was but the poet’s version of the value of the individual.”
– The Atlantic Monthly, 1896
“Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1909
“Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries produced only beauty.”
– George Bernard Shaw, 1909
“Was ever any story-teller so versatile as Poe within his chosen field, so generally perfect in execution? Was any other nineteenth century writer so prepotent, so fertile in suggestion, so dominant over those who came after him?”
– The New York Times, W. H. Babcock, 1909
“The directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in either America or England.”
– T. S. Eliot, 1919
“Poe is hardly an artist. He is rather a supreme scientist.”
– D. H. Lawrence, 1919
“By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story.”
– Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories, 1926
“Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beaconlights in the province of the short story. . . . Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.”
– H. P. Lovecraft, 1927
“It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.”
– Alfred Hitchcock, 1960
“His portraits of abnormal or self-destructive states contributed much to Dostoyevsky, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his tales of the future lead to H. G. Wells, his adventure stories to Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson.”
– W. H. Auden, 1966
