Writing in the Georgia Review in 1964, Charles Thomas Samuels provocatively inquired, “How can a bad writer be a major figure? About Edgar Allan Poe, no more important question can be asked.”1 Samuels’s question reflects his—and many critics’—uneasiness at the time with what he describes as the baffling paradox of Poe’s iconic cultural status despite “anything like a critical consensus”2 regarding the meaning and artistic merit of his literary works. To twenty-first-century ears, Samuels’s remarks may simply sound old-fashioned, expressing sentiments similar to T. S. Eliot’s infamous (and later somewhat revised) derisive judgements about Poe’s writing and intellect.3 However, Samuels’s jarring provocation and Eliot’s studied ambivalence both make reference to what might diplomatically be called the twentieth century’s “Poe problem”: the fact that Poe presented “a stumbling block for the judicial critic.”4 While there was no doubt among scholars that Poe’s cultural influence was equal to...
