The most contradictory judgments have been passed on Edgar Allan Poe’s character and works. The Reverend Ruf us Griswold, whom he had the unfortunate idea of appointing his literary executor, branded him a perverse neurotic, a drunkard and drug addict “who walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses.” For Baudelaire, on the contrary, he was a “fallen angel who remembered heaven,” a “Byron gone astray in a bad world.” Whereas Emerson looked down upon that “jingle man” who shook his bells and called their sound poetry, Tennyson admired him as an equal and Yeats...