埃德加•爱伦•坡在恐怖题材方面的天赋——他在发现隐藏在事物核心的怪异感方面的天才——是如此不同寻常，以至于他对波德莱尔和法国象征主义、弗洛伊德分析，以及侦探小说和好莱坞电影都产生了重大影响。他关于与奇妙、神秘和可怕的事物相遇的有心理深度的故事——与艾默生和惠特曼等作假的乐观主义形成鲜明对比——代表了十九世纪美国鉴赏力的另外和黑暗的一面。

Edgar Allan Poe's gift for the macabre-his genius in finding the strangeness lurking at the heart of things-was so extraordinary that he exerted a major influence on Baudelaire and French symbolism, on Freudian analysis, and also on the detective novel and the Hollywood movie. His psychologically profound stories of encounters with the marvelous, the uncanny, and the dreadful represent-in contrast to the optimism of writers like Emerson and Whitman-the other, darker side of the nineteenth-century American sensibility.