As is apparent in Whitman’s description, Poe’s advocates praised in him what they most admired in themselves. The result was a mythic figure, created in their own image with little concern for historical accuracy. Poe was not a cosmic outcast. His demons were decidedly commonplace—a lack of drawing-room skills and a tendency to tipple. Had he been truly profligate we might enjoy him more. Nor was he, for all his negativity, really a social reformer. Hardly critical of the bourgeoisie, Poe venerated middle-class values. His odd household was not an act of cultural defiance but a measure of how greatly he longed for domesticity, and how little he knew about achieving it.

Later generations of admirers turned from mythic biography back to the works themselves without entirely resisting the temptation to project themselves onto Poe. In response to his preoccupation with extreme mental states, psychoanalytic readers used him to detail the labyrinthine splendours of the mind. Princess Marie Bonaparte and other students of Freud combed the tales for insights into the unconscious. Though stunning demonstrations of the range of dream symbolism, these readings were hard pressed to discover repression in the confessions of Poe’s all-too-talkative narrators. Seeking out a shadow plot of sexual misdoing hidden beneath the tales’ obvious gothicism, psychoanalytic critics recast the tales as explorations into, virtually creations of, a diseased mind. Even those readings that did not confuse Poe with his unhinged narrators had difficulty explaining why the author was so fixated on a single state of mind. Reducing Poe’s extravagances to by-products of mental illness, these early psychologists made the narratives as predictably middle-class as their author.

The recent reinterpretation of psychoanalysis in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of the linguistic structure of the mental has taken Poe’s work as one of its major testing-grounds. In his ‘seminar’ on ‘The Purloined Letter’, maverick psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used the story’s unread letter as a model for the ways in which meaning circulates in the mind and in society. Subsequently, aestheti-cians such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Stanley Cavell explicated semiological implications not only in the deductions of the detective fiction but also in the horror of ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. In their intellectual rigour and respect for Poe’s creations, these theoretical readings made it once again safe for grownups to think about Poe without feeling guilty.

Linguistic theory brought about a rebirth of scholarly interest in Poe. Yet even these post-modern critics explored his fiction to illustrate analytic paradigms derived from elsewhere. In over-praising Poe’s prescience, theorists called attention to how much he left for later generations to articulate. Although anticipating modern trends, Poe is hardly modern. ‘The Bells’ is not ‘Le Bateau ivre’, nor ratiocination, deconstruction; and any reader who goes to him looking for Mallarmé or Derrida is bound to be disappointed. The inability of such dazzling analyses to make Poe respectable suggests that perhaps we are trying to defend him in the wrong way. No author wishes to be a precursor—a literary way station on the road to somewhere else. Each aspires to be the word itself. And until we can respect Poe without regard for what his progeny have made of him, we will not be able to appreciate him at all.

Respect for Poe must begin with his ideas. Although his characters are forever burying themselves in ‘volumes of forgotten lore’, modern readers have trouble imagining Poe himself as an intellectual. Yet in fact Poe’s uniqueness rests more with his thought than with his craft. Despite Baudelaire’s assertion that he was a pure aesthete, an early proponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, Poe’s technical skills were uneven. His language in both the poetry and the prose could be swift and evocative; it could also be ungrammatical, overwrought, relentless. His supposedly innovative use of the outré and the perverse was unremarkable, roughly comparable to that in other Gothic fictions of the period.