The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange duality. We find this trait in his temper, in his mind, in his art. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems to point to the coexistence in him of two persons. With those he loved and who saw him in repose, he was gentle, affectionate, obliging and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism or who happened to meet him in moments of excitement, found him irritable, arrogant, self-centred, sombre, rebellious, and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle and conscience. Was it, in the latter case, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares, or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes, of from appalling graveyard hallucinations, that ominously loomed through die gentler Poe's unstable being? If we consider the mind of Poe, the duality is still more strik ing. On one side he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitiveness to the beauty, purity and lovingness of woman, asso ciated with the contemplation of her amid the sweetest objects of nature or in the glory of ethereal radiance, inspired him with his most touching lyrics ("To Helen," "The Sleeper," "Eulalie," "To One in Paradise"), and with the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in "Ligeia" and "Eleonora." His imagination carried him away from the earth and the material world into the angels' a welling-plate ("Israfel"), into fairyland or dreamland, or into the empyrean, where souls dwell in immortality, where Monos and Una, Eiros and Charmion, Oinos and Agathos hold discourses on the secrets of life and death, and whither the prophet of "Eureka" takes his flight to meditate on ultimate causes.
This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his life. More generally, either in his verse ("Valley of Unrest," "Lenore," "The Raven," "For Annie," "Ulalume") or in his prose-tales, his familiar mode of evasion from the universe of common experience was through converse with death-in-life or life-in-death, and through haunting thoughts, impulses, or fears that seem to belong to an eerie world of horrible dreams, lurking in his abnormal subliminal consciousness. From these materials he drew the startling effects of his "tales of death" ("House of Usher," "Red Death," "Valdemar," "Premature Burial," "Oval Portrait," "Shadow"), of his "tales of wickedness and crime" ("Berenice," "Black Cat," "William Wilson," "Imp of the Per verse," "Cask of Amontillado," "Tell-Tale Heart"), of his "tales of survival after dissolution" ("Ligeia," "Morella," "Metzenger stein"), and of his "tales of fatality" ("Assignation," "Man of the Crowd"). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of fearful, mysterious or supernal forces or on to the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver and the flesh to creep ("Pit and the Pendulum"), and his very grotesque in ventions deal with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.
On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute details, which characterizes the realist or the painter of trompe-l'oeil landscapes or familiar scenes. He resorts to this gift of precise, Defoe-like apprehension in the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or con stitute their setting. Closely connected with this accurate scan ning of actual or imagined things, is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his faultless logic and he carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public with his possessing still more of it than he had. Hence the would-be feats of thought-reading, problem-unravelling and cryptography which he attributed to his Legrand and his Dupin. This suggested to him the "analytical tales," which introduced into literature the detective story, and his "tales of pseudo-science." The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry with a supreme sense of rhythm and word-appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and suggestive ness, with the apparent abandon of compelling inspiration; and he would write down a problem of morbid psychology or the out lines of an unrelenting plot in a hard and dry style, with the clear-cut directness of algebraic reasoning. He was capable of throwing massively into a poem or a prose-tale the most impres sive unity of effect, as if urged by a flashing vision or an irresist ible creative impulse; and he would dissect in cold blood that seemingly unanalysable whole and show by precept and rule that it was the result of the most deliberate and artificial technique. In Poe's masterpieces, the double contents of his temper, of his mind and of his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure and movement, the more effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements that give depth and intensity to the total sheen or dismal glow.
Poe's genius was first recognized abroad. None did more to persuade the world, and, in the long run, America, of Poe's great ness than Baudelaire and Mallarme. The one was a romanticist and the other a symbolist; they hailed Poe as the wizard of let ters who had had intimation of immortal truths and the divine faculty of calling up an other-worldly thrill. Even if the present and the future generations are less likely to tremble in awe at Poe's would-be revelations of Elysian or Tartarian lore, they will concur with his "discoverers" in admiring his fecund and startling invention, his exact dosage of artifice and spontaneity, and his supreme artistry.
Poe's works have been edited by J. A. Harrison (1903, con taining biography and letters), and by E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry (1914, with a memoir, biography and criticism).