When I post about Poe, there is a distinct lack of excitement. I've been on Notes for days now, asking, "Does anyone out there actually love E.A. Poe?" When I posted about Melville and Twain, I heard back from a lot of people. There was a lot of love.
With Poe, there's not so much love. Lots of people say they bounced off him. Lots of people say they loved a few stories. Lots of people say they dislike him. A few people say they love him, but compared to his level of prominence in pop-culture (there is a football team named after a poem he wrote), this guy's reputation is soft. He's got more name recognition than genuine love.
Okay...just so we’re on the same page: Edgar Allan Poe was a writer in early 19th-century America. He died in 1839, so he lived somewhere in between the 1820s heyday of James Fenimore Cooper and the big pre-war boom in American fiction that happened in the 1850s. When Poe was writing, American fiction was just getting going. There were lots of journals, lots of newspapers, comparatively more novels being published, but...there was also a lot of insecurity about whether there was a truly distinctive American literary sensibility, and, as a practical matter, you still needed a reputation abroad in order to be fully established.
Poe's father, mother and grandmother were actors. His dad abandoned the family when he was a year old, and his mother died shortly thereafter. He was fostered into a wealthy Virginia family, but never formally adopted, and he quarreled quite frequently with his foster father over money and the fact that Poe was generally sort of a scamp. Poe went to military school and briefly served as an officer, before talking his way into a discharge. Then he embarked on a career as a man of letters. In this position, he edited various literary periodicals, where he was a prolific reviewer and literary critic.
Poe was an extremely harsh critic, known during his life as "The Tomahawk Man" because he would chop every book to bits. He hated didacticism in fiction and thought that a story should aim at beauty above all else: I’m sure he would’ve hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin.