Whatever mysteries may still surround his life and character, there is no doubt of his enormous importance to American literature in several different areas. His best poems--"To Helen," "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and others--which many can recite by heart, demonstrate him to be a master of rhythmic effect. His stories, particularly his tales of horror and terror, are equally treasured by an immense readership. Yet despite his popular association with the gothic and the grotesque, Poe was also an accomplished humorist, as shown in a number of his short stories, and was capable of hilarious satire at the expense of inferior writers. For all his interest in lurid effects and morbid states of mind, he was also fascinated by ratiocination: in his three tales featuring Auguste Dupin, he singlehandedly invented the genre of the detective story. And more than anyone else in early nineteenth-century America, he played a crucial role in shaping and elevating literary taste and in developing aesthetic theory, particularly in the field of poetry. Thus, both with critics and scholars and with the general public, Poe remains a permanent fixture of our living literary culture. 

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