[From Books and You, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940, pp. 91-92:]

It may be that the writers of the School of Concord have a value to Americans which the foreigner cannot hope to comprehend; he must be content to leave it and pass on. This is not the case with Edgar Allan Poe; indeed he is, I think, more honoured in Europe than in the land of his birth, and in France, for example, his influence is still powerful with his fellow-writers. It may be that his moral character and the unsatisfactory nature of his life have unjustly caused Americans to hold him in less esteem than he deserves. But neither an author’s character nor his life has anything to do with the reader, who is concerned only with his works. Poe wrote the most beautiful poetry that has ever been written in America. It is like some of those great pictures of the Venetians whose sudden loveliness takes your breath away so that, for the moment satisfied by the appeal to your senses, you do not care that they can give you no matter for your fancy to work upon. They have nothing but their beauty to offer, but their beauty is matchless. Poe, furthermore, was an acute critic and his analysis of the art of the short story for long governed the practice of his successors. His tales have never been excelled. I need hardly remind you that in The Gold Bug and the narratives in which Monsieur Dupin figures he invented the detective story which has resulted in the flood of books which we all of us at times are glad to read. The field has been cultivated by a great many writers with variety and success, but in essentials no one has added anything to what he at first attempt accomplished. It may be that his stories of horror and mystery owe something to Hoffmann and Balzac, but they wonderfully achieve the end he set himself, for he was the most self-conscious of artists, and they deserve their renown. He wrote in a turgid style, and he was lavish of romantic accessories; his dialogue was as bombastic as his people were unreal; his range was narrow; but that you have to put up with: what he has to give us is unique. He wrote very little and almost all he wrote can be read with enjoyment.

[From Traveller’s Library, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933, pp. 1513:]

There must be few novelists who have not harboured a secret wish to write a detective story. The rigidity of its conventions makes it an exercise in ingenuity which must tempt a nimble brain. It is a form that has its classics. I believe that the genre was invented by Edgar Allan Poe and I do not know that any writers have surpassed the exercises he made in it. He settled its main lines once for all. I do not think that any of the attempts that have since been made to ignore them have been successful. It was certainly he who discovered the effective use of ratiocination. His detective is the father of all the detectives of fiction and Sherlock Holmes, though by the irony of fate more widely known, owes much more than most people are aware to his illustrious predecessor. But Poe wrote stories and many of his followers have written books. They have elaborated his technique. The space they have had at their command has allowed them to introduce complications and so has enabled them to delay for a longer time the delicious and thrilling moment of discovery. But in essentials they have added little to his wonderful tales.

[From Points of View, Vintage Classics, 2000 [1958], "The Short Story", p. 154:]

No one has stated the canons of the kind of story which I am now discussing with more precision than Edgar Allan Poe. But for its length I would quote in full his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales: it says everything that is to be said on the matter. I will content myself with a short extract:

“A skilful artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be brought out, he then invents such incidents – he then contrives such effects as may best aid him in establishing this pre-conceived effect. If his very initial sentence tends not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed….”