Popular but not always respected in his own time, Edgar Poe is significant today not only for the quality of his best work but also for his influence on later writers. His poems were admired, especially in France, where such writers as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry assimilated his technique of symbolism and, in turn, transmitted their own versions of the symbolic mode to a number of writers in English in the twentieth century. Poe's versatility is displayed also in fiction and literary criticism. As a writer of fiction he has attracted many admirers, not only in his own time but also in ours. It is hard to imagine modern detective and fantasy fiction without the example of Poe. Even the most famous of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, owes much to Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, who once solved a crime...