SOURCE: Lawler, James. “Daemons of the Intellect: The Symbolists and Poe.” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 1 (autumn 1987): 95-110.

In the following essay, Lawler examines the critical assessment of Poe by the French symbolists Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry.

For Baudelaire he was “one of the greatest of literary heroes,” for Mallarmé “the spiritual Prince of this age,” for Valéry an “achieved mind”: the Symbolists that stand at the beginning, middle, and end of a lineage were constant in their fidelity to Poe.¹ They encountered half-secretly, each in turn, a stranger to the canon and found in him the key to their own works, for he served Baudelaire against Hugo, Mallarmé against Baudelaire, Valéry against Mallarmé. Distinct from the native conventions, he provoked less violence or anxiety than the intimate ferment of self-recognition.

Poe's influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many occasions, though not in detail. The...