His genius was peculiar, and not, as he himself thought, various.  He remarks in one of his letters: 

“There is one particular in which I have had wrong done me, and it may not be indecorous in me to call your attention to it.  The last selection of my tales was made from about seventy by one of our great little cliquists and claquers, Wiley Putnam’s reader, Duyckinck.  He has what he thinks a taste for ratiocination, and has accordingly made up the book mostly of analytic stories.  But this is not representing my mind in its various phases—­it is not giving me fair play.  In writing these tales one by one, at long intervals.  I have kept the book unity always in mind—­that is, each has been composed with reference to its effect as part of a whole.  In this view, one of my chief aims has been the widest diversity of subject, thought, and especially tone and manner of handling.  Were all my tales now before me in a large volume, and as the composition of another, the merit which would principally arrest my attention would be their wide diversity and variety.  You will be surprised to hear me say that, (omitting one or two of my first efforts,) I do not consider any one of my stories better than another.  There is a vast variety of kinds, and, in degree of value, these kinds vary-but each tale is equally good of its kind.  The loftiest kind is that of the highest imagination—­and for this reason only ‘Ligeia’ may be called my best tale.”

But it seems to me that this selection of his tales was altogether judicious.  Had it been submitted to me I might indeed have changed it in one or two instances, but I should not have replaced any tale by one of a different tone.  One of the qualities upon which Poe prides himself was his humor, and he has left us a large number of compositions in this department, but except a few paragraphs in his “Marginalia,” scarcely anything which it would not have been injurious to his reputation to republish.  His realm was on the shadowy confines of human experience, among the abodes of crime, gloom, and horror, and there he delighted to surround himself with images of beauty and of terror, to raise his solemn palaces and towers and spires in a night upon which should rise no sun.  His minuteness of detail, refinement of reasoning, and propriety and power of language—­the perfect keeping (to borrow a phrase from another domain of art) and apparent good faith with which he managed the evocation and exhibition of his strange and spectral and revolting creations—­gave him an astonishing mastery over his readers, so that his books were closed as one would lay aside the nightmare or the spells of opium.  The analytical subtlety evinced in his works has frequently been overestimated, as I have before observed, because it has not been sufficiently considered that his mysteries were composed with the express design of being dissolved.  When Poe attempted the illustration of the profounder operations of the mind, as displayed in written reason or in real action, he frequently failed entirely.