The NBCC at 35 & Edgar Allan Poe

It's the thirty-fifth anniversary of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization that arose out of the conviction that book reviewers are the right people to decide book prizes just as sportswriters are the right people to choose the winners of the Most Valuable Player and Cy Young awards in major league baseball.
Click here for the recollections of one former board member and here for Allen Barra's recent post on the NBCC site concerning the reputation of Edgar Allan Poe, and what sense to make of the disparity in judgment on the quality of his work. On the one hand, many critics have held Poe in low esteem, condescending to him as a "jingle man" (Emerson) with an "immature" mind (Eliot). On the other hand, Poe has wielded a tremendous influence on everything from detective fiction and tales of terror to French symbolist poetry. Mallarme credited Poe with having "clarified the dialect of the tribe." Indeed, for many writers he has been indispensable.
Barra writes:
<<For the first 75 years after his death, he [Poe] was lionized by Europeans
who couldn’t understand why we couldn’t understand him as well as they
did. Tennyson thought him to be “the most original genius that America
has produced.” Nietzsche, Kafka, Yeats, and Joyce all claimed to draw
inspiration from him, and, as we all know, the French, most famously
Baudelaire, regarded him as the greatest American export till Jerry
Lewis. >>
Mindful of Poe's energizing effect on baudelaire and Mallarme, Harold Bloom mischievously asserts that Poe's "atrociously written" poems and stories "benefit from translation, even into English." This is a witty put-down, and Barra tentatively seconds the motion, though he manfully makes the case for Poe's importance to the development of Flannery O'Connor, "the ultimate writer in the Southern gothic tradition."
The debate about Poe's greatness will not soon die. For every derogation of Poe, you can find an unlikely champion, and I would recommend the poets Richard Wilbur and Daniel Hoffman as excellent guides to the terrain. It is true that detective novelists are working within the bounds of a genre, but unlike Barra I do not think that this observation minimizes Poe's accomplishment. He wrote the first detective story and it came with all or most of the trimmings that later authors exploited: the locked room, the eccentric detective who outwits the police, the sleuth's partner who tells the tale, the least likely suspect, the wrongly accused bystander, and so forth. When you consider the identity of the culprit in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," you realize that instinct or genius has guided Poe to propose a Darwinian solution to the riddle of the Sphinx — more than fifteen years before "The Origin of Species." Barra asks: "Can a serious case really be made for Poe by claiming that H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King found inspiration in his work?" To which I would simply add such names as Borges and Nabokov, and urge readers to decide for themselves by reading "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Tell-tale Heart," and "Annabel Lee."
— DL