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Home  »  Eleonora The Fall of the House of Usher The Purloined Letter  »  Criticisms and Interpretations. III. By John Mackinnon Robertson

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). Eleonora, The Fall of the House of Usher & The Purloined Letter.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.

Criticisms and Interpretations. III. By John Mackinnon Robertson

AS a tale-teller, then, he is to be summed up as having worked in his special line with the same extraordinary creative energy and intellectual mastery as distinguish his verse; giving us narratives “of imagination all compact,” yet instinct with life in every detail and particle, no matter how strange, how aloof from common things, may be the theme. As Dr. Landa remarks, he has been the first story-writer to exploit the field of science in the department of the marvellous; and he has further been the first to exploit the marvellous in morbid psychology with scientific art: These are achievements as commanding, as significant of genius, as the most distinguished success in any of the commoner walks of fiction.—From “Edgar Allan Poe,” in “New Essays towards Critical Method.”