This 50th anniversary reissue of G.R. Thompson's makes available for Poe scholars, students, and aficionados the groundbreaking work that changed the course of Poe studies. Written in highly accessible prose, the book reads as fresh today as when it first appeared. , which established that Poe was neither a hack nor a madman, neither a writer purely devoted to ideality nor solely a morbid Gothicist-but rather consistently a romantic ironist-was not only the first book to make full sense of Poe, it also helped to explain Poe's enormous influence on twentieth-century literature.