SOURCE: Magistrale, Tony, and Sidney Poger. “Originating Lines: The Importance of Poe.” In Poe's Children: Connections between Tales of Terror and Detection, pp. 11-28. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Magistrale and Poger define Edgar Allan Poe as a quintessentially Romantic writer whose detective stories are best understood when examined within the context of his tales of horror.

Poe's was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss.

(Lovecraft 54)

[Poe] is the undisputed father of the detective story, although he would be disconcerted by many of his children and grandchildren.

(Symons 35)

Romanticism is untidy and imprecise. The concept is almost as difficult to define as are the precise dates of its history. And certainly its evolution, extending from the Gothic revolution of the late eighteenth century to the...