Edgar Allan Poe is one of few writers who remain relevant outside of the era in which they live,

and Poe is no exception. The man is undoubtedly a product of his time, which in terms of literature and art, is called the Romantic era. Poe's style of Romanticism was similar to his contemporaries (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and William Wordsworth among others) but most of his works often bordered on what was later called the gothic genre. Perhaps the most overarching characteristic of the Romantic Movement was the rejection of the rational and the intellectual in favor of the intuitive and the emotional (Spielvogel 2006). This characteristic became the hallmark of Poes writings. In his critical theories essays such as The Philosophy of Composition and through his art, Poe stressed that didactic and intellectual elements had no place in art. The intellectual and the didactic were for sermons and treatises, whereas the emotions were the sole province of art (Poe 1846). Poe reasoned, man felt and sensed things before he thought about them. Prior to recently researching Poe, (for the purpose of writing this paper) I do not recall ever hearing the word didactic. Apparently Throughout his lifetime, Poe was mainly known as a literary critic. He was also known as a writer of fiction and became one of the first American authors of the 19th century to become more popular in Europe than in the United States. Poe was particularly respected in France. Posthumously he was recognized as one of our most important national authors and an innovator of forms and genres. Poe is widely regarded as the master of the macabre, inventor of the detective story; explicator of the psychotic soul, Poe was the father of psychological horror literature as well as an accomplished satirist, critic and poet. His story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is widely considered to be the first modern detective story, with Poe the forerunner of later masters of the craft like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, Each of Poe's detective stories is a root from which a whole literature has

developed, where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it? (Peeples 1998). In January 1845 Poe published his poem "The Raven" to instant success.