The broad variety of works in this mammoth book make it very difficult to decide on a rating. When Poe is at his best, he is utterly sublime, and he looms large over my own artistic education. I owe him a great deal. On the other hand, his Complete Works contains a lot of chaff to be separated from the wheat: works of a mediocre to downright dull quality, justifiably forgotten by all by completionists (that’s me) and academics in the relevant fields. Obviously reading his entire oeuvre allows for a fuller understanding of both the development of his style and the psychology of his person, but I honestly don’t think people who opt for a ‘best of’ or selected works edition are missing all that much in terms of literary quality. Not all of Poe’s works are must-reads, by any means: I could have lived a full life without reading his essay on furniture, for instance, or stories like “Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling”.

Poe’s poetry reads as a lot more dated than his prose, but Poe is a master in particular at final rhyming couplets — many of the more forgettable poems are suddenly thrown into relief by profundity revealed at the very end. I will also freely admit that his poetry is miles ahead of that of Lovecraft, though in prose I would at least assert that Lovecraft, in general, had more original ideas. Lovecraft could have written “The Tell-Tale Heart”, but Poe could never have written “The Call of Cthulhu”. On the other hand, Lovecraft most certainly could not have written “The Raven”. Furthermore, Lovecraft, being the later writer, certainly takes a cue from Poe, particularly in his early work; Poe was the first major American writer to write in the particular style that he did, but was still writing in an established tradition, even if his work has aged better than others of the kind. (Longfellow was the most popular at the time, but wallows in obscurity today.) The number of classical references, which are less common in his prose, affect a higher, more intellectual register to what is otherwise conventional ‘jingly’ metre and rhyme, and adds an air of dignity which the modern reader might otherwise find lacking in this style. My edition interlaced the poems within the stories where that was the nature of their original publication, and in my view it is a much better experience to read these ones within the context intended, and I would advise others to look for an edition that does the same.

Naturally, “The Raven”, “Annabel Lee”, and “Dream within a Dream” all stand out among the poetry. All of these exemplify Poe’s melancholic style, but “The Raven” (which is obviously his most famous work) has a particular value not just as Poe’s defining work but as one that reflects more critically on the themes he employs elsewhere. His other works often contain an element of mystery and ambiguity, one that is often not resolved by their end, but “The Raven” directly examines the conflict between madness and sanity, fantasy and reality: the narrator wishes to cling to his lost love, but the raven insists on the irreversible finality of death. The poem confronts and criticises the delusional hope for the fantastical, which are inextricably tied to his rose-tinted memories of Lenore, and the result is surprisingly anti-Romantic in apparent contrast with the rest of Poe’s oeuvre. If this was something Poe himself struggled with, it casts a shadow of doubt over some of the romanticism of his other work: the idealised view of lost love in stories like “Eleanora” and poems like “Annabel Lee” may be more illusory or nostalgic than based in anything ‘real’ (more on this below).

My favourite stories are your favourite stories: Poe is at his best when he focuses on gothic and macabre themes, though some of these are skilfully interlaced with humour as well (of the humorous stories, I particularly liked “Loss of Breath” and “Bon Bon”, which I think show how Poe’s humour works best when incorporated into his natural literary home as a writer of the macabre). His stories also show a consistent love of mystery, whether this is deciphered (as in his detective works) or remains more ambiguous (as in the gothic). All these elements seem to have been key elements of his personality: wit interlaced with melancholy, himself doomed to die under mysterious circumstances. In my view Poe’s style is best exemplified in my absolute favourite of his works, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, which in my view contains the perfect balance of literary tradition and innovation, as well as of mystery and revelation, uses some of his favourite tropes of wasting diseases and catalepsy to their best symbolic advantage, and maintains the eerie, mystifying atmosphere throughout while leaving the reader fully satisfied by the end. Although much of Poe’s lesser-known work disappoints, there are some hidden gems within: I loved the dreamlike quality of “Eleanora”, which is now my favourite of his lesser known works, and some of his more descriptive, less plot-driven works like “The Landscape Garden” are worth reading for the loveliness of the prose alone.

Of the detective stories (which are some of his most famous works, and certainly the most innovative — he arguably invented the genre) I was enthralled by “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”, both of which are masterpieces of the genre, but found “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” dull by comparison: I respect that it was Poe’s attempt to reason his way through a real case (which was obviously much more difficult without the technology we have now), but I didn’t find the analysis of the details of the body and the crime scene all that interesting when the solution is so speculative. “The Gold Bug” should also be included in the mystery category, although it is the only one that doesn’t feature Poe’s detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, and although the story is cartoonishly racist, the actual mystery is engaging and clever, particularly for those who enjoy cryptograms, which feature heavily. In the mode of “Marie Rogêt”, the science fiction stories are extremely technically heavy, and arguably Poe is a bit in love with his own cleverness here. It’s certainly no mystery why Jules Verne was such a big fan, as this excellent Kate Beaton comic memorably portrays. For me these ones were heavy-going at times because science fiction is not really my cup of tea, and the descriptions and explanations of the intricacies of various machines and the like, which I’m sure are very well devised, did not capture my imagination.

As I said earlier, although “The Raven” remains synonymous with Poe, and the raven has become the symbol of Poe (he was even called “the Raven” by fans in his lifetime), ravens are not a motif in his work and the themes of the poem throw the rest of his work into relief. In Poe’s body of work, much more frequent recurring subjects include:
• Dead and dying women (of course — though this provides an important overlap with “The Raven”)
• Catalepsy and epileptic (or similar) fits
• Monomania
• Sudden intrusions of cats (surprisingly common in his work)
• Sudden references to opium (though it seems ambiguous whether Poe was a regular user himself)
• Phrenology (with surprising frequency); and
• A fixation on black-haired women in particular (which may or may not have a connection to the phrenology — he may have perceived some deeper significance of melancholy in this hair colour, which perhaps he saw reflected in the example of his own person).
Many of Poe's works focus on finding a beautiful, ethereal, perfect woman — his soulmate — symbolic of the loss of happier times, hope, even Heaven, the loss of whom throws into relief the darkness that follows. He doesn’t ever quite seem to have found a woman of this description in his own life; the fact that “Annabel Lee” could have been inspired by any of four different women he was involved with, or all of them combined, exemplifies the problem. As with Horace, there is an element of conceit or fantasy — an idealised, ‘Romantic’ view of love, and of the life of the love poet, which is not entirely sincere or true to life. Another regular theme, particularly in his poetry, is that of dreams — everything seems to be a dream, or to do with dreams, and the poetry as a whole is able to achieve a dreamlike quality which is easier to achieve within a medium that does not require the writer to state the reality of a situation outright (though, as I have said, he often aims for the same ambiguity or unreality in his stories too). This may help us to contextualise “The Raven” further: he is berating himself for his own attachment to Romanticism, to fantasy, to the dream of an ideal love, but still relies on a dark vision of the supernatural — one which symbolises the darkness and pessimism encompassed within the rational side of his mind, against the romantic — to realise this vision. It is this, the overwhelming, oppressive power of his imagination, his self-psychoanalysing and his preoccupation with mystery, unreality, and the tortures of his own mind, that consumed Poe, but which also manifested itself in the creation of his enchanting, haunting, unparalleled work.