“To me [Poe’s] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane’s.”

“Poe’s serious style at its typical worse makes the reading of more than one story at a sitting an almost insuperable task.”

“To the most sensitive and high-souled man in the world we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the solecism and shudder.”

“I do not know why you or indeed anybody should want to illustrate Poe… I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound. The rest of him seems to be vulgar and commonplace.”

“That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted person before puberty.”

“[Poe was] a genius, and if not of the first rank, then at least near the top of the second — but a foolish, disingenuous and often somewhat trashy man.”

“Poe exhibits scarcely any virtue in either his life or his writings. Probably there is not another instance in the literature of our language in which so much has been accomplished without a recognition or a manifestation of conscience.”

“His heart was as rotten as his conduct was infamous. He knew not what the terms honour and honourable meant. He had absolutely no virtue or good quality, unless you call remorse a virtue and despair a grace. Some have called him mad; but we confess we see no evidence of this in his history. He was never mad, except when in delirium tremens.”

“Art to delight the soul of a servant-girl; it is a matter for astonishment that mature men can be found to take this kind of thing seriously.”

“No reader who cares deeply for the best poetry written in English can care greatly for Poe’s verse… I can think of no other American writer, down to this moment, at once so inescapable and so dubious.”

“Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hand on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.”

“A poor creature…in a condition of sad, wretched imbecility, bearing in his feeble body the evidences of evil lying.”

“He evinced the singular cleverness of the children of this world…his writings lack the elements not only of great, but of real, literature.”

“Endless self-indulgence, wallowing in atmosphere, incessant lecturing, ruthless discourse on whatever took the writer’s fancy, longueurs, trivialisations, telegraphing of punch-lines, loss of plot in effect, loss of effect in plot… In sum, what Poe lacked above all was a sense of his reader.”

“Edgar Allan Poe was incontestably one of the most worthless persons of whom we have any record in the world of letters.”