In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

Perhaps the classic figures of American literature should be regarded chiefly as actors in the epos of the American birth. With one or two exceptions, they did not produce great books. Yet all of them were heroes; were characters who in their defeats as in their victories fleshed and fixed features of our nascent world. Their lives-like the careers of the patriarchs of Genesis-may prove more current in our future mind than any of their works.

This certainly will be the case with Poe. Despite his influence abroad, despite the range of his activity, he wrote neither verse nor prose intrinsically great. His significance is not to be extracted from his situation. And the construction of the creative Poe-the _true_ Poe-has lagged, precisely because this situation was misunderstood. Poe paid bitterly for his youthful Byronism. From his neighbors and the Bostonians, it shrouded him in sentimental horror; from us, it has quarantined the man in an equally blinding sentimental glamour. His first biographer, Griswold, was incompetent. And Professor Woodberry inherited this incompetence for all his scholarly good will since crucial features of Poe's life were hidden and since without them Poe's work, unlike organic great art, lacked an entire dimension.