By Walt Whitman (excerpt from Speciman Days, Complete Prose Works, 1892)
Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete or its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe's verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet's life and reminiscences, as well as the poems. To one who could work out their subtle retracing and retrospect the latter would make a close tally no doubt between the author's birth and antecedents, his childhood and youth, his physique, his so-call' d education, his studies and associates, the literary and social Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, of those times—not only the places and circumstances in themselves, but often, very often, in a strange spurning of, and reaction from them all.