This volume of the Critical Insights series opens with a reflection of Poe's aesthetics, and offers a consideration of Poe's distinctive contribution to American poetry. Other essays contextualize Poe's invocation of the exotic in poems such as "Tamerlane," "Al Aaraaf" "Ulalume," and "The Raven" against nineteenth-century travel narratives, analyze Poe's poetics of memory and grief and discuss Poe's influence on other major poets such as Baudelaire, Frances Osgood, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.