I've read nearly all of Poe's short stories, many of his essays, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, upon which I wrote a scholarly paper that impressed the editor of Poe Studies (my professor in the graduate seminar for which I wrote the paper). I've never cared much for his poetry (I know it is almost sacrilege to admit this).
Such stories as "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and others deserve to be read by everyone that reads English. Poe not only is the Godfather of all horror writers, he invented the scientific detective genre (Sherlock Holmes is but a pale imitation of Poe's Dupin). But, most of all, Edgar A. Poe was one of the greatest satirists ever.
