Critics of Poe's time either loved his work or hated it. Many of Poe's readers loved his dark work. George Lippard of the "citizen Soldier" said, "Poe was born a poet, his mind is stamped with the impress of genius. He is, perhaps, the most original writer that ever existed in America."
Though many liked Poe's work, the majority of critics hated them. Many of his critics thought that his work was too dark, and he would be better off if he wrote about happier and lighter subjects. John Neal of the "Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette" said Poe would "do himself justice to make a beautiful and perhaps magnificent poem." (1829) The "Richard Compiler" magazine agree with that statement and also said that Poe should put his genius into "purer, brighter, and happier regions."
Walt Whitman said, "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."
Whitman was saying that although many of his works are good, and have a demonic undertone, they don't really thrill and "heat" the reader. This was one of the better reviews. Ralph Waldo Emerson even named him the "Jingle Man' because of the overused words, and pounding rhythm in his poems.

Many of Poe's recent critics feel the same way as the critics in Poe's time. They respect Poe for all that he contributed to literature, but dislike his writing style in poetry. They believe his rhyming is choppy, and that he overuses words. It is interesting to discover that French writers admire Poe's work more than English ones. The critic Aldous Huxley states that this is because "they are incapable of appreciating those finer shades of vulgarity that ruin Poe for us." Huxley states that Poe's rhymes are weak. Many poets also believe that Poe is too literal, and that he isn't deep enough, and his elements of poetry were too obvious, but none can deny that he changed literature. W.H. Auden stated, "His portraits of abnormal or self-destructive behavior contributed much to Dostoevski, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his tales of the future led to H.G. Wells, his adventure stories to Jules Verne and Stevenson" (Meyers 280).

In biography, the truth is everything. -Edgar Allan Poe