“Now, we all of us like to believe that we understand our own poets better than any foreigner can do; but I think we should be prepared to entertain the possibility that these Frenchmen have seen something in Poe that English-speaking readers have missed”

“It is certainly possible, in reading something in a language imperfectly understood, for the reader to find what is not there; and when the reader is himself a man of genius, the foreign poem read may, by happy accident, elicit something important from the depths of his own mind, which he attributes to what he reads.”

“[But] I find that by trying to look at Poe through the eyes of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and most of all, Valéry, I become more thoroughly convinced of his importance, of the importance of his work as a whole.”