The earliest foreign study of the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, the text presented in this volume is something of a landmark in the history of comparative literature. Baudelaire's first and longest essay on Poe was published in the Revue de Paris is 1852; it was revised and abridged for use as the preface of the first volume of his translation of Poe's tales, Histoires extraordinaires. This study was significant especially in the area of Franco-American literary relations because it was the basis of not only the French attitude toward Poe, but of his reputation...