While American critics, scholars, and others derided Poe’s work, in France, in contrast, he was considered a genius. Both Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme—French symbolist poets—admired Poe’s work. Mallarme took the trouble to learn English so that he could not only read Poe’s works, but also translate them. In fact, he completed the translation that Baudelaire had started. Both French poets revered Poe’s ideas about poetry, in which he favored the aesthetic over the moral and beauty over truth.
From our 21st century perspective we can find beauty, originality, and incredible heightened emotion in Poe’s poetry as well as in his stories. Not only was he a prolific producer, but also an innovator and a theoretician of literary technique.
In the latter part of the 20th century, French Freudian psychologist Jacques Lacan revived universal interest in Edgar Allan Poe, and the interest hasn’t waned well into the 21st century.