Beside Poe, Emerson is in many ways a mere local sage. For Poe’s tones and accents are those of a man conscious of possessing a European and cosmopolitan heritage. Poe cannot be understood apart from the great Byronic tradition (which extends at least back to Cervantes) of the aristocratic rebel fighting for human values in a sub-human chaos of indiscriminate appetite. It is no mere accident that Poe, like Byron, won a European recognition denied to such a great but autochthonous sensibility as Wordsworth’s.