los Williams, for his part, praised him for giving ‘the sense for the first time in America that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.' Who was right? Whom are we to believe? T.S. Elliot, who denounced his ‘slipshod writing,' or George Bernard Shaw, who found him ‘exquisitely refined?'" (Asselineau, 409).If you look at a portrait of Poe, it will always be full-faced, from the front. However, the only accurate portrait would be to show a head with a double profile, like that of the Roman god Janus (Asselineau, 414), with one side turned towards reality and the other towards dreams. Poe himself was crystalline in his awareness of this duplicity. He went so far as to point out, when describing his detective which appears in several of his stories (most notably, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue), C. Auguste Dupin, "I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin– the creative and the resolvent." (Asselineau, 414). The subject of his tales were evenly divided between those of imagination and those of "ratiocination." His personality at the time of their composition controlled which mode he wrote in; the former being written by a "Dinysiac" and inspired creator, the latter written by a articulate and apathetic analyst.When a tale is written to invoke fear, it must first involve the imagination. Poe was a master at stimulating the reader's imagination, and thereby bringing out the sense of irrational fear that all human beings possess. The narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a prime example of how Poe invoked this fear, saying "a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit . . .There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart. . . .There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase in my superstition . . . to accelerate the increase itself. . . .An irrepressible tremor gradually perva...
