Borges on Poe

F.S. Among your favorite authors (Wells, De Quincey, Chesterton) are some whom the critics generally don't consider to be major figures. Conversely, you negate Calderón, for example, who is generally admired by everyone. What explanation would you give for this fact?

J.L.B. I attribute this predilection of mine to the fact that I judge literature in a hedonistic manner. That is, I judge literature according to the pleasure or emotion it inspires in me. I've been a professor of literature for many years and I'm not unaware that the pleasure caused by literature is one thing and the historical study of that literature is another. Take Edgar Allan Poe's case, for example. I believe Poe, as a poet, is mediocre, a sort of miniature Tennyson. As for Poe's short stories, each one of them judged separately, except perhaps The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, suffers, I think from truculence, from bombast . . . Nevertheless, Poe's importance is considerable if we judge it historically. We could say that what today is called science-fiction originated with Poe. It's evident that Poe is the inventor of the detective genre and that there are stories of his—"The Purloined Letter," for example—that perhaps haven't been surpassed. It's evident that Baudelaire was inspired by Poe, that the Symbolist Movement was inspired by Baudelaire, and that Paul Valéry was inspired by Symbolism. That is, you can't deny the historical importance of Poe, but that doesn't mean that each one of his stories, poems, or essays is especially admirable. One might oppose what I've just said with the fact that the image left by an author is more important than each page he's written, and no doubt, that image of misfortune, of arrogance, of a brilliant imagination that Poe has left is also one of his works. Furthermore, literary historians often seem to me to be individuals enamored with mere information, to come back to a subject we dealt with some days ago. And as for literary movements, I think they're mere conveniences for the historians and, in the best of cases, are stimuli for the author to produce his work.

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Seven conversations with Jorge Luis Borges By Fernando  Sorrentino

Translated, with Notes and Appendix by Clark M. Zlotchew (1982, 2010)