Poe is unquestionably one of the great American writers of all time. He was far ahead of his time with his vision of a special area of human experience the "inner world" of dream, hallucination, and imagination. There is a distinct connection between Poe's nightmarish life and his works. His fictional works resemble a distressed individual who has a pattern of dreams night after night with the same repeating tone of terror. Critics interpret his works as being a search going deep into himself and arriving at the unplumbed mystery of his innerself. He has accomplished himself with that search and characterized the twentieth century with his art. F