Ah, good ol' Poe. The tragic and deranged mad poet with the sort of clout to reach "The Simpsons" and "Altered Carbon" while simultaneously maintaining a firm grasp on the imaginations and curricula of students everywhere--he holds a special place in my heart, along with H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos--minus the racism), Percy Bysshe Shelley ("Ozymandias"), and Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). I'm a massive fan of Victorian Gothic styles of writing, and Poe certainly brought those mentalities to America as one of the strange outliers of the Romantic movement.
The story of his that I'm most familiar with is "The Fall of the House of Usher," where through moral and philosophical degradation, the house and the House of Usher are deconstructed - the house crumbles and falls into the swamp and the House is ended when both Roderick Usher and his sister/lover/zombie Madeline die. Poe has a knack for bringing gradual madness to his characters, which is what makes his writing so compelling; the impending dread, the fear of the unknown, the mind playing tricks upon itself, these are all devices that Poe explores.
In the classroom, I think Poe is a fantastic source of figurative language and is a clear avenue down which to stroll when considering teaching lessons on subtextual clues and metaphor. The dark, "creepy" manner of Poe's works could be a nice reprieve from some of the other "typical" sorts of literature that make themselves present in the classroom, or they might be ignored by other students for how "weird" they are. However, I'm of the mind that students should experience literature that they otherwise wouldn't stumble upon themselves. Shouldn't we try to expand the repertoire of our students? In most cases, they won't do it themselves.
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