Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health or illness of his narrators.

Zimmerman breaks new ground in Poe studies by providing a catalogue of three hundred figures of speech and thought in the author's oeuvre, including his tales, personal correspondence, literary criticism, book reviews, and marginalia. This incisive catalogue of literary and rhetorical terms, presented in alphabetical order and amply illustrated with examples - in addition to close examinations of some of Poe's most important tales - overwhelmingly demonstrates Poe's rhetorical and linguistic dexterity, putting a nearly two-hundred-year-old critical debate to rest by showing Poe to be a conscientious craftsman of the highest order.