The reader’s orientation
Poe came to poetry through grief and instability. Orphaned before he could speak, raised in a household where he never quite belonged, married to a woman who was ill for years before she died, he wrote about loss not as a literary theme but as the atmosphere he actually breathed. The women who vanish from his poems — Annabel Lee, Lenore, the unnamed figures glimpsed in dreams — carry the weight of real mourning, even when the poems themselves are gorgeously, almost perversely ornamented.
He was also, and this is easy to forget, a working journalist and critic for most of his adult life. He had strong opinions about what poetry should do, and he put those opinions into practice. His 1846 essay 'The Philosophy of Composition' claimed that he engineered The Raven effect by effect, like a clockmaker. Whether you believe that account or not, the poem does feel meticulously crafted. Every repetition is calibrated. Every rhyme tightens the screw another turn.
For new readers, the best place to start is not necessarily with the most famous work. The shorter poems let you hear the voice before the full machinery of something like The Bells or The Raven takes over. Once you have that ear, the longer poems open up in a way they do not when you come to them cold.
Poe rewards rereading more than most poets. The first time through, you are catching the story and the sound. The second time, you start to notice what he is doing with repetition, with the placement of a single different word inside an otherwise locked refrain. The third time, you begin to understand why Baudelaire spent years translating him and why the Symbolists treated him like a founding saint. He is not a difficult poet, but he is a deep one, and the depth reveals itself gradually.