DGAR ALLEN POE fares badly at hands of contemporary critics, if we may judge from treatment given The Fall of House of Usher by such subtle commentators as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their Understanding Fiction (New York, 1943). It may be worth while to reanalyze this little masterpiece and then to elucidate Poe's artistry still further by considering it from a comparatist viewpoint. Let us first assume strictures made by Messrs. Brooks and Warren against this of horror. The Fall of House of they hold, is within limits, rather successful in inducing in reader sense of nightmare, but horror for its own sake cannot be aesthetically justified unless horror, of true tragic impact (Macbeth, Lear), engages our own interest. Poe's protagonist, Roderick Usher, fails to engage our imaginative sympathy; the story lacks tragic quality, even pathos. Poe has narrowed fate of principal character to a clinical case which we readers (and also narrator) view from without. Free will and rational decision exist neither in protagonist nor in story. Roderick-it is story alone, not that of sister, lady Madeline-does not struggle as he should against doom embodied in decaying house. Poe has played up sense of gloom excessively, no doubt because of his own morbid interest in story.' These are severe words from sensitive writers who in same vol-