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When we make a retrospective survey of the history of Poe criticism as a whole, we are at once struck by the fact that there has been a wide divergence of opinions between Europe and the United States on the evaluation of Poe. As is well known, Poe has received enthusiastic recognition in France since Baudelaire introduced him to French readers, while his countrymen regarded him as an eccentric figure, or rather, as a pathological case who was isolated from his moral and intellectual environments. Even in the present day, he is often not ranked among representative American authors. American critics are still often perplexed by the continuing popularity which Poe has enjoyed among Europeans. The present paper forms a part of my proposed research on the significance of the French response to Poe, the American. First, I attempt to trace Poe's influence on various aspects of literary life of nineteenth century France, giving emphasis to his relation to three major poets - Baudelaire, Mallarme and Valery - who played a significant role in establishing Poe's reputation. Second, my study aims at clarifying the attitudes towards Poe of professional critics and scholars who were the contemporaries of the above poets. Unlike the creative writers, they were rather slow to recognize Poe's importance, and some of them failed to understand him. Nevertheless, the examination of the French commentaries on Poe helps us to reconsider Poe from quite a different perspective. Briefly, the present paper is an attempt to discover, by looking at Poe through the eyes of Frenchmen, some values that they have found in him and that English-speaking people have failed to perceive.