Through a series of prominent essays published in The Galaxy, The Atlantic Monthly, The Round Table, and elsewhere during the 1860s and 1870s, the painter and critic Eugene Benson (1839–1908) led the way in establishing a place for Edgar Allan Poe at the center of the American literary tradition. Now largely unknown, Benson wrote at a time when Poe’s reputation remained darkened by the calumnies spread by his biographer, Rufus Griswold (1815–1857), and amplified by the poet Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903), among others. A prolific critic of art, literature, and American and French cultures, Benson opened “Poe and Hawthorne,” published in The Galaxy in December 1868, by linking the disreputable Poe with the revered Hawthorne as “the two brilliant exceptions in American literature. Among Americans, they are the only two literary men who have had the sense of beauty and the artist’s conscience in a supreme degree.” Benson argued that without a continuing engagement with Poe, American culture would remain diminished. Further, in establishing thematic and stylistic connections between American literary and artistic traditions and such French figures as the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and the painter Jean-Francois Millet (1818–1875), Benson forged a transnational aesthetic for postwar America. This chapter explores two inextricably connected themes: the postbellum revaluation of Poe led by Benson and Benson’s emergence as arguably the most consequential contemporary critic of American art and culture in the 1860s. In the decade before his permanent expatriation to Italy in 1874, Benson mounted a campaign to eliminate moralism and censoriousness from American culture. In placing Poe and Hawthorne at the center of the American literary tradition, he opened a space for a new generation of writers and painters to confront an America that, in the wake of the war’s trauma and dislocation, had lost its sense of coherence and moral purpose. Further, Benson formulated an aesthetic philosophy that was grounded in vital American practices while also incorporating British and Continental developments. Why was it, Benson wanted to know, that Poe, so reviled at home, was revered abroad, notably by Baudelaire, the exemplar of modernism? In unravelling this paradox, Benson contributed significantly to the broadening and deepening of postbellum American culture.