If you were trying to think of Marilynne Robinson’s influences, I’d bet it would take a while to get to Edgar Allan Poe. But here is Robinson (found via Maud Newton) discussing the impact Poe had on her as a young reader:

Poe at his best is not imaginable without the excesses for which he must be forgiven. I think I have always loved him because to love him requires loyalty. Those gothic dreams of his are the sort of thing a pre-adolescent girl might be enthralled by, and I did notice that brilliance and learning were among the glories of his perishing damsels. But I had to defend him and myself together from the idea that the tales were simply lurid or morbid. I knew better because I could not stop memorizing his poems. To say them and hear them taught me to feel the deeper coherences of language, as if words ordered by their sounds and suggestions were a charm that opened more meaning than words contain. And I learned from him that an ancient or an alien language had the intimate sound of a whisper at my ear.