In our time, Poe`s stories of detective, horror, SF, and fantasy enjoy such a wide popularity throughout the world that they are often perceived as part of the postmodern mass culture. Accordingly recent studies and criticisms on Poe, which tend to dismantle the difference between high and popular art, reevaluate his works, focusing on postmodern features of his popular stories. We need to discriminate, however, two different kinds of postmodernity in Poe`s works: one as his strong impulse to break out of the modern system itself, and the other as his indulgence in the sensation of destruction when he destroys and violates everything modern, especially his own consciousness. This paper attempts to clarify how and why Poe`s works are significant in our time, paying attention to his ambivalent postmodernity. Reviewing remarkable critical judgements of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Stanley Cavell, and Jacques Lacan, we come to find many faces of Poe such as artist, entertainer, scientist, philosopher, and psychologist. Especially illuminating to the nature of Poe`s postmodernity is ``the impulse of perverseness`` suggested in "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Black Cat," and other works. It is also noticeable that the impulse of perverseness in particular, and Poe`s narratives of delusion and destruction in general, correspond to Freud`s concept of the death drive. Poe`s love stories are not exempt from the death process either. "Ligeia" is the best story showing why the exalted relationship between man and woman of profound learning has to end up as a bitter battle of wills. In the latter part of the story, we come to witness the modern will-to-know transforming into a kind of vampirism to suck the life out of other living beings. Poe`s stories consist of two kinds of postmodern narratives complementing and conflicting each other; he observes consciously such hideous change of modern beings on the existential level, indulges in, and often tells us exaggeratedly ``delightful`` sensation of horror. The artistic achievement and significance of Poe`s works depend upon which narrative ultimately prevails.