Weird Fiction discussion

A quote by Yuri Olesha in "Not a Day without a Line" included in Envy and Other Works regarding the two "proto-weird" writers we on occasion discussed, E.T.A Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe caught my eye. (Google translated, sorry).
"Hoffman, depicting a certain student in a story, says that this student belonged to people who were unlucky in everything... Yes, if he dropped bread and butter, then the sandwich always fell on the ground with the buttered side. One can object to Hoffman that the sandwich always falls with the buttered side.

Who was he, this crazy man, the only writer of his kind in world literature, with raised eyebrows, with a thin nose turned down, with hair that stood on end forever? There is information that when he wrote, he was so afraid of what he was depicting that he asked his wife to sit next to him.

Hoffman had an extraordinary influence on literature. By the way, on Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky.
...
He appeared, it seems to me, unlike anyone else. He is not only a science fiction writer, but is full of genre, everyday life, and authenticity.

Sometimes he gets confused. They say that he wrote drunk.

Music reigns in his works. Cavalier Gluck appears from the past, alive before him, Hoffmann, and listens to the performance of "Iphigenia in Aulis". Conductors, theater curtains, made-up actresses crowd his pages.

He was perhaps the first to depict doubles, the horror of this situation - before Edgar Poe. Poe rejected the influence of Hoffmann on him, saying that the horror he sees is born not from German romanticism, but from his own soul...

Perhaps the difference between them is precisely that Edgar Poe is sober, and Hoffmann is drunk. Hoffmann is multi-colored, kaleidoscopic, Edgar in two or three colors, in one frame. Both are magnificent, unique, divine."

Hoffman is drunk, and Poe is sober, says Yuri Olesha. What an interesting way to compre. But... Poe? Sober?