We, again, are not gonna join the synthesized vocal fray

It makes for a good "do it all yourself" demo.
Heh. It would be a
massive step down for you.

And yes, these songs really are "demos", even if that's as far as they get.
Us rubes out here in the deep south provinces have not read much Poe other than the obligatory high school exposure. However, your shoehorning of his poetry into this lyric resulted in a fine lyric. The rubes missed out on ELO also but that notwithstanding we much like and enjoyed your arrangement.
Your background isn't that far from mine. The main difference is that I'm a big fan of the
Alan Parsons Project, who started their series of concept albums back in the '70s with an ode to Poe titled
Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
More recently, Eric Woolfson (one of the two producers of the Project) did the musical
Poe - you can
find the video here, and it was also released as a studio album. Think of it as the musical Cliff's Notes version, although - as expected with any adaption - it veers a bit from the historical reality.
Good to hear from my favorite "rubes"!
