Wow! You must really be old to have had to read Poe. I suppose Kipling, Shakespeare, Zane Grey, and others were forced on you. O’Henry, Cooper, and such were there too. I had this kind of brutality thrown at me back then. It’s probably why I find myself comparing today’s authors coming up short to those back then. I blame it on mom, she read Hitchcock stories and Ellery Queen novels to me. It has almost ruined me to modern story telling. We can’t let the left burn books. They’ve screwed up most other things.
I sought out Zane Grey and Kipling. Kipling Rocks!
But I come from a family of readers, who believed in reading great lit to children, at very early ages ( age appropriate; such as Lamb's Shakespeare for Children, when I was around 4 and the greats of children's lit and poetry...Lear, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Kipling, The leather Stocking Tales, etc. )and so I became an avid reader too.
And yes, we did HIAWATHA in the 3rd grade and the required reading just kept on accelerating.
When I was a teen, I asked my mother why she only read non-fiction and she said:"Because I have all of the great fiction there is to read already." and she had.
Modern authors haven't been able to write a decent novel in 50 years and all of it is so derivative and/or very badly written, that it's worthless.