Poe’s satirical effects are often thought of as being aimed at members of the New England establishment, for their cliquish pufferies and didactic croaks. While Poe certainly made it a part of his mission to mock and ridicule the popular ideas, scenes, and tastes of the New England literati, the vitriolic quips against them stem from the poet-critic’s broader and more enduring aims. Ruminating on the sorry state of U.S. American literature in his review of Lowell’s A Fable for Critics (1848), Poe declares “we may attribute our failure to the colonial sin of imitation,” which entails “doing what not only has been done before, but what, however well done, has yet been done ad nauseam.” To subvert the American taste for “infinite repetitions” of the same forms of magazine literature derived from Europe, Poe, ironically, appropriates heavily from British Orientalist literature and German aesthetics of the arabesque. Concluding with my interpretation of Poe’s Boston Lyceum reading as a performance of his writing style, this essay posits that Poe developed throughout his career a satirical arabesque style of composition meant to position readers in a mise en abyme of orientalist stereotypes. In other words, instead of assuming the same horrified expressions as his characters’ and thereby reducing the arabesque to a sensational, meaningless, and amoral object of horror, I propose that we reinvestigate Poe’s arabesque as the satirical key to his subversive aesthetics of terror.