Why study H. P. Lovecraft?

Why study H. P. Lovecraft? In the minds of some critics and scholars this question still evidently requires an answer, and will perhaps always require an answer so long as standard criticism maintains its inexplicable prejudice against the tale of horror, fantasy, and the supernatural. In the space I have I cannot hope to present a general defense of the weird tale; but I can at least suggest that Edmund Wilson's condemnation of Lovecraft's work as "bad taste and bad art" ("Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous" [1945]) may, at the very least, have been a little myopic.

Why study H. P. Lovecraft?