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We are here given a foretaste of the author's forthcoming book on the American poet, Edgar Allan Poe. The suggestion is made that Poe was a repressed necrophile of the first of the two types described by Ernest Jones in his book on the nightmare and mediæval superstitions. The beloved corpse would in this case be that of Poe's mother, who died at the age of twenty-four when the poet was scarcely three years old, an event which would provide a 'biographical' source for Poe's necrophilia. The sadistic lust-murderer (Baudelaire) succeeds in making an identification with the father in the sexual act (sadistically conceived). The necrophile (Poe) leaves the responsibility for the murder (= sexual act) to another, father or father-substitute (e.g. fate), and prefers to content himself with the remains.
Burdened by his incestuous and sado-necrophile fixation to his mother, Poe was never able to attain to normal love. The Don Juan 'series' of love relationships represents not only the search for the unattainable first love, but also a desperate attempt to break free from it, an attempt which has perpetually to be renewed, since in every fresh object the original one reappears. Thus fidelity and infidelity find a compromise. This double mechanism underlay Poe's series of abortive attachments, most of which, indeed, concerned women who bore 'the attributes of disease or death which belonged to his darling mother'. Variations on this theme figure in Poe's work (e.g. Morella, Eleonora, and above all, Ligeia).
The pamphlet under review suggests a host of questions, many of which, we hope, will be dealt with in the more comprehensive work referred to above.