SOURCE: Felman, Shoshana. “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches.” In Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 119-39. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1980, Felman examines the limitations of psychoanalytic criticism that links Poe's life to his poetry and thus concludes that the poetry is symptomatic of sickness or abnormality.

To account for poetry in psychoanalytical terms has traditionally meant to analyze poetry as a symptom of a particular poet. I would here like to reverse this approach, and to analyze a particular poet as a symptom of poetry.

No poet, perhaps, has been as highly acclaimed and, at the same time, as violently disclaimed as Edgar Allan Poe. The most controversial figure on the American literary scene, “perhaps the most thoroughly misunderstood of all American writers,” “a stumbling block for the judicial...