This book, while ostensibly attempting to read Poe's writings by way of archetypal models, takes the confident critical stance of resisting being limited by a singular--Jungian--approach, even though this would have been a convenient, even expected, route to take. The psychological or Freudian approach, which provides one major framework of interpreting symbols, has already been applied to Poe, with its own contribution and limitation, but in this book Poe is studied from an archetypal perspective. This approach is also used to deal with symbols in a framework, but the structure is more extensive because it attempts to address symbols not as symptoms in pathological cases but as normal phenomena in life.