In going over ground likely to be familiar to the general reader, biographers often feel the need to buttress their presumption with a theory; if that theory can hint, no matter how vaguely, at some kind of 'reassessment', then all the better. The nervousness is understandable, but rarely can it have resulted in so eccentric a presentation of the material as in Symons's book on Edgar Allan Poe [The Tell-Tale Heart]. What we get is not so much a reassessment as a rearrangement, the manuscript being presented in two sections; first the life, then the works. Symons reasons that in few literary case histories has there been so marked a contrast between the bread-and-butter journalistic labours on the one hand, and the real creative achievement on the other, and that if we are to proceed in the conventional style, by taking a period of the life together with...