ABSTRACT
A thorough going Freudian interpretation of all Poe's works has, in fact, been offered by Marie Bonaparte in her Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation but a less doctrinaire approach to the relationship between the life and the works has to start from the distinction between the narrators and the writer who created them. Several of Poe's satirical sketches reveal his alienation from the 'spirit of the age' as that was expressed by faith in progress. 'Some Words with a Mummy' ridicules American pride in such achievements as the Bowling-Green Fountain in New York and the Capitol at Washington, DC, by contrasting them with the glories of ancient Egypt. American pride in democracy recalls, to the ancient Egyptian, the bragging of thirteen Egyptian provinces that boasted prodigiously of their democratic political system and instituted the intolerable despotism of Mob.
