One of the personal traits that defined Jorge Luis Borges in the eyes of his friends and other contemporaries was his troubled sexuality. Estela Canto, who maintained a close romantic relationship with Borges in the 1940s, said that “la realización sexual era aterradora para él.” Dr Miguel Kohan Miller, the psychoanalyst who about the same time treated him for his “impotencia sexual,” also observed that Borges, “como toda persona que tiene una disminución de su potencia sexual, [vivía] acosado por el problema de la sexualidad.”

This emotionally overwhelming condition significantly shaped Borges's literary experience: he often read, thought, and wrote about desire and sex. Yet, in a modest and reticent writer like Borges, this aspect of his work is not usually apparent. This is the case, for example, in the essay “Edgar Allan Poe,” published in the newspaper La Nación in 1949, in which Borges offered a critique of the American author. The title of the article does not allude to sex, and the text does not seem to be concerned with it. Borges begins the essay in this way:

At first glance we may think that here Borges proposes that Poe's personality and emotional troubles may help explain his work (as well as those of the other authors). But that would be barely an elemental approximation that still leaves us essentially clueless about the rationale that guided his interpretation of the American author. To comprehend all that is implied in the opening of the essay, we first need to ask what was the “neurosis” common to Poe and the other writers? The answer, which requires us to investigate well beyond Borges's literature, allows us to learn a fundamental fact: all four authors suffered from sexual impotence.