Text: John H. Ingram “Recent Edgar Poe Literature,” Civil Service Review (London, UK), February 17, 1877, pp. 161-162

[page 161, column 1, continued:]

RECENT EDGAR POE LITERATURE.*

IT is not surprising that the literature of Edgar Poe should go on developing in America, for certainly the place which he takes among American literati is a very high one whereabouts among the first three authors of the United States it is not necessary on this occasion to discuss. Neither, perhaps, is it surprising, when we have regard for the whole of the circumstances, that the best edition of Poe's works has been produced on this side of the Atlantic, or that the truest and most valuable contributions to his biography are also English. Poe's life was such as to secure a pretty large and influential company of enemies, and these, with all the virulence of American hatred and vindictiveness (these qualities being, at all events in literature, much more strongly marked in America than here), followed up their several grudges long after the poet and story-writer was in his grave. Under a particularly unfortunate conjuncture circumstances, it fell to the lot of [column 2:] one of Poe's bittterest and most unscrupulous foes to write his biography and edit his works soon after the author's death: how the abominable Rufus Griswold did his work is matter of common knowledge, and now, universal contempt; and it to Mr. John H. Ingram, Poe's English editor (a Civil Servant by-the-by), that we are mainly indebted for the dissection and complete destruction of Griswold's calumnious and otherwise poisonous fabric of biography and textual manipulation. But notwithstanding the complete refutation of Griswold's slanders which is now current all over the English-speaking world, there are still found persons who hug their hatred of Poe's memory so dearly as to prefer it to all considerations of truth and decency; and notably an American poetaster, who rejoices in the name of Stoddard, repeats the old refuted calumnies with an unassuming air of ignorance as to their refutation, which were it not for the venomous motives, which, by the man's own confession, must be adjudged to him. Somewhere or other he once gave an account of his grudge against Poe (purely personal and poetastral), and we desire hereby to apologize to that harmless hybrid, the mule, for using its name (though unavoidably) in any such scurrilous connection.

The books from America which are now specially before us are not, however, of this character, and we are glad to see that Mr. Ingram has contributed the biographical sketch with which the Edgar Poe memorial volume opens. Miss [[Sara]] Sigourney Rice certainly deserves all credit for [[a few words blacked out]] getting this part of her elegant tribute to Poe's memory done by one who had already approved himself worthy to handle the subject, and thus avoiding the risk of falling into the hands of the enemy, for who shall say where the poison of Griswoldism may lurk in America? Mr. Ingram's biographical sketch is substantially a compression of the fuller biography prefixed to the edition of Poe's works, of the four volumes of which we too occasion to record our cordial approval at the time of their publication. We do not find in this sketch any very striking results of the renewed and untiring researches which Mr. Ingram is known to have been making in this connection since the appearance of his edition, and we presume that the fruits of these researches are reserved for a full biography of Poe, to appear at some future period. — let us hope rather sooner than later. It would be inexact to say that we find no evidence of fresh research, for although no substantial new matter is introduced, there are some few capital omissions, evidently made on grounds and connected with compression, and some dates and minor details are modified, so as to indicate that something is being done; and curiously enough, Mr. Didier, the writer of the so-called New Memoir for Mr. Widdleton's last edition of Poe's poems, has been misled into the notion of finality and absolute perfection as regards Mr. Ingram's original memoir just as he found it, and merely translated it from the English into the American language, embellishing it with some few flowers of style peculiar to himself, and not so rightly designated flowers, as tinsel and flummery. The result has been that, substantially, Mr. Ingram's memoir appears at New York in a travestied form, with its few inaccuracies repeated, and a few added from want of intelligence on Mr. Didier's part as to the bearing of certain details, — while it appears at the same time in Baltimore compressed, and to some extent perfected. Mr. Didier's New Memoir has thus about as much to recommend it as Mr. Widdleton's Additional Poems, that is to say, there is not a single poem in the volume that was not already well known to all students of Poe, and the memoir is only new in the sense of being merely made up from a source already in course of supersession by true author. The illustrations, such as there are, are also all old.

Miss [[Sara]] Sigourney Rice's Memorial Volume, although it has not any more connexity than is usual in memorial volumes, in altogether a real contribution to Poe literature. After Mr. Ingram's biographical sketch, we have “Some Reminiscences of Poe as a School-boy,” by Colonel J. T. L. Preston, in a paper which, though brief, is interesting, and will prove of service to future biographers, for that early period of the poet's career. Then comes the history of the movement for setting up a monument(now pretty generally known), and this is accompanied by addresses from Professor Elliott, Professor Shepherd, and Mr. John H. B. Latrobe, the two first mainly critical, as regards Poe, the last biographical. A somewhat novel feature of the book is a collection of autograph letters from poets and authors, given in fac-simile in some cases. The [page 162:] poet-laureate's handwriting figures first; his letter to Miss Rice is as follows: —

This laconic document is followed by something much more extensive from Mr. Swinburne, wherein the younger poet dwells upon what has been done in France for the fame of Poe by the late Charles Baudelaire, and what is being done by M. Stéphane Mallarmé and M. Manet, who are engaged, the one in translating, the other in illustrating his poems. Mr. Swinburne ends with a characteristic aphorism: “Time, the eternal enemy of small and shallow reputations, will prove in this case also the constant and trusty friend and keeper of a true poet's full-grown fame.” Letters from Mr. Whittier, Mr. Bryant, Professor Longfellow, and Dr. Holmes are also produced in fac-simile; and an appreciative and interesting letter from the veteran English poet, R. H. Horne, is printed in extenso, being somewhat long for rendering in fac-simile. This is followed by several shorter letters, and a few poems concerning Poe. The volume is an elegant little quarto, adorned with a capital photograph of the poet from a daguerreotype, said to be the best extant likeness of him.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 161, column 1:]

*Edgar Poe: a Memorial Volume. By Sara Sigourney Rice. Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers. 1877.

The Life and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. A New Memoir, by E. L. Didier, and Addfitional Poems. New York: W. J. Widdleton. 1877

Notes: Although the article is unsigned, it is assigned to Ingram by John C. Miller in his bibliography in Building Poe Biography, 1977, p. 256. In his 1960 catalog of John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia, item 705, Miller states that the review may not entirely be the work of Ingram, but that Ingram had one or more friends on the staff of the Civil Service Review which accepted whatever he provided while also giving him cover to deny that he was responsible for the review. Such an arrangement was presumably particularly convenient to avoid being seen as unduly praising his own work on Poe.