Text: Killis Campbell, “Bibliographical Notes on Poe — II,” The Nation (New York, NY), December 30, 1909, pp, 467-468

[page 467, column 2, continued:]

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON POE. — II.

Last week I called attention to a number of brief essays by Poe that have been overlooked by Poe's editors. In this second and final instalment of my article I wish to direct attention to some neglected versions of certain of the poems and tales.

Of these the most interesting are those to be found in the Flag of Our Union for 1849. This periodical, a weekly published at Boston, is, for 1849 at least, of little interest except as being the place of first publication of most of Poe's best productions during his final year. But this interest has been enhanced by the fact that files of the paper had eluded the search of all Poe's editors, except, perhaps, Griswold, who, however, makes no mention of it. The copy that has at last turned up is to be found in the Library of Congress, to which it came, I am credibly informed through an exchange a few with one of the Boston libraries.

Poe's letters had made it clear that at least one of the tales (“Hop-Frog”) and three of the poems (“A Valentine,” “For Annie,” and the sonnet “To My Mother”) had appeared in the Flag in the spring or summer of 1849; but it is not clear in what numbers they had appeared. It now develops that “Hop-Frog” appeared in the issue of March 17, and that the poems appeared, respectively, on March 3, April 28, and July 7. It further develops that not only these, but five other of Poe's poems and tales appeared there, as follows: “A Dream within a Dream,” March 31; “Von Kempelen and his Discovery,” April 14; “Eldorado,” April 21; “X-ing a Paragrab,” May 12; and “Landor's Cottage,” June 9. All of these are duly advertised as “By Edgar A. Poe,” each of is formally announced in the number immediately preceding that in which it appeared, and after the first or second of these announcements Poe is proudly proclaimed as “our regular contributor.”

Of the nine tales and poems thus brought out in the Flag of our Union, only one, “A Dream within a Dream,” had appeared previously (in the “Poems” of 1827, 1829, and 1831). One outcome, then, of the unearthing of a file of this paper is to reveal the place and the exact time of first publication of eight of Poe's poems and [column 2:] tales. Another is to establish the authenticity of “Eldorado.” This had been doubted, and by no less an authority than the late W. M. Griswold (see Woodberry's “Life of Poe,” II, 417). Still another gain is to acquit the elder Griswold of having coined the title, “A Dream within a Dream.”

The text of Poe's publications in the Flag differs but little from the text of Griswold. In the tales, the only noteworthy variation that I detected in a hasty examination was an additional sentence at the end of “Landor's Cottage,” in which Poe mentioned the possibility of bringing out a third number of the series to which this belongs. Of the poems, “For Annie” is farthest of all removed from Griswold, showing differences not only in phrase, but also in line-division and in the order of stanzas; but it will remembered that Poe complained in a letter to Mrs. Richmond that the text of this poem had been garbled by the Flag, gave this as his reason for Willis publish a corrected copy in the Home Journal.* “A Valentine” also displays several variations — seven or eight in all. But To My Mother” has only one variant reading — sweet instead of dear in the fifth line; and “Eldorado” and “A within a Dream” differ in no respect from Griswold

The other variants of the poems to which I desire to call attention are (1) an early draft of the sonnet “Silence” in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine for September, (2) a version of the sonnet “To Science” Graham's Magazine for June, 1841, being prefixed there to “The Island of the Fay”;† (3) a reprint of “Ulalume” in the Literary World of March 3, 1849 (see Poe's letters of February 16 and March 8, 1849, to FE. A, Duyckinck, then one of the editors of the Literary World); and (4) a version of the sonnet “To My Mother” of Memory” for 1850 (an annual edited by R. Coates and published Philadelphia in the autumn of 1849).

Of these the reprint of “Ulalume” is least important, since it exhibits only variation not found elsewhere — ”till” for “until” in line 57. The versions of the sonnets “To Science” and “To My Mother,” however, are of considerable interest, each of them displaying upwards of half a dozen unique readings . But more noteworthy still is the early version of “Silence.” This differs radically from all subsequent forms of that sonnet, and should perhaps be accounted an independent poem. In view of this, and because it is not accessible in the magazine in which it appeared, I venture to present it here in its entirety:

Comparison of these lines with “Silence” as we know it in the collective editions of Poe makes obvious the difference between the two: they treat their subject differently and they possess nothing in common in phrasing It is in this difference, perhaps, that we are to seek an explanation of the neglect that has been visited upon the earlier version. For in all that has been written about Poe I can discover only one allusion to it — that of Professor Woodberry in the first edition of his life of Poe (p. 115), where he mentions a sonnet, in Burton's for 1839, “conjecturally [Poe's], although never afterwards acknowledged”; and even this bare mention Professor Woodberry omits in the revised edition of his work. But the poem is surely Poe's. It is true that it was signed merely by the initial “P.”; but so, too, were Poe's “Fairyland” and the lines “To the River ——— ” in Burton's for the preceding month; and so also was the later and perfected “Silence” as republished in the Broadway Journal in 1845. Moreover, appearing as it did in Burton's while Poe was one of its editors and after he had published there other things signed in the same way, I cannot help feeling that Poe, if the lines were not his, would somehow have made it clear that they were not — as he did with more than one thing wrongly attributed to him. Finally, it is not difficult to discover in this early draft a parallelism in substance with several other things by Poe, notably his “Spirits of the Dead” and “The Valley of Unrest” and the prose essay “Silence — A Fable.”

KILLIS CAMPBELL

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 647, column 2:]

* It is open to question, however, whether Poe's explanation is to be accepted, since the poem was published under the same date in both periodicals — April 28, 1849.

† This was published in the “Virginia Poe” in connection with the variant readings of “The Island of the Fay” (IV, 307), but was overlooked by both Professor Harrison and Professor Woodberry in their bibliographies and in their lists of variant readings for the poems.