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GLEANINGS IN THE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF POE
1. Of the seventy-one stories from the pen of Poe, the place of first publication of all except two — The Spectacles and The Premature Burial — has been pointed out by one or another of Poe's editors. I have recently stumbled upon the place of first publication of these two. The Spectacles appeared in the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper for March 27, 1844, and The Premature Burial in the same paper (a weekly) for July 31, 1844. A file of the Dollar Newspaper covering the years 1843-45 has lately come into the possession of the Maryland Historical Society at Baltimore.
This file also supplies the original text of The Gold Bug, advertised by the latest editors of Poe's tales as inaccessible,(1) though contemporary newspaper notices had made it plain that it was [page 268:] published in the Dollar Newspaper (for June 21 and June 28, 1843), having been awarded a prize of a hundred dollars offered by that newspaper. The story as originally published contains two illustrations by Darley, one showing Legrand and his companions at work in the treasure pit, the other exhibiting the treasure after it had been laid bare. The issue of June 28 contains the story in its entirety, and it was again published, in a prize-story supplement, on July 12, 1843.(2)
2. A dozen years before the publication of The Gold Bug, as I have elsewhere shown,(3) Poe submitted five of his stories to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, in competition for another hundred-dollar prize, to be won in this instance, by a curious irony of fate, not by Poe, but by Delia Bacon, of Shakespeare-Bacon notoriety. Even before this, however, Poe had formed the habit of submitting his verses to the magazines. In September, 1829, a part of his fantastic lyric, Fairy-Land, appeared in John Neal's journal, The Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, being there pronounced to be “nonsense, [though] rather exquisite nonsense.”(4) A month later the same poem was publicly rejected by N. P. Willis through the columns of the American Monthly Magazine. Willis's comment is interesting both as displaying his characteristic jauntiness and as reflecting the contemporary estimate in which Poe was held. He prefaces his notice with the statement that he finds much pleasure in destroying rejected manuscripts of bad verses, and in particular in watching them as they burn “within the fender.” “It is quite exciting,” he writes, “to lean over eagerly as the flame eats in upon the letters, and make out the imperfect sentences and trace the faint strokes in the tinder as it trembles in the ascending air of the chimney. There, for instance, goes a gilt-edged sheet which we remember was covered with some sickly rhymes on Fairy-land. The flame creeps steadily along the edge of the first leaf, taking in its way a compliment to some by-gone nonsense-verses of our own, inserted in brackets by the author to conciliate our good [page 269:] will. Now it flashes up in a broad blaze, and now it reaches a marked verse — let us see — the fire devours as we read:
‘They use that moon no more
For the same end as before —
Videlicet, a tent,
Which I think extravagant.’
Burn on, good fire!”(5)
The “sickly rhymes” here quoted by Willis are lines 35-38 of Poe's Fairy-Land. In justice to Willis, it should be added that another of his magazines, The New Mirror, published (in its issue of May 7, 1831) one of the earliest and one of the fairest of the contemporary notices of Poe's verses, and that he proved in Poe's darker years the staunchest and truest of his literary friends.
3. Among minor prose articles not heretofore attributed to Poe, but demonstrably his work, are the following:
a. A half-column notice of the Southern Literary Messenger in the Baltimore Republican of May 14, 1835. Poe's authorship of this item is established by a letter of his, of May 30, 1835, to the proprietor of the Messenger, T. W. White (Virginia Poe, XVII, p. 6).
b. Brief notices of the American Almanac and English Annuals in the Southern Literary Messenger for December, 1835 (II, p. 68). These are shown to be Poe's by a letter of T. W. White's published in J. H. Whitty's edition of Poe's poems (p. 179). The same letter confirms B. B. Minor's ascription to Poe of the notices of the Westminister Review, the London Quarterly Review, and the North American Review, in the same number of the Messenger (pp. 59-64).(6)
c. The review of The Magazines for June, 1845, in the Broadway Journal of May 17, 1845 (I, pp. 316-17). The note on Graham's Magazine has to do mainly with Hoffman's biographical sketch of Griswold which appeared in the current number of that magazine, and is evidently the article referred to in a letter of Poe's, printed by Griswold (I, p. xxii), as “my notice of C. F. Hoffman's sketch of you.” The item is of interest as showing that Poe, although naturally antipathetic to Griswold, was not incapable of saying a good word for him when he felt that occasion offered. [page 270:]
d. A note concerning an alleged plagiarism by Whittier, under the heading Editorial Miscellany, in the Broadway Journal for September 20, 1845. This is in part identical with No. 188 of the Marginalia as printed by Griswold (in, p. 570).
e. A review entitled Mrs. Lewis’ Poems in the Western Quarterly Review for April, 1849 (I, pp. 404-8). This article was published anonymously, but is partly a recast by Poe of his notice of Mrs. Lewis's poems in the Southern Literary Messenger for September, 1848. Poe refers to this paper (though he does not specifically acknowledge it) in a letter to Mrs. Clemm of September 5, 1849 (Virginia Poe, XVII, p. 369).
f. An interesting letter of Poe's, printed in George Lippard's Herbert Tracy (Philadelphia, 1844, pp. 1671). This letter, which bears date Feb. 18, 1844, and is addressed to Lippard, is devoted mainly to a criticism of Lippard's Ladye Annabel, but contains also some friendly counsel as to how an author should conduct himself when attacked by undiscerning and unscrupulous critics. “Let a fool alone — especially if he be both a scoundrel and a fool,” advises Poe, “and he will kill himself far sooner than you can kill him by any active exertion. . . . I have never yet been able to make up my mind whether I regard as the higher compliment, the approbation of a man of honor and talent, or the abuse of an ass or a blackguard.”
4. In addition to the foregoing, I wish to call attention to two items which I cannot prove to be Poe's, but which are, I think, entitled to consideration as being perhaps the work of his hand.
a. The first of these is a gruesome story, entitled A Dream, published over the signature “P.” in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post of August 13, 1831. The story purports to be an account of a dream in which the writer fancies himself as witnessing the “dying agonies of the God of Nature,” and later as wandering into the “burial ground of the monarchs of Israel,” where he is so much frightened by the apparition of the ghost of one of the buried kings of Israel that he suddenly awakes from his dream. A part of the concluding paragraph, describing the vision of the buried king of Israel, will serve best for illustration.
“'Twas a hideous, unearthly form, such as Dante in his wildest flights of terrified fancy, ne’er conjured up. I could not move, for terror had tied up volition. It approached me. I saw the grave-worm twining itself among the matted locks which in part covered [page 271:] the rotten scull. The bones creaked on each other as they moved on the hinges, for its flesh was gone. I listened to their horrid music, as this parody on poor mortality stalked along. He came up to me; and, as he passed, he breathed the cold damps of the lonely, narrow house directly in my face. The chasm in the heavens closed; and, with a convulsive shudder, I awoke.”
The resemblance here, both in matter and in style, to Poe's fully authenticated work is plain. We have already noted that the item is subscribed with the initial “P.” It should also be noted that Poe was on terms of friendly acquaintance with one of the assistant editors of the Post, L. A. Wilmer, at the time of (or shortly before) the publication of this story, and that, through his influence, presumably, the Post had, in September, 1830, and in May, 1831, published in its columns two of Poe's early poems.(7) It may be added that the hackneyed device with which the story ends is employed also in the denouement of Poe's The Angel of the Odd and The Premature Burial. But it should be said, on the other hand, that neither a similarity in style nor the presence of the initial “P.” nor any merely circumstantial evidence can furnish adequate ground for ascribing unreservedly to Poe an item not otherwise authenticated.(8)
b. The second dubious item to which I wish to direct attention is a fragment of verse published anonymously in the Southern Literary Messenger for March, 1835 (I, p. 370), under the title, Extract from an Unfinished Poem. The poem begins as follows:
There is a form before me now,
A spirit with a peerless brow,
And locks of gold that lightly lie,
Like clouds on the air of a sunset sky,
And a glittering eye, whose beauty blends
With more than mortal tenderness,
As bright a ray as Heaven sends
To light those orbs where the pure and blest
Are taking their eternal rest. [page 272:]
Sweet Spirit! thou hast stolen afar
From thy home in yonder crystal Star
That I might look on thee, and bless
Thy kindness and thy loveliness.
The rest of the poem is in much the same strain. In diction and tone the piece manifestly resembles Poe's early long poem, Tamerlane; the mention in lines 10 and 11 of a “sweet spirit” stolen from a “crystal star” suggests another of his early poems, Al Aaraaf; and there is a slight verbal correspondence (though the wording is obviously conventional) between lines 8 and 9:
. . . where the pure and blest
Are taking their eternal rest,
and lines 4 and 5 of The City in the Sea (1831):
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
Moreover, it has been made fairly plain that Poe did contribute to the Messenger verses that he was later unwilling to admit into the collective edition of his poems (1845): Professor Woodberry has suggested — and the suggestion seems a highly plausible one(9) — that the lines entitled Ballad in the Messenger for August, 1835, are in reality an early version of Poe's Bridal Ballad; and Mr. Whitty(10) assigns to Poe the lines To Sarah in the Messenger of the same month.
Here again, however, it ought to be said that similarities in manner and phrasing are, as a rule, inadequate as a basis for an unqualified ascription of authorship; hence I do not wish to be understood as holding that either of these items is surely Poe's. I have drawn attention to them, nevertheless, in the hope that some other student of Poe may be able to demonstrate conclusively their authorship.
KILLIS CAMPBELL.
University of Texas.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 267:]
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 268:]
2. Poe's stories, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Oblong Box, published in the Dollar Newspaper — in the issues of January 25, 1843, and August 28, 1844 — appear to be merely copies of earlier texts, though The Oblong Box as there published has the sub-title, “A Capital Story.”
3. The Dial, February 17, 1916 (LX, p. 146).
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 269:]
5. American Monthly Magazine, November, 1829 (I, pp. 586-87).
6. Southern Literary Messenger, 1834-1864, p. 37.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 271:]
7. To Science (published in the issue of September 11, 1830), and To Helen (in the issue of May 21, 1831).
8. In an article entitled The Poe Canon (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XXVII, p. 334) I have called attention to a number of items of Poe's time which are subscribed with the initial “P.”, but which are surely not the work of his hand. The list there given is by no means exhaustive.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 272:]
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Notes:
Thomas Ollive Mabbott, rejects the “Extract from an Unfinished Poem” with the comment “I cannot accept it,” but no further explanation (Poems, 1969, 1:506, item 46). The author of the poem has still not been identified.
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[S:0 - MLN, 1917] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Gleanings in the Bibliography of Poe (K. Campbell, 1917)