Text: Alphonso Gerald Newcomer, “The Editing of Poe,” The Dial (Chicago, IL), vol. XXX, no. 354, March 16, 1901, p. 183, col. 2

THE EDITING OF POE.

(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

The distress of your correspondent, “S.,” in THE DIAL for Feb. 1, over the supposed misquotation in Mr. Stedman's Anthology, is another straw which shows how set the winds of American appreciation of Poe. Our poets, even Poe, are household poets, well-loved, memorized, but not critically studied. Now Poe is the only one of them of whose works we have something like a definitive critical edition, and yet so little is that known that a supposed error in Mr. Stedman's Anthology does not suggest a comparison with Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry's Poe. I can scarcely conceive of an Englishman using his Tennyson thus.

The communication is further interesting as showing the fatility of à priori æsthetic reasoning. “Gray eye glances” is called a “distressing alliteration” of which Poe would have been incapable! Yet Tennyson changed “ The tall masts quiver’d as they lay afloat” (“Dream of Fair Women”) to “The high masts flicker’d as they lay afloat,” and, though the change was compelled by other changes in the same stanza, the alliteration was not found offensive. And how should alliteration have been offensive to the poet of “weak and weary,” “quaint and curious,” “nodded, nearly napping,” “named Lenore”? The simple fact is that we are used to “dark eye glances”; and poets may take a lesson upon the danger of changing their printed text. “These old shoes,” said Emerson, “are easy to my feet.”

The really interesting question under all this is the wisdom of Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry's adoption of Poe's marginal emendations. Their general principle, which they defend, is doubtless right, and it would be too delicate a task (à priori reasoning again) to decide that the principle should be departed from in any particular instance. Yet in this instance “gray eyes” was substituted after 1845, and Poe's judgment in those latter disastrous years might well be questioned. Was the change made for purely æsthetic reasons, or out of personal caprice? We might at least be pardoned for preferring to keep the color of the eyes which originally inspired the poem.

A. G. NEWCOMER.

Stanford University, March 1, 1901.