Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Poe's Iron Pen,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 206-229 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 206:]

12

POE'S IRON PEN

THERE IS GENERAL agreement that “The Fall of The House of Usher” of September, 1839, is “Poe's finest short story.”(1) Naturally, the list of recondite titles of obscure works, furnished by Poe in this Gothic tale, has engaged the attention of many commentators; they can all be authenticated, although not always in the form used by Poe, except for the “antique volume” called “The Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning.(2) This is the interior tale which, when narrated, serves as the textual accompaniment of the Lady Madeleine's efforts after seven or eight days of interment to free herself from her tomb; finally she returns to her twin brother, to destroy him in her death throes. Ethelred, the hero of “The Trist,” has been described as breaking in the door of the “obstinate and maliceful” Hermit, only to find a “dragon of scaly and prodigious demeanour ... which sate in guard before a palace of gold.” The monster shrieks while being destroyed, thereby providing another grim sound to parallel the noises made by Madeleine in approaching her cowardly and homicidal brother.

This Gothic interlude — too well known to need detailed presentation — has surely seemed less interesting than the earlier portions of the fascinating tale of the neurasthenic dilettante, Roderick Usher with his “wild” guitar music, morbid painting, and general ambience of decadence. Professor Mab-bott alone seems even to have bothered to detect the origin of Sir Launcelot Canning, “author” of “The Mad Trist.” His note is characteristically brief and much to the point: “The Mad Trist's author, Sir Launcelot Canning, is surely a relative of Chatterton's mythical authors.(3) Given the context of a Gothic castle, “the dark deeds” of an insane English nobleman, and [page 207:] a narrative of “uncouth and unimaginable prolixity,” I find rather fruitful this hint concerning the “William Canynge” of Thomas Chatterton's “Thomas Rowley” poems. The source is by no means to be limited to this one author, however, for it is fairly obvious that Poe, an idolator of Tennyson, derived the first part of his “buried” pseudonym from Tennyson's reference to Sir Lancelot, the gallant but blemished knight of the Round Table, mentioned early in “The Lady of Shalott.” Even more astonishing is the fact that the name Poe used for the author of this tale within a tale was used once again — this time more directly as the pseudonym for Edgar Allan Poe in his Stylus prospectus of 1843; within the prospectus he included a motto of three lines of verse on the subject of criticism, which was signed by “Launcelot Canning.” If my conclusions are correct, the two lines of verse in the narrative of “The Mad Trist” and the three lines about magazine critics in his prospectus must join the canon of Poe's poetry. More important than this addition is the need to explain fully the content of those three lines in terms of the derivation of the imagery and also of the titles of The Penn magazine and The Stylus. For that inquiry we shall have to consider the reputation of the Renaissance writer named Paulus Jovius or Paolo Giovio.

First, let us take note of Launcelot Canning in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The period of the enframing story is contemporary, vide the reference to Von Weber's last waltz or even the Vert Vert of Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset (1709-1777).(4) The “Mad Trist” episode is deliberately “uncouth” in its mise-en-scene and in its language. In this it is similar to Thomas Chatterton's fraudulent medieval manuscripts. Of course, Poe does not go to the length of ransacking Bailey's and Walker's dictionaries for archaic terms, as did the “wonderful boy” for his works. He merely remembers several of the obsolete terms read in Scott and other historical novelists, changes spellings as in “trist” for tryst in the title,(5) and gives us a veneer of medievalism which does not interfere with immediate comprehension.(6) On one page wehave “maliceful,” “uplifted his mace [page 208:] outright,” “alarumed,” “sore enraged,” and “sate” for sat, on the next, “pesty breath,” “withal so piercing,” “had fain to close,” and finally “in sooth tarried not” (3.293-295). The quality of the language is shown also in the couplet that should be printed in any edition of Poe's complete poems, since Poe is undoubtedly the “romancer” named Canning. It is inscribed on the brass shield on the wall, to be read by the knight who has broken down the hermit's door:

It is not difficult to prove Poe's awareness of the unhappy story of Thomas Chatterton, source of “Master Canynge” and Poe's “Sir Launcelot Canning.” I believe that Poe also knew a somewhat less familiar sequel to Chatterton's unhappy story — that which involved the insidious Sir Herbert Croft, who profited enormously from the precious letters owned by Chatterton's family and who engaged in a celebrated literary controversy with Robert Southey. Chatterton, born at Bristol in 1752, son of the sexton of St. Mary Redcliffe's, derived notions about medievalism from the parchments which his father brought home from the muniment room of the church; medievalism was a stream which flowed freely, at that period, in the same channels as the sources of The Castle of Otranto. Horace Walpole, the author of this prototype of Gothic tales, had almost been beguiled by Chatterton's history of painting, purportedly composed by a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, for his Bristol patron, William Canynge. After a prolific period of unremunerated hack work, the destitute Chat-terton took arsenic when he was not yet eighteen years old. The outlines of his unhappy life were known to the American writer; Poe, after his virtually stillborn Tamerlane and Other Poems of 1827, liked to consider himself an unappreciated boy genius.

Poe's single reference to Chatterton in the collected works confirms this knowledge. It occurs in his review of the Poetical [page 209:] Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson in Graham's Magazine of December, 1841. The two Davidson sisters, Lucretia Maria (1808-1825) and Margaret (1823-1838), of Plattsburg, New York, had become internationally famous for their precocious verse publications and their early death from tuberculosis.(7) Clearly they had many things in common with Chatterton, including Robert Southey's admiration. This is mentioned by Poe in his review of Washington Irving's Biography and Remains of the Late Margaret Davidson, in Graham's of August, 1841.(8) Four months later, Poe speaks again of her previously praised “Lenore” and of Lucretia's long poem Amir Khan.(9) As for Southey and Chatterton, Poe's reference is this:

Apparently Poe knew that Southey had engaged in a verbal battle with Sir Herbert Croft, who had profited greatly from the epistolary novel into which he incorporated letters written by Chatterton to his mother and sister. The book exploited the growing interest in the dead poet even in its title: Love and Madness; in a Series of Letters which contains the original account of Chatterton (London, 1786).(11) The surrounding text consisted almost entirely of the letters exchanged between a “Mr. H.” and “Miss R.,” which tell of their trysts for four years and of his murdering her when she refuses to marry him. Croft, the so-called author, had managed to secure, probably from Kearsley, his publisher, the real letters of Mr. James Hackman, who had murdered Miss Reay, his inamorata, the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich; and this affair too was only thinly veiled in the sensational novel. The book reached nine editions and was widely known by the pithy title Love and Madness.(12) [page 210:] Southey, in his reformistic mood of the late 1790's, admiring Chatterton as did the early romantics in general, became indignant when he discovered how Croft had cheated the impecunious and ailing mother and sister of Chatterton; he had promised them support in return for the use of their precious documents but paid them a total of eleven pounds, one shilling and sixpence. Announcing his projected volumes of Chatterton's works, Southey sent a letter to the Monthly Magazine, denouncing Croft. He even printed the letter as a handbill.(13) Croft, from abroad — or so he claimed to be — sent irate letters to the Tory Gentleman's Magazine, full of ad hominem arguments against Southey as a Jacobin.(14) With these he sought to distract the readers from his own obvious venality in the affair. Southey exposed his lies and trickery in a final letter to the Monthly Magazine of April, 1800.(15) Southey's publication in 1803 of the three volumes realized a goodly sum for the relief of Chatterton's family.(16) Poe must have heard about this famous controversy, as his reference above shows, and taken note of the title of Croft's book. In Love and Madness allusions to William Canynge might have suggested the Canning part of the pseudonym(17) (although Poe's source here could have been Chatterton directly), while the rendezvous and the dementia of “Mr. H.” might have furnished “The Mad Trist” title.

There are two indications in Poe's works that he had dipped into Croft's stock of arcane learning. One of the letters of Love and Madness deals with the derivation of The Life ... of Robinson Crusoe from Alexander Selkirk's “strange sequestration at Juan Fernandez.” Croft (or Mr. Hackman) says: “It is mentioned, I believe, in Walter's account of Anson's Voyage (which, by the way, was not written by Walter, but by Robins),”(18) that is, Benjamin Robins (1707-1751). This is an allusion to the Voyage Round the World of Lord George Anson, British admiral (1697-1792), written by his chaplain, Richard Walter, and published in 1748. On doubtful grounds Benjamin Robins was given credit for a share in this popular [page 211:] work.(19) Poe's “Marginalia” paragraph about far-fetched attributions is in the December, 1844 issue of the Democratic Review:

For my part I agree with Joshua Barnes: nobody but Solomon could have written the Iliad. The catalogue of ships was the work of Robins. [Harrison, 16.37]

Poe derived his information about Joshua Barnes from H. N. Coleridge's Greek Classic Poets. His interest in Robins, I believe, was stimulated by Croft.(20) The second indication of Poe's knowledge of the novel concerns his discussion of “palpable plagiarism”:

This is a point made in Love and Madness.(21)

“Sir Launcelot” presents very little difficulty, I feel. Poe's admiration for Tennyson was frequently expressed, and it is easy to prove his fondness for “The Lady of Shalott,” which had appeared in Tennyson's Poems of 1833.(22) (Tennyson's next reference to Sir Launcelot was to be in his “Morte d’Arthur” and “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere,” published in 1842.)(23) Poe's pseudonym in the “Usher” of 1839 derives from “The Lady of Shalott,” the third section of which tells of the knight who fatally awakens the girl. (Incidentally, there are marked resemblances here to the knight in “Eldorado.”)(24) Poe's awareness of the early volume is shown throUgh charges of plagiarism incurred by his 1827 volume, which he counters with his headnote of 1845: “Private reasons ... which have reference to ... the date of Tennyson's first poems — have induced me ... to re-publish these, the crude compositions of my earliest boyhood” (Harrison, 7.xlix). It is to this charge also that Poe alludes in a letter to Lowell, in which he shows his knowledge of the dates of Tennyson's early poetry.(25) In his [page 212:] Drake-Halleck review of April, 1836, Poe had referred to Tennyson with an implied familiarity with his works and also in a context of medieval knight errantry.(26) Clearly, he knew the 1833 volume of poetry well. As for Poe's specific knowledge of Sir Lancelot from “The Lady of Shalott,” there are three references to the poem, all of which come after 1839 but which indicate a long-standing acquaintance with the poem; these references are in August, 1843, December, 1844, and June, 1845.(27) Without doubt Poe was deeply aware of this lyrical and medieval early poem by Tennyson, and, I think, borrowed the name, Sir Lancelot, in an archaic spelling employed by Tennyson himself in 1842 at the first printing of “Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.”

In continuing our pursuit of Sir Launcelot Canning we must follow Poe into one of the most complicated and deeply worn paths that he ever trod — his attempt to found a magazine for whose editorial policy he would be solely responsible and which would guarantee him a sizable income such as was enjoyed by Thomas W. White of the Messenger or George R. Graham of Graham's Magazine (an income that he felt reflected then the labors of Edgar Allan Poe more than of any other person on the staff). But Poe's ambitions were not primarily materialistic or egotistic, save in the sense that he wished to become a cultural force in a nation that sadly needed one. Of course, the New England literati expressed their own viewpoint, which Poe variously derided as moralistic or puritanical, provincial, and transcendental — that of the “Frog-pond,” as he often called it — while New York literary aspirations were expressed, rather badly he thought, through The Knickerbocker of the detested Lewis Gaylord Clark. The Philadelphia magazines had yielded to frilly prettiness or the “namby-pamby” style, as he termed it more than once,(28) and the Southern Literary Messenger had gone to ruin since his departure. While serving under the unappreciative and crass theatrical man William Burton, Poe cherished the ideal of having his own organ with which to lead “the literary community.”(29) [page 213:] To see how constant was this effort to secure the necessary financial backing through a patron and through subscribers, glance into the indices of any biography of Poe under the headings “The Penn” and “The Stylus.” Poe called control of a powerful magazine “the one great purpose of my literary life.” Unhappily, it was never fulfilled, even when he had the Broadway Journal, the moribund relic of Charles F. Briggs, in his own hands in 1845.(30)

Perhaps I should explain why this long and tangled series of false starts and almost successful journeys, as with Thomas Cottrell Clarke in 1843 and Edward N. H. Patterson of Oquawka, Ohio, in 1848, should involve the study of “Launce-lot Canning.” The answer lies in one of the many forms of the printed prospectus for the magazine, that of March 4, 1843, on which appears a motto concerning the type of literary criticism that was to be a major feature of The Stylus. The three lines of poetry, which deserve a place in the Poe canon, are signed “Launcelot Canning.” It is found in Quinn's reprint of portions of this prospectus but not in any of Poe's collected works.(31) This omission may have caused Poe students to overlook the fact that the author of “The Mad Trist,” now deprived of his sobriquet “Sir,” is the author of the motto statement on The Stylus:

This motto is pregnant with implications for Poe's critical opinions and literary efforts throughout the rest of his career.

First I must indicate the way in which the “pen” or “Penn” magazine became the “Stylus,” as far as the prospectus of the journal and Poe's glowing plans were concerned. Poe must have been revolving in his mind the founding of his own magazine soon after his departure from the Messenger in January, 1837, but his abject poverty made this simply a fantasy. During [page 214:] his unsatisfactory association, as a subordinate, with William E. Burton of the Gentleman's Magazine, July, 1839 to June, 1840, the fantasy came to assume body and substance. In a letter of June, 1840, recriminating Burton for his plans (inadequately concealed) to sell the journal to free himself for the stage, Poe avows his own magazine plans more definitely than before: “Had I not firmly believed it your design to give up your Journal, with a view of attending to the Theatre, I should [never] have dreamed of attempting one of my own” (Ostrom, 1.132). I cite this to explain Poe's rather rapid production of a prospectus for The Penn magazine in the Saturday Courier of June 13, 1840. Strangely enough, although there was to be a succession of modified and revised prospectuses, this first is the only form of Poe's fundamental position on magazine publication which has been widely available in entirety to the students of Poe.(32) Since the country and, as usual, Poe were in the midst of a financial depression, the would-be proprietor became an associate of Graham on the reorganized Gentleman's Magazine sold by Burton; he postponed but did not abandon the publication of The Penn.

By 1842, after he was separated from Graham's Magazine, Poe revived his plan for The Penn.(33) On February 3, 1842, he wrote to F. W. Thomas that “The project of the new Magazine still ... occupies my thoughts” and expresses his belief that it “might even play an important part in the politics of the day, like Blackwood” (Ostrom, 1.192). This notion represents an expansion of the critical and literary purpose he had previously entertained. On July 6, 1842 (Ostrom, 1.208) and October 5 (1.216) he still thinks of the magazine as The Penn. Moreover, up to September 27, 1842, Poe has not had a new prospectus printed (Ostrom, 1.214).

When Thomas Cottrell Clarke, publisher of the weekly Saturday Museum of Philadelphia, offered to patronize Poe's new magazine, the name was changed to The Stylus, since The Penn was a too local pun on Pennsylvania plus editor's pen. A new prospectus was printed by February 23, 1843, when Poe [page 215:] used one of the broadsides as writing paper for his letter to Frederick W. Thomas (Ostrom, 1.223-225). The same letter alludes to the prospectus as being “on the outside” of Clarke's Saturday Museum. Quinn has covered adequately the propaganda campaign conducted by the Museum, beginning with Poe's front-page biography in the issue of February 25, 1843, reprinted in the March 4 issue. Poe also mentions to Thomas his having to supply all the literary material for the first year under his own name and “pseudonyms.” His being represented, in a sense, as “Launcelot Canning” in the advance notice of the magazine is significant.

I know of no study per se of the pseudonyms used by Poe for his various personae throughout his anxious and unhappy life. If ever there lived a sensitive being with reason to wish himself possessed of another form, it was Poe, especially after he found himself cut off from the benefits that he had expected as a member of John Allan's family. From that early period he must frequently have thought of himself under the guise of other names and other personalities. The pseudonyms that he used fall into three groups: the names that he used as incognitos; those which he signed to tales or poems as the author, which were not intrinsic to the action of the fiction itself; and, third, those in which he became the named character through the device of autobiographical narrative. Of the first group, the earliest was Henri Le Rennet, used in 1827.(34) Upon entering the United States Army on May 26, 1827, Poe gave the pseudonym of Edgar A. Perry, as well as the false age of twenty-two. As Quinn observes, since “minors were at that time accepted, it is evident that Poe intended to disappear.”(35)

Perhaps the development of his creative gifts through the ensuing years after his return from Fort Moultrie enabled Poe to represent himself in the many narrators, for whatever motivations of catharsis or sublimation one may impute to the creative act. Only in 1844 do we find “a seedy looking gentleman” giving his name as Thaddeus Perley to Mr. Gabriel Harrison, tobacconist and president of the White Eagle Political [page 216:] Club. When he returned a few weeks later for a second “handout” of tobacco, he also wrote a campaign song for the club called “The White Eagle” — an act for which he accepted a bag of coffee.(36) “Edward S. T. Grey,” the next one of Poe's pseudonyms, was used first in a disguised note sent to Mrs. Helen

Whitman on September 5, 1848 (Ostrom, 2.367); and finally in a plan to have Maria Clemm send her future mail “direct to Phila. For fear I should not get the letter, sign no name & address it to E. S. T. Grey Esqre” (Ostrom, 2.461).(37)

As for his first-person narratives — the scope of his imaginative role-playing appears throughout his varied “autobiographies.” It is worthy of note, perhaps, that Poe, uncertain about his place in the family of John Allan, should so often have given no name at all to the narrator, as in the “Ms. Found in a Bottle” or “The Assignation” or “The Tell-Tale Heart,” an omission which helps to universalize each of these tales. Often the names are brief or generalized or, occasionally, humorous. The narrator of “Berenice” is Egeus (Shakespeare's?); of “Lionizing,” Robert Jones; of “William Wilson,” the character of that name; of “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Signora Psyche Zenobia; of “Why the Little Frenchman,” Sir Pathrick O’Grandison; of “The Spectacles,” Adolphus Simpson, ne Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart; of “The Literary Life,” Thingum Bob, Esquire; of “The Cask of Amontillado,” Montresor; of “Mellonta Tauta,” Pundita, of “The Business Man,” Peter Pendulum, changed to Peter Proffit; of The Narrative, Arthur Gordon Pym, significantly of Edgarton, Nantucket, and of “The Journal,” Julius Rodman.

Of the pseudonyms which Poe gave to his writings, aside from the last two autobiographical travels (“Pym” and “Rodman”), there are only two or three before “Launcelot Canning,” although one name was to be applied to five tales. The first was attached to a satire, “The Atlantis, a Southern World — or a wonderful Continent discovered,” by Peter Prospero, published in the Baltimore American Museum, serially, September, 1838, to June, 1839. Although it has not been collected [page 217:] by Harrison, I believe that A. H. Quinn is correct in his attribution, as I have shown elsewhere.(38) The name Peter Prospero (like that of Peter Proffit in “The Business Man”) has a mocking irrelevancy to Poe and also a touch of whimsy in its combination of the humdrum “Peter” with the Italian “Prospero,” perhaps reminiscent of the prince in “The Masque of the Red Death.” This stylistic discrepancy between forename and family name can be found in Launcelot and Canning.

Early in 1845, Poe published “The Raven,” under the curious pseudonym of “Quarles.”(39) I scarcely think that he ignored Francis Quarles, whose name occurs in his 1836 review of S. C. Hall's The Book of Gems (Harrison, 9.91); there may be a small measure of fitness in the fact that Quarles published in 1620 his paraphrase of the book of Jonah, entitled Feast of Wormes, and in 1635 his more famous Emblems. I doubt that the pseudonym was derived from the word for controversies (quarrels) in which Poe was so often embroiled. As for the possibility that this pseudonym led to its extension as Quarles Quickens, satire on Charles Dickens, I leave that exploded theory to the multifold pages of Mary Phillips.(40) Later in the year 1845, Poe signed “Lyttleton Barry” to five of his early tales when he reprinted them in the Broadway Journal.(41) In these two words are implied many possibilities of literary and personal meaning, just as in Launcelot Canning. There is, first of all, George Lord Lyttleton (1709-1773), to whose celebrated Dialogues of the Dead Poe alludes in the “Pinakidia” of 1836 (14.56). “Barry” could easily have been suggested by the popular Barry Cornwall, pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874), poet, dramatist, etc., whom Poe mentions four times.(42) But I think that a more important author — at least in Poe's day — suggests the two names, Bulwer Lytton himself, who loomed so important in Poe's criticism and also in his creative works.(43) The similarity of initials and the near correspondence of syllables manifest Poe at his word-play methods.(44)

It is fitting that in 1843 Poe should have dropped the “Sir” part of the pseudonym used in “The Fall of the House of [page 218:] Usher,” when he attached the name to a motto sounding the trumpet call of “firm Truth” in criticism, rather than the minor strains of Gothic melodrama. Yet the archaic quality of Canning, from William Canynge, is carried over a bit in the phrase “With the antique iron pen” of the verses. Since the lines occur in the never completely reprinted prospectus to The Stylus of 1843, I shall briefly postpone discussion until the reader can see how they fit into the total text, taken from the Philadelphia Saturday Museum of March 4, 1843:(45)

Certainly no great creative effort was needed for the versified motto. Yet it should be placed unequivocally in the canon of Poe's poetry, along with Poe's examples of dactylics and hexameters in “The Rationale of Verse,” which have been left out of every edition of his poetry thus far (Harrison, 14.228 and 265). As for “Canning's” metrics, one wonders what verse form Poe was implying for the poem of which this is supposed to be a part, since the first line, printed as though the end of one, contains three iambic feet, which correspond with those of the third line (an anapest substituting for an iambus in the first foot). The second line is scarcely reconcilable with the others, since it starts with three feet of iambic trimeter and then veers into feet lacking the first unstressed syllable before the resumption of the iambic pattern (“Lo! this is writ). It is what Poe too loosely called “catalectic” (14.244). Perhaps Poe showed that he felt the lines to be weak when he dropped the motto from two other versions of the prospectus, printed in 1848 (although there may have been another cause in that he provided a Latin motto plus a picture for the title page, as we shall see). The idea of the lines is close to the prospectuses that he had prepared, all of which stress his resolution as sole editor of the newly founded magazine to deliver an “honest and fearless [page 222:] opinion” (paragraph 3 in 1840) or “a sincere and a fearless opinion” (in 1843 and 1848). Poe was conscious, of course, of being called the tomahawk critic, and commentators often try to vindicate his unsparing slashing of weak authors like Norman Leslie or Thomas Ward (“Flaccus”) as well as his sentimental sparing of literary ladies whose sole merits lay in their good intentions and femininity.(46)

In view of the picture, however, that he drew later for the title page of The Stylus, with a prominent place given to “truth,” it is important to realize that Poe earnestly thought of his role in criticism as a vates, drawing his dicta from some aesthetic height and gifted with a sense of first principles as absolute and immanent as those of the New England moralists or Puritans, as he sneeringly called them in the prospectus. Appropriately he capitalizes every letter of “Truth,” for his sense of truth as a critic is fundamentally derived from the aesthetic empyrean. Throughout the prospectus he promises that he will be unsparing or, as he says in the motto, “unbending”; the new journal will try to be “more vigorous, more pungent, more original, more individual and more independent” (paragraph 5). It will offer “a fair field” for the “true [Poe's italics] intellect of the land.” Compared with such quarterlies as the North American Review The Stylus will find it “difficult” to be as “dishonest” (5, last sentence). In its “Critical and Biographical sketches of American Writers” (basis of the “Literati” sketches), it will present with “rigorous impartiality” the “claims of each” (6). It will be “aloof from all personal bias,” and will fear only “outraging the Right,” another capital concept, if we may pun in using a favorite Poe adjective (7). Poe wished to establish a “vision of Literary Order” or a “Republic of Letters,” but one fears that a functioning Stylus would only have established a none-too-benevolent autocracy, ruled absolutely by the caustic critic Edgar Allan Poe; witness his narrow or narrowing concept of the beautiful in “The Philosophy of Composition” (Harrison, 14.201) or “The Poetic Principle” (14.290).(47) Nevertheless, Poe vigorously maintained [page 223:] this estimate of his own peculiar ability to convey truth, interpreted a little in the Keatsian strain.

Another key phrase in Poe's motto, the “antique iron pen,” needs explanation, although of course it obviously refers both to the title of the magazine and to the objectivity of the managing editor. This is explained by Poe in his second sentence: “ ‘The Penn Magazine,’ it has been thought, was a name somewhat too local in its suggestions, and THE STYLUS has been finally adopted.” Launcelot Canning, of course, did not originate the phrase “iron pen,” which was, to be sure, “antique” in itself, being found in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 17:1: “Written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond [Scrip-turn est stylo ferreo in unque adamantino].”(48) I believe that Poe combined the biblical reference with one which he picked up from Wallace's novel Stanley, from which he had borrowed many erudite references.(49) The basic source, as I shall prove, was Paolo Giovio, known as Paulus Jovius (1483-1552) of Como, Florence, Rome, and other places. His Latin Lives of Illustrious Men (Elogia virorum illustrium) of 1546 and History of His Own Times (Pauli Jovii historiarum sui temporis) of 1550 won fame and fortune for him; he had the papal patrons Leo X and Clement VII, and the royal patrons Francis I and Charles V. The well-known fact about this wealthy, venal man was that he wrote history and biography to please his benefactors. All the commentaries concur in associating him with a saying that he had two pens, one of gold and the other of iron, depending upon the payment or favors received. In view of Poe's attributing the statement in Latin directly to Jovius (see below), I have sought the original source but with little success. Michaud refers the idea to his letters, but my perusal of those collected has not revealed the statement.(50) The Grand Diction-naire Universel implies that this was said of Jovius by Bran-tome, the chatty annalist, but that source has not yielded it.(51) Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire Historique et critique asserts that “some said that he prided himself on having” the two pens for princes who had been generous to him or parsimonious.(52) [page 224:] Alexander Chalmers cautiously writes that he “is said to have asserted that he had two pens, the one of iron and the other of gold, which he made use of alternately, as occasion required.”(53) Apparently, it is the less cautious or the epitomizing sources, such as Joseph Thomas, which attribute it directly to him.(54) The ambiguous derivation seems to be this: “The old story that he said he kept a golden and an iron pen, to use according as people paid him, condenses the truth in epigram.”(55) It is impossible to determine whose epigram it originally was.

Wallace's inept comparison of the independent pens of Pope and Jovius led to Poe's allusion, printed in the “Marginalia” of the Messenger, July, 1849:

Poe's comment on Jovius's phrase shows either an unlikely ignorance of Jeremiah or a deliberate warping of the point of “adamantine” in order to make a pun on the goose quill and “goose heads” of authors. I doubt that Poe was ignorant of Byron's words on the subject, at the very beginning of English-Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a work which he knew well:

The bimetallic standard of Jovius obviously made a strong impression on Poe. When he was finally successful in securing another backer of his magazine after the Clarke fiasco in 1843, in the person of E. H. N. Patterson, owner of the Oquawka,

Illinois, Spectator, in May, 1849, he sent the man a title page “designed by myself about a year ago” (Ostrom, 2.443). On it appears a motto in Latin purporting to be the words of Paulus Jovius, although somewhat differently arranged from Poe's “Marginalia” citation: “Aureus aliquando STYLUS, ferreus aliquando.”

At the same time, in January and again in April, 1848, Poe revised the prospectus in his final search for subscribers and a patron. The January version of this “critical work” by Poe was printed in 1934 by Robertson, but it has been apparently ignored by students of Poe.(57) The final version of the prospectus, dated April, 1848, originally contained in a letter of February 29, 1848, is owned by the Lilly Library of Indiana University. I reprint the text of this presumably unique copy below.(58) The revised prospectus does not include the 1843 motto by “Launcelot Canning “ In a way, it has received a substitute in the motto now assigned to the title page of the “forthcoming” magazine as designed by Poe himself. Poe apparently had a strong sense of the epitomizing force of a good motto. This is seen in his changing the mottoes of works that he reprinted, or in his adding them to many tales when reprinted in the Broadway Journal. In critical references too he evinces this sense, as when he says about the detested North American Review: “As I see no motto on its title-page, let me recommend it one” (Harrison, 16.145) or when he discusses the overlong poetic mottoes heading the verses of Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Sigourney (8.125-126). In addition to the change concerning the motto, the last prospectus for Poe's “dream” shows many changes of content, chiefly in a shift away from criticism as the sole purpose of The Stylus.

A comparison of the three prospectuses reveals many interesting shifts in Poe's thought about the role of the magazine in national culture and the role of criticism.(59) From the two additional prospectuses printed above, it appears evident that Poe has gone back to The Penn prospectus for the major part of his 1848 version. The first paragraphs in both are the same save that Graham's Magazine is now added to the Messenger as his “points of departure” in editing (see paragraph 4 of 1843). Slight ‘changes in wording occur in paragraphs 2 and 3. The 1840 “purest rules of Art” now become “intelligible laws of art,” and there is no return to the discussion of the “overdone causticity” in the critical notices and the “mellowing” of the forme1 y petulant critic. At the same time, the petulance [page 228:] of paragraph 2 of 1843 entirely disappears from the last prospectus. Paragraph 4 voices a concept new to The Penn but not to the 1843 Stylus, in which the fifth paragraph speaks of discussing “the Belles-Lettres, ... the Fine Arts, ... the Drama” and of provision for a “Retrospect of our Political History.” While the “fair field for the true talent of the land” suggests the “Republic of Letters” (paragraph 5, 1843), mentioned in The Penn (without capitals), an emphasis which Lewis Simpson finds paramount in both, the elimination of the phrase suggests a more disillusioned Poe, less comradely in feeling with the many literati (save for the women), who had drawn away from him during the years.

Yet he seems to broaden the scope of the magazine — purely critical in 1840 and called a “Monthly Journal of General Literature” in 1843 — to a true cultural organ in 1848; notice the subtitle and the italics of the same phrase in paragraph 4 (“Literature Proper,” etc.). The element of political history, included in 1843, has now disappeared, another proof perhaps of Poe's disenchantment with that field. And yet the ideas current in the world of broad culture are now to become a regular feature, through European correspondents, while Charles Anthon, as is clearly intended, will supervise “classical letters.”(60) This feature, in a sense, counterbalances the loss of the 1843 idea, in paragraph 4, of a series of “Critical and Biographical Sketches of American Writers,” to be investigated with “rigorous impartiality.” The publication of the “Literati” papers made this less urgent, and the antagonisms and outcries stimulated may have taught him the danger of thus passing judgment ex cathedra on his fellow authors. Most important, throughout the entire prospectus, the language is modified from its bold, self-righteous tone in the first two versions; Poe still insists on “one mind alone” in “general control” (paragraph 2), “a sincere and a fearless opinion,” and an “independent criticism,” but he eliminates all contemptuous remarks to the “arrogance” of “organized cliques” (1840) or the “pompous or Puritanical way” and “stilted dulness” of the quarterlies [page 229:] (1843). Also, the aim, which was to “please” in 1840 and to “judge” in 1843, now seems a bit uncertain, as one might expect from the erratic course of Poe's life during 1847-1849. There are hints in the subtitle and in paragraphs 4 and 5 that perhaps Poe was less averse to the Utilitarian or Benthamite goal of general enlightenment as presupposing the improvement of public taste. And yet paragraphs 2 and 3 still contain the core of his opinion — that a magazine must exert a vigorous and individualized critical influence to lead to national growth and to broad effectiveness.

And this was clearly shown in the design that Poe sketched for Mr. Patterson in Oquawka, enclosing it in his letter of May 23, 1849, showing a right hand with an iron stylus writing on a tablet the Greek word for “truth,” with Jovius's Latin motto underneath it and the words “Edited by Edgar A. Poe” at the very bottom.(61) (See the frontispiece illustration of this book.)

We now see clearly that the iron pen or “stylus” was derived from Paulus Jovius, whose form of utterance is slightly different from the Messenger citation. The iron pen, having nothing to do with the flattery of Jovius, is shown in the hand of the editor. Poe seems unaware of the venality of Jovius, in view of his identification of the motto on the title page. Although the poetic motto of “Launcelot Canning” has disappeared from the prospectus, the title page of the journal preserves and interestingly displays its essential phrase. The editor's opinion, we had been told, must be open only to truth, not to “personal bias” or “fear” of outraged dignity, and this stress is continued in the word written by the iron pen, for we can easily see the Greek word for truth, “Aletheia” ('Αλήθεια) or rather “Alethe” ('Αλήθε) since the pen has not completed the whole. Poe had delivered metaphysical and scientific truth to America the previous year in Eureka, and the same spirit apparently drove him in his search for a magazine that would bring an enlightening criticism to an unappreciative and uncomprehending America.