Text: Floyd Stovall, “Introduction to the AMS Edition,” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, AMS Press (reprint), 1979 (unnumbered pages of front matter in volume I) (This material is ©1979 by AMS Press)

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The publication history of writing by and about Edgar Allan Poe is a remarkable one. He began to write at a very early age and published his first book of poems in 1827 at the age of eighteen, his second in 1829, and his third in 1831, but there was no other until The Raven and Other Poems in 1845, when he was thirty-six. His long story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, had been brought out in 1838 but was not widely noticed. His first collection of short fiction, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, appeared in 1840 in two volumes, and in 1845, the publishers of The Raven and Other Poems issued Tales as a companion volume. He planned a series of pamphlet publications to be called The Prose Romances of Edgar Allan Poe, but only one installment was published; it appeared in 1843 and contained only two stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the minor tale, “The Man that Was Used Up.” In 1848 he published a work in prose with the title Eureka: A Prose Poem, yet on the first page of the main text he called it “an Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe.”

On these slender volumes and half a dozen poems and tales not included in them rests his fame as a creative artist. In addition, his work as a literary critic, though not of equal importance to the reading public, Is nevertheless an original and lasting contribution to [page 2:] the world of letters. Between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-six he was engaged most of the time in editing popular magazines. To these and to other periodicals he contributed, besides poems and tales, a number of distinguished essays on critical theory and several hundred book reviews in some of which there are passages of general criticism only less valuable than that of his essays devoted to general principles.

Shortly before his death at the age of forty years, Poe authorized Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an ordained minister and well-known editor and compiler of anthologies, to collect and publish his more important writing in case he should not live to do it himself. He was not an admirer of Griswold, but he recognized his competence as an editor and obviously assumed that he would fulfill the responsibilities generally expected of an editor. Unfortunately for Poe's reputation, Griswold had nursed unsuspected and bitter resentments, presumably arising from Poe's sharp criticism of some of his work, and immediately took advantage of his position as literary executor to defame Poe with falsehoods and slanders in an obituary notice published in the New York Tribune two days after his death and signed by the fictitious name “Ludwig.” This article and much more, including forgeries and unexplained omissions in some of Poe's correspondence, was elaborated in his Memoir published the following year as part of his edition of Poe's writings. It is not necessary or desirable to look further into this sordid betrayal by a trusted executor, though the effects of it were lasting and still occasionally distort the judgment of some commentators on Poe and his work.

Because of the seemingly perverse human tendency to believe the worst rather than the best in the conduct of famous persons, it is likely that the world-wide interest in Poe that rapidly developed in the last half of [page 3:] the nineteenth century was partly due to Griswold's falsehoods, though it should also be noted that the worth of his work as poet, critic, and fiction writer was at the same time widely recognized. So much has been written and is still being written about Poe and his work that there are probably ten people who know him only at second hand to one with a first-hand knowledge of his books. The Alderman Library at the University of Virginia has more than 1200 linear feet of shelves filled with books by and about Edgar Allan Poe, mostly about him, besides the many thousands of pages available to the curious in periodicals and an incalculable number of borrowings, imitations, and parodies. The Raven Society, its membership consisting of advanced students, former students, faculty, and others considered worthy of the honor who are related in some way to the University, was founded in 1904, and still requires every newly-elected member of whatever rank — and the ranks extend from undergraduates to governors and senators — to write a parody of “The Raven” and deposit a copy in the archives of the society. The literary quality of these parodies often leaves much to be desired, but most of the initiates at least read the poem before writing.

There have been many collected editions of Poe's works, the first, already mentioned, being Griswold's The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, “with a Memoir by Rufus Wilmot Griswold and Notices of His Life and Genius by N.P. Willis and J.R. Lowell,” first published in three volumes in 1850. The first two volumes, issued early that year, contained 54 tales, 42 poems, including the dramatic “Scenes from Politian,” four prose essays, and Eureka. Later the same year the third volume appeared, consisting of The Literati, which Poe characterized as containing “some honest opinions about authorial merits and demerits, with occasional words of personality”; “Marginalia,” nearly complete but arranged [page 4:] in an order, or rather disorder, different from that of the original magazine version; “The Poetic Principle,” “Fifty Suggestions,” and 37 book reviews. Volume III also contained the Memoir preceded by a preface in which Griswold replied to the critics of his “Ludwig” article in the Tribune and printed some of his correspondence with Poe.

In 1856 a fourth volume was published containing the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (as Griswold's title had it) and “Miscellanies,” including “Letter to B—,” which had been originally the preface to the 1831 edition of his poems, and more than 30 reviews of books. In a reprinting of the first three volumes in 1853, the Memoir was shifted from Volume III to Volume I. For the poems Griswold followed the text of the 1845 edition of The Raven and Other Poems, but he made a number of changes, including the omission of the early “To Helen,” certainly one of the best of the early poems, and he inserted in the section of Juvenile Poems the verses addressed to Mrs. Marie Louise Shew entitled “To M. L. S—”, which was not written until 1847. Griswold may possibly be excused for leaving out another good early poem, “Spirits of the Dead,” this one from the 1829 edition, because it had been omitted from The Raven and Other Poems in 1845. He also rearranged the order of the poems and of more than 200 items of “Marginalia” for no discernible reason. The dramatic poem Politian was not completed by Poe, but he did finish more than the five scenes printed. The entire text was first published in a pamphlet as Politian — A Tragedy, by Thomas Ollive Mabbott in 1923, from the original manuscript in the Morgan Library. In “The Poe Canon” (PMLA, 1912) Professor Campbell says that apparently Griswold had access not only to all Poe's books but to most of the magazines to which he contributed and “to sundry manuscripts (mostly fragments) and to revised clippings of some of Poe's briefer essays.” [page 5:]

With all its faults, and despite the damage done by the Memoir to Poe's reputation, Griswold's edition introduced his poems and tales, directly or indirectly to readers throughout the world. For more than twenty years it was the only collected edition, and it was reprinted in whole or in part many times in Great Britain as well as in America. There were numerous translations of the poems and tales into French, German, Spanish, and Italian, most of them based more or less on the text of Griswold's edition. The most notable translator was the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, whose Histoires Extraorinaires par Edgar Poe was published in 1856, followed the next year by Nouvelles Histoires Extraorindaires, and both were made a part of the complete edition of Baudelaire's work published in 1869. There were many editions of selected poems and tales in English and other languages, the latter sometimes using the text of Baudelaire. Most of them, unfortunately, contained biographical introductions borrowed from Griswold's Memoir, thus further spreading misinformation about Poe's life and character.

The next collected edition of Poe's work was that of John H. Ingram, who had lived as a child at Stoke Newington, near London, where the building in which from 1818 to 1820 Poe attended Dr. Bransby's school was still standing. This was perhaps a factor in arousing his interest in Poe, which later developed into a lasting passion. Ingram was not a literary scholar in the modern sense of the term, but he had gone to college for a while, and he was an indefatigable reader and researcher who spent much time in the British Museum. He supported himself by securing a position in the Civil Service, which apparently was not demanding and left him much time for study and writing. His serious study of Poe began about or shortly before 1870, and in 1874-1875 his collected edition of Poe's works was published in Edinburgh in four volumes. It came out in New York [page 6:] in 1876 and was reprinted in both England and America.

The text of this edition is not very different from that of Griswold, but Ingram's Memoir presented a very different account of Poe's life and character. In fact Ingram's primary and driving purpose in all his Poe studies was to refute Griswold's errors and misrepresentations, and he spared no pains in gathering data for this purpose. He carried on for years, indeed until their deaths, a persistent and inquiring correspondence with Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, of Providence, and Mrs. Charles Richmond, Poe's “Annie,” of Lowell, the two persons who knew Poe most intimately during his last years. Besides their own letters to him relating what they knew of his personal life, they sent him many letters, or copies of letters, they had received from other acquaintances of Poe. They also sent books, clippings, pictures, and various other items that would be of use to Ingram in writing his Memoir and his two-volume biography published in 1880. All of this material and much more, including many of Ingram's manuscripts, was preserved after his death in 1916 by his sister, who sold it in 1922 to the University of Virginia, where it may be consulted by scholars. To facilitate such study, John Carl Miller compiled a calendar of the Ingram papers that the University Press of Virginia published in 1960.

In 1884 Richard Henry Stoddard completed another collected edition that was published in six volumes, with a memoir by the editor, in New York. This was a useful and popular collection for libraries, but it did not add materially to the work of previous editors. It was reissued in a handsome format in 1895 that was evidently intended to please collectors more than scholars. In the meantime the first scholarly biography had been written by Professor George E. Woodberry of Columbia University. It was published in the American [page 7:] Men of Letters Series in 1885. Although this biography was in no sense definitive, even in the revised and enlarged two-volume edition of 1909, it did give an accurate record of Poe's life and activities and cleared away errors and falsehoods that had prevailed, despite Ingram's efforts, since Griswold's Memoir.

Woodberry also had a part in the first scholarly edition of Poe's collected works. This was The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry, and published in 1894-1895 in ten volumes by Stone and Kimball in Chicago. Volume I contained a Memoir of about 85 pages by Woodberry, based on his 1885 biography, an “Introduction to the Tales” of 38 pages, by Stedman, and eighteen of the tales. In this edition the editors undertook to arrange the stories into groups on the basis of subject matter or mood. In this volume, for example, the eighteen tales fall into two main divisions: “Romances of Death” and “Old World Romances.” The first main division has four subdivisions. The first of these, called “Overture,” has only the one tale, “Shadow — A Parable.” The second subdivision, under the heading “Terrestrial,” has six tales: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleonora.” The third subdivision, under the heading “Celestial,” has three tales: “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” and “The Power of Words.” The fourth subdivision has only the one tale, “Silence — A Fable.”

Volume II has seventeen tales arranged in three groups under the headings “Tales of Conscience,” including “William Wilson,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Man of the Crowd”; “Tales of Natural Beauty,” including “The Elk,” “The Island of the Fay,” “The [page 8:] Domain of Arnheim,” and “Landor's Cottage”; and “Tales of Pseudo-Science,” including “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” “The Balloon Hoax,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” This arrangement differs from that of Volume I by having no subdivisions. Volume III has eleven tales arranged in two groups with no subdivisions. The first group, “Tales of Ratiocination,” includes “The Gold-Bug,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “Thou Art the Man.” The second, “Tales of Illusion,” contains “The Premature Burial,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Sphinx,” “The Spectacles,” “Mystification,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” Volume IV contains twenty-one tales under the heading “Extravaganza and Caprice.” These tales are all short and relatively unimportant, including such early pieces as “The Duc de L’Omelette,” and “The Angel of the Odd.” There are a number of satires, such as “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” This volume also contains a list of Poe's 68 tales in the order of publication and notes on some sources. Editors since Stedman and Woodberry have chosen, wisely no doubt, to follow the chronolgical order of composition or publication. Volume V completes the text of Poe's prose fiction with “The Journal of Julius Rodman” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Volumes VI, VII, VIII, and IX contain selections from the critical writings. Volume VI has the Editors’ general “Preface to the Critical and Miscellaneous Papers.” Two sentences from this preface suggest the limitations of this edition for scholarly use. “The labor of selecting from the mass of these writings is, however, [page 9:] simplified by the fact that Poe himself edited it in effect. He was accustomed to eliminate from these papers as he went along, preserving the more original and general reflections, and such special criticism as related to writers of distinction or of contemporary note, and suppressing the detail of the current book and the passing author; and these selected parts he re-wrote and used repeatedly both in lectures and in new reviews.” Most readers might by pleased to be saved the sometimes tedious reading of reviews the editors have suppressed, but surely a few, the more thorough student readers and critics, would prefer to have the entire text and the privilege of deciding for themselves what is or is not important. Following the Preface in this volume comes the “Introduction to the Literary Criticism,” by E.C. Stedman, in which the idea of the General Preface is further developed, that most of Poe's reviews might be dispensed with at no loss to the reader. It may be true, he concludes, that “except for a few noteworthy canons, restated again and again,” the purely contemporary criticism, if considered apart from his time,”would be scarcely worth preserving.” But the historian of criticism needs to have it simply because it is contemporary. As the mountain climber must climb the mountain because it is there, so the serious reader must take note of such writing by an important or once-important writer, if for no better reason, simply because it is there.

The table of contents of Volume VI consists of three essays — “The Poetic Principle,” “The Philosophy of Composition,” and “The Rationale of Verse” — of a general nature, an essay-review of Bryant, an article titled “A Reply to ‘Outis’ “, which was a part of Poe's contribution to the so-called “Longfellow War” and mostly concerned with Longfellow's alleged plagiarism, and reviews of Longfellow's “Ballads,” of two plays — Willis's “Tortesa” and Longfellow's “Spanish Student” — of Lowell's “Fable for Critics,” Moore's [page 10:] “Alciphron,” Horne's “Orion,” and Elizabeth Barrett's “Drama of Exile, and Other Poems.” In the notes, which presumably Woodberry wrote since his initials appear at the end of the section, the statement is made that the most important part of “The Poetic Principle,” the passage on the theory of poetry, “is from the notice of Longfellow's “Ballads.” This is in part true, but it would hardly be justification for omitting the review of the “Ballads” in an edition of Poe's works. Poe did repeat some of his general ideas more than once, but I doubt that he did it consciously or for any purpose other than to emphasize them.

Volume VII contains chiefly reviews of novels, essays, and travels. The article titled “Hawthorne's ‘Tales”’ consists of three parts numbered I, II, and III, but in the text they all appear to be in one review. We have to turn to the notes to discover that Parts I and III are from Poe's review of Hawthorne's “Tales” published in Godey's Lady's Book for November, 1847 and that Part II is from the review published in Graham's Magazine for May, 1842. But near the end of Part I, six paragraphs from the Lady's Book text are omitted and the last two paragraphs are shifted to Part III. The editors also make two or three changes in the text of Graham's in their Part II, and regularly change Poe's pronoun “we” to “I.” Thirteen other reviews appear in this volume, none of them very important except that of Dicken's Barnaby Rudge. The last selection in the volume is “Marginalia,” or that part which the editors chose to include. In a note this explanation is offered: “The Editors have omitted from the “Marginalia” all passages printed elsewhere in the critical writings; secondly, all passages from “Pinakidia”; thirdly remarks on obscure authors and books, and other matter of like ephemeral nature.” [page 11:]

Volume VIII contains the text of The Literati, a group of eighteen review-essays under the heading “Minor Contemporaries,” and “A Chapter of Suggestions.” Woodberry says in the notes that the text of The Literati is that of Griswold's edition, and that in several of the items the text varies materially from that in the magazine in which it originally appeared. This, he presumes, is because Griswold “followed a later manuscript of Poe.” The Griswold version of the Literati sketch of Thomas Dunn English is in fact from a genuine manuscript of Poe's, but one that was written some time after the original sketch was published in Godey's Lady's Book and which Poe chose not to publish. It is from this manuscript also that Griswold got the name “Thomas Dunn Brown,” as Poe facetiously called English. Those interested in the controversy between Poe and English may read the entire sordid story in Quinn's biography. Stedman and Woodberry may possibly be excused for this error on the ground that they had no knowledge of Poe's later manuscript, but one wonders why they did not consult the original text in Godey's, for Ingram had already shown that Griswold was not always trustworthy. Among the writers discussed as “Minor Contemporaries” were Griswold, Rufus Dawes, William Ellery Channing, and L.A. Wilmer, an early friend of Poe's and author of “The Quacks of Helicon,” a satire. “A Chapter of Suggestions,” as stated in the notes, is made up of two originally separate publications, the first part from The Opal of 1845 with the title “A Chapter of Suggestions,” and the last part from Graham's Magazine for May and June, 1845, under the title “Fifty Suggestions.” In Stedman and Woodberry the title, “Fifty Suggestions” is omitted, and its paragraphs are unnumbered though they are numbered in the original. [page 12:]

Volume IX contains Eureka, printed from the text of Poe's annotated copy, and six miscellaneous essays: “Maelzel's Chess-Player,” “The Philosophy of Furniture,” “A Chapter on Autobiography,” “Cryptography” (originally published in Graham's Magazine as “A Few Words on Secret Writing”), “Anastatic Printing,” and “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House.” The Notes to Eureka in this volume include the “Addenda” originally written by Poe in one of his letters to G.W. Eveleth, and a comment by Professor Irvine Stringham.

Volume X contains the poems in the revised text of the Lorimer Graham copy of the edition of 1845. Variant readings of the early poems from the editions of 1827, 1829, and 1831 are provided in the notes, together with variant texts from many, but not all, magazine publications. This volume also contains a section of “Contemporary Notices of Poe by Griswold, Willis, and Lowell,” and a section on the portraits reproduced in the various volumes of this edition. There are ten of Poe and one each of his mother and his wife Virginia, both rare. All of these should be of interest to students of Poe. There is also a bibliography, which is useful in connection with early editions, including many in foreign languages, and an index. One reason for contemporary students to return to Stedman and Woodberry is that their introductions and notes contain some excellent criticism not readily available elsewhere. It is obvious, however, that, with all its excellences, it is not adequate to the needs of the modern scholar.

The fullest and best collected edition of Poe's works up to the present time is the one here reprinted, the one edited by James A. Harrison and originally published in seventeen volumes in 1902 by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company of New York. The first volume, Harrison's biography, and the last, the letters, were [page 13:] reissued in two volumes, with only minor revision, by Crowell in 1903 as The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. This edition was not widely circulated, apparently, and most scholars have found it most convenient to use the text of the Virginia edition, so called perhaps because both its subject and its editor were identified with the state and its university. Although it bears the title “Complete Works” it is not complete since many book reviews were omitted.

James Albert Harrison, its general editor, was a distinguished scholar. He was born August 21, 1848, in the small town of Pass Christian, Mississippi, on the Gulf coast, about fifty miles east of New Orleans, but he was from the James River family of Harrisons in Virginia that had given the United States two presidents. His education began in private schools in New Orleans, where presumably he became acquainted with the Creole society that he later described in a volume of romantic tales under the title Autrefois. These stories demonstrate that he had considerable skill in description and characterization but not much in the invention and development of plots. Yet, because of his vivid and romantic style, the stories still make good reading. He entered the University of Virginia at the age of eighteen, where for two years he studied Latin and Greek and the modern languages; but because of a distaste for mathematics, he did not stay for a degree but went to Europe to continue his studies, chiefly in Germany at the universities at Bonn and Munich. Still without a degree, he returned to Virginia in 1871. He taught at Randolph-Macon College until 1876, when he was called to the faculty of modern languages at Washington and Lee. While there he married Elizabeth Letcher, daughter of a former governer of Virginia, who shared his enthusiasm for languages. He came to the University of Virginia in 1895, already a scholar of repute, as Professor [page 14:] of Romanic and Germanic Languages, the latter including Old and Middle English, a field in which he had published extensively.

But he was extraordinarily versatile and had by this time written many books on a variety of subjects, including accounts of his travels in many parts of the world, historical studies of Greece and Spain, and several biographies. It was presumably after he went to Washington and Lee that he wrote “Spiridion, A Poem,” which was privately published in Lynchburg in an undated pamphlet. It is in blank verse with a marginal gloss in the manner of Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and in a style that is obviously that of a romanticist, with an inflated classical diction suggesting that the author was a precocious and learned youth whose classical education had not yet been brought into harmonious relationship with his romantic temperament. It tells the story of a Greek youth of ancient times who falls alseep [[asleep]] by the seashore and dreams of a strange and fascinating girl that, apparently, he supposes is a nereid but who turns out to be a vampire. He dies and is found discarded on the beach like an empty shell.

It is generally agreed that Harrison's most important literary achievement was the monumental edition of the works of Poe. His eyesight was permanently injured by the intensive research required for this work, but he continued to write, and in 1906 published The Life of George Washington. The last of his publications was a limited edition of The Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman, which appeared in 1909. These letters had been published, though not accurately, by Ingram from copies provided by Mrs. Whitman. At her death she left the original letters to the care of her literary executrix, who in turn made copies for Harrison. These copies were accurate except for some slight omissions and deletions, and note of these [page 15:] was made on the copies, which Harrison faithfully printed. But the first completely authentic text of these letters is that of John Ward Ostrom's two-volume edition of The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, published by the Harvard University Press in 1948. Even here a few brief passages that were so thoroughly marked out as to be illegible had to be supplied by the editor, partly by conjecture.

As noted above Harrison seems to have been romantic by temperament, and his prose style, even in his biography of Poe, was at times poetic, not to say flowery. But he understood Poe better, perhaps, than other biographers because of a closer kinship of spirit. Recent biographers have had access to more facts, but probably no one presented Poe more sympathetically than he. This may seem strange in the light of Harrison's training in linguistics and his reputation as a specialist in Old and Middle English language and literature; but at an early age he had come under the influence of the great romantic writers of England, France, and Germany in the early nineteenth century. Though he never earned a college degree, he was awarded several honorary degrees during the course of his academic life. He retired from active teaching in 1909 and died January 31, 1911. Philip A. Bruce, the historian of the University of Virginia, called him “one of the most accomplished and cosmopolitan scholars of his time.”

There were three events honoring Poe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that contributed much to the increase in public interest in his work. The first was the organization of the Poe Memorial Association through the efforts of Professor Charles W. Kent of the University faculty, who became its president, and Professor Harrison, who became its secretary; under its auspices a special ceremony was arranged at the University on the occasion, in 1899, of the unveiling [page 16:] of the Zolnay bust of Poe, which had been paid for largely by contributions from students. Invitations to attend were sent to many literary notables throughout this country and even in Europe and many came to Charlottesville for the occasion, while many others sent letters to be read. Professor Kent edited and arranged for the publication of a brochure recording the event and printing many of the letters. About ten years later, on January 19, 1909, scholars, poets, and friends of Poe again gathered in Charlottesville to celebrate the centenary of his birth, and this produced another small volume, edited by Professor Kent, containing tributes to Poe. The third event of this kind was the organization of the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association of Baltimore and a ceremonial meeting in January 1909, when before a “brilliant assemblage” Lizette Woodworth Reese read a tribute in verse, and several distinguished scholars, including Professor William Peterfield Trent, addressing the meeting.

These tributes were published and contributed, especially Professor Trent's essay, materially to the growing body of critical literature on Poe. The scholars who in this century contributed most to the knowledge of Poe and his work have used the texts of the Harrison edition, compared and occasionaly [[occasionally]], though not extensively, corrected by reference to the original texts. One of the first of these was Killis Campbell, like Harrison a Virginian but not connected either as student or teacher with the University in Charlottesville. He did his undergraduate work at William and Mary College and went on to Johns Hopkins University, where the English faculty was much under the influence of the German universities. There he received the Ph.D. degree in 1899 and went at once to the faculty of English at the University of Texas, where he remained until his death in 1937. Like many others at Hopkins he first [page 17:] directed his study to Old and Middle English and did his first publishing in that field, but within a few years turned his attention to Poe and eventually to American literature in general. As one of his students in the 1920's I remember seeing his set of the Harrison edition, which was already worn with use. His edition of Poe's poems, published in 1917, with variant readings and extensive notes, at once became the authoritative text and has continued so to this day with but few competitors. He wrote extensively also on the prose works, including bibliographical as well as critical studies, and edited one of the most dependable one-volume collections of Poe's tales.

Another influential Poe scholar, though he did not publish a great deal, being preoccupied with administrative and editorial duties, was still another Virginian, James Southall Wilson, who was educated at William and Mary College and Princeton University, and was for many years the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of English, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Dean of the Graduate Faculty at the University of Virginia. He died in 1963. Like Campbell, he steered many students, especially graduate students, into American literature and,a number into the intensive study of the works of Poe, and in his capacity as director of their doctoral dissertations contributed indirectly to the bibliographical and critical study of Poe. A few other scholars and teachers who have been influential in the history of Poe studies should be named. Among them was Professor Trent, mentioned above, who said in his address at the Poe centenary celebration at Baltimore that a few years before he had begun to write a biography of Poe and had got as far in his narrative as 1837, the year when Poe left the Southern Literary Messenger, but gave it up because dependable sources seemed inadequate to his needs. One of his students at Columbia, Jay B. Hubbell, [page 18:] another Virginia native, after a long and distinguished career at Duke University as professor of American literature and founding editor of the journal American Literature, is still actively interested in Poe studies though now more than ninety years old. Of my own generation, the late Thomas Ollive Mabbott, has written extensively on Poe and has been very generous in materially assisting dozens of other Poe scholars, young and old, by sharing his unparalleled store of knowledge of Poe acquired through decades of study. As early as 1924 he began planning a new collected edition of Poe's works which, though he did not live to finish it, will no doubt eventually be finished and become a worthy successor to the Harrison edition. Among biographers, of which there are many, Arthur Hobson Quinn remains preeminent; his critical biography, published in 1941 must remain for a long time yet the best in the field. He edited, with Edward H. O’Neill, The Complete Poems and Stores of Edgar Allan Poe, with selections from his criticism, in two volumes, 1946. He died some years later but will be long remembered. These scholars, and others, have supplemented the Harrison texts of the tales and poems, but for most of the criticism, particularly the book reviews, Harrison's text remains the best available.

Although Harrison gave his collected edition the title “Complete Works,” it is not complete. In the Introduction to the critical works in Volume VIII, he wrote that the anonymous critical reviews in the magazines Poe edited had been mostly ignored by previous editors, although it was this criticism that chiefly gained him his reputation, and he proposed to correct the imbalance. Because of the mass of such critical matter, however, he was forced to be content with “selecting only the more important reviews, leaving out the long quotations.” Over the years some students have felt [page 19:] handicapped because no complete text was available for study, not completely satisfied to accept any editor's opinion of what is or is not sufficiently important to be preserved. Yet until it is possible to spend a great deal of money for editing, printing, and binding a genuinely complete edition, we shall have to make out with what we have, and that basically is Harrison's.

In the meantime the reader who wishes to examine the reviews written by Poe but omitted from Harrison's edition is not without recourse. In 1941 William Doyle Hull, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, working under the supervision of Professor James Southall Wilson, completed a doctoral dissertation with the title A Canon of the Critical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, with a Study of Poe as Editor and Reviewer, and this is now available through University Microfilms. After studying all the essays and book reviews in the various periodicals edited by Poe, and others to which he is known to have contributed, Hull undertook to identify all the anonymous reviews in them that were written by Poe. He also examined a great many documents, including the available correspondence of Poe and other editors, where he found considerable evidence for or against Poe's authorship of doubtful reviews. Published materials that were helpful were D.K. Jackson's Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (1934), B.B. Minor's The Southern Literary Messenger (1905), and several bibliographical essays by Campbell, Wilson, and Mabbott.

He made a list of all the reviews published anonymously in these periodicals during the years Poe was connected with them and numbered in sequence those which he believed on external or internal evidence were written by Poe. For some he found several types of objective evidence, such as written statements by the proprietors or editors of the periodicals identifying Poe as the reviewer in question. These he indicated by placing [page 20:] an asterisk beside the number on the list. For a great many he had to rely on internal evidence, primarily style. Since Poe's prose style was distinctive and usually consistent, he was often able to assert confidently on this basis alone whether Poe was or was not the author. When the evidence of Poe's authorship was in his judgment positive, he placed an asterisk by the corresponding number. When he thought the evidence was strong enough to induce belief in Poe's authorship but not demonstrable he withheld the asterisk but explained in his notes on the review, which were sometimes extended, the grounds of his opinion. If, for any reason, he felt such a review was not Poe's, he put an asterisk at the appropriate place on the list but did not give it a number. This list also contains other information, including the volume and pages of the magazine in which each review was printed, the month and year of issue and the initial H (underlined) if it is in the Harrison edition, together with the volume and pages where it is printed in that edition. Much of the information a researcher needs is to be found conveniently in this list. However, in the body of the manuscript there are two chapters on each periodical, one giving an account of the magazine and Poe's connection with it and the other discussing each of the reviews published in it during Poe's connection, with Hull's reasons for attributing authorship to Poe or denying it.

There are approximately 900 numbered items on Hull's list, reviews and notices of books that he is more or less convinced were written by Poe. If he felt some doubt of his own judgment, he placed a question mark beside the number on his list. About 170 numbered items on the list have such a question mark, leaving about 730 that he felt sure Poe wrote. Of these, 403 are marked with an asterisk, indicating that Hull is certain on objective evidence or reasonably assured on other [page 21:] evidence of Poe's authorship. But Harrison included only abut 250 reviews in his edition, or a little over 60% of those which Hull feels certain Poe wrote. Many of the reviews or notices omitted by Harrison are very brief and contain no real criticism, and yet it seems probable that a very considerable number of reviews omitted by Harrison would deserve, by Hull's criteria, to be preserved. Even so, as Harrison explains in his introduction to the volumes of criticism, he was the first editor to reprint more than fragments of this criticism — criticism, he affirms, which “even when lavished on volumes that have long since sunk into oblivion, will amply repay study and perusal.” The mass of Poe's periodical criticism is so great that Harrison deemed it practicable to reprint only the more important reviews. Poe quoted extensively from the books he reviewed, and these quotations are important for the understanding of his critical comments, but the editor felt obliged to delete all or large parts of them to save space. With so many reviews and short book notices to search out and examine, it is surprising that he made so few errors. According to Hull, he included in his edition only fourteen reviews that Poe did not write, seven from the Southern Literary Messenger and seven from Graham's Magazine.

The seven reviews from the Southern Literary Messenger were: (1) Bryant's Poems, January, 1835, Volume VIII, pp. 1-2; (2) Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, May, 1835, VIII, 12-19; (3) Theodore Irving's The Conquest of Florida by De Soto, July, 1835, VIII, 37-39; (4) Washington Irving's Crayon Miscellany (second installment), July, 1835, VIII, 40-42; (5) two eulogies on Chief Justice Marshall, December, 1835, VIII, 114-115; (6) Paulding's Slavery in the United States, April, 1836, VIII, 265-275; and (7) Maury's Navigation, June, 1836, IX, 48-50. As to the first of these, Harrison says in a footnote on page vii, Vol. VIII, in his introduction to the works of [page 22:] criticism, that he could find no evidence that Poe wrote it, but included it solely on the strength of Woodberry's statement that it was Poe's. Hull assigns it to James E. Heath, a friend of White's who occasionally helped him with his magazine without remuneration. The second, Hull attributes to Beverly Tucker, another friend of White's, on the basis of a letter from White to Tucker in which he calls it “as good a review as you have penned for the Messenger.” As to the fourth, White wrote to Lucian Minor on August 18, 1835, that all of the reviews in the July number of the magazine were written by E.V. Sparhawk, who was the sole editor from May to October, 1835. Hull gives the fifth review to White on the basis chiefly of stylistic characteristics. The review of Paulding's Slavery in the United States is identified by White as Tucker's in a letter to him May 2, 1836. The review of Maury's Navigation is not Poe's, says Hull, who quotes a passage from it and comments: “Involved, loose, weighted down with verbiage, this style is not Poe's.” He does not certainly identify the author but suggests J. F. Otis.

The seven reviews in Graham's Magazine were: (1) Cooper's Mercedes of Castile, January, 1841, X, 96-99; (2) Mrs. Norton's The Dream and Other Poems, February, 1841, X, 100-105; (3) McHenry's Antediluvians, February, 1841, X, 105-109; (4) G.P.R. James's Corse de Leon, June, 1841, X, 160-162; (5) The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, July, 1841, X, 171-174; (6) Bulwer's Zanzoni [[Zanoni]], June, 1842, XI, 115-123; and (7) Tennyson's Poems, September, 1842, XI, 127-130. As to the authorship of the first of these, Hull concludes on the basis of style, characterization, and previous notices in the Casket, a magazine united with Graham's about that time, that an anonymous reviewer connected with that periodical wrote it. On the same or similar grounds he concludes that the second, third, fourth and fifth are also by the same anonymous [page 23:] Casket reviewer. The sixth, the review of Zanzoni [[Zanoni]], Hull assigns to the Casket reviewer on the basis of a letter from Poe to J.E. Snodgrass in which he says that his withdrawal from Graham's took place with the May number, 1842. The seventh, the review of Tennyson's poems, is accredited to Griswold on objective evidence that appears to be conclusive.

I have discussed Hull's dissertation in some detail because it is the most thorough analysis of Poe's periodical criticism that I have seen, and it is unlikely that we shall soon, if ever, see a fuller one. It is helpful in discovering many of the omissions of the Harrison edition, but it also suggests the accuracy and inclusiveness of that edition. Since most sets of that edition still accessible in libraries have deteriorated with time and use, this AMS reprint becomes ever more important. Even if a more complete edition is eventually published, and with the ever-increasing cost of labor and materials that is not certain, it will probably not be available very soon. In the meantime the preservation of the Harrison text is fully justified. It is true that Poe often repeated himself and that much of his theoretical criticism is incorporated in a few essays, yet one will occasionally find ideas or opinions useful in the evaluation of his work scattered in routine reviews of lesser and now mostly forgotten writers. The very unevenness of Poe's criticism is a reason for wishing to preserve as much of it as possible, for often we see glimpses of him at his best in reviews that, in general, show him at his worst. These glimpses could conceivably be sufficient to modify a reader's total impression of the man and the writer.