Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Preface,” Flora and Fauna in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1992), pp. 9-10 (This material is protected by copyright)

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PREFACE

It was over twenty years ago that Bill Woolfson and I first discussed the possible usefulness of the names of the flora mentioned by Poe in all of his writings. I had recently published Dictionary of Names and Titles in Poe's Collected Works, which was limited to the titles of books and the names of persons and characters. Bill had observed the frequency of Poe's references to flowers and trees, and I agreed that these citations and their textual locations would be useful to students of Poe and his period. After a few discussions about the arrangement of his data, including the textual locations, I heard little about the project for several years. Then I received a typewritten copy of his findings, which now included the names of the fauna appearing in Poe's works — a commendable addition. However, Bill's use of the Quinn and O’Neill two-volume “works” of Poe seemed a limitation on the full canon, especially of the entire body of reviews. He cheerfully accepted the suggestion of redoing it all on the basis of the Harrison edition (fifteen volumes out of Harrison's seventeen, displaying about ninety-five percent of Poe's discovered oeuvre). I believe that a few years later I received the revised, much-augmented list and had an opportunity to suggest to him the use of additional Poe textual tools, largely to fill in the missing items, as in The Columbia Spy and Alexander's Weekly Messenger. Again, Bill cheerfully undertook to revise his text, also including some of the materials in Thomas Ollive Mabbott's Harvard edition of the poems and the “Tales and Sketches.” To redo all of the items from tales and poems as contained in the Harrison edition would have entailed far too much strain — especially since Bill was not well during the latter years of his life. His devotion to the completion of this book speaks well for his interest in letters and in the advancement of scholarship.

After his untimely death, the officers of the Bronx Society of Science and Letters did me the honor of asking about putting the typescript in final shape for publication. Despite a great pressure of work on the annotated, critical edition of The Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, I found it possible to read through Bill's work, as he left it, and then [page 10:] through the page proofs of the book. Some revisions and deletions had to be made, as was natural considering Bill's remoteness from developments in Poe scholarship during a decade. It is fortunate that the material could be reviewed, corrected, and quotations added by the spirited, alert, and assiduous labors of Edith, Bill's wife. She gladly undertook to eliminate entries derived from non-Poe articles which Harrison had inadvertently included. (I must have failed to point Bill's attention to my list of them, on p. xiv of my Dictionary.) He had also acknowledged the publication of a more definitive text of Poe's longest narratives in my 1981 edition of Pym, “Rodman,” and “Hans Pfaall” (Boston: G.K. Hall), but used it only for notes to “Hans Pfaall.” Bill had also, as suggested, used the Harvard edition for supplementary material and some variants in the footnotes. It was Bill's happy idea, I found, to include “Some Mythical Beasts and Monsters,” as an appendix to his list. I suggested to Edith Woolfson that the reader might be helped by having a differentiating “R” placed after all the titles designating the loci (mainly reviews) which were not the titles of Poe's works. She graciously transcribed all my inserted “R” letters into the proof pages.

It is most gratifying that this opus should now be emerging from the seed of those initial conversations and from the years of effort that Bill lavished on it. Scholars interested in Poe's mind and in the type of references that would activate his creative and critical pen will be glad to add this to the growing shelves of reference tools devoted to our great American literary artist.