Richmond Examiner Proofsheets Collection (1849)

About September 1849, Poe prepared a number of his poems to be printed in a series of issues of the Richmond Weekly Examiner. Of the fourteen texts apparently intended, only two were actually printed, but the remaining texts were transcribed by Poe's friend F. W. Thomas, who planned to issue a new edition of Poe's Poems. The manuscript notes left unpublished after Thomas ’ death in 1866 have also been lost, but were fortuitously recorded by J. H. Whitty and subsequently printed in his collection of The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1911). Mabbott (Poems, 1:583-584) discusses the complicated issues surrounding questions of accuracy and authenticity of these texts, but generally accepts them for several poems as the only source for versions which were presumably approved by Poe during his last visit to Richmond. (Without the originals, it is impossible to determine whether or not errors have been created in the double process of transcription and later of typesetting, or if Whitty has made any editorial changes. Also unknown are typographical matters concerning the use of small caps and similar issues of formatting.) For those poems where the Examiner text essentially agrees with the changes Poe made in the J. Lorimer Graham copy of RAOP, Mabbott does not generally list the Examiner as one of the variants, although he includes all of the titles below in his discussion of the Examiner proof sheets (1:583). Thus, he gives the Examiner as a variant for “The Raven” and “A Dream within a Dream,” but not for “The Sleeper” or “Israfel.” For these texts, what Whitty gives usually differs only in minor matters of punctuation, and Mabbott reasonably asserts that Whitty's transcriptions (second hand from those of F. W. Thomas) are not to be considered reliable for such details. Mabbott is not entirely consistent in this matter, however, for in his variants for “The Haunted Palace,” he does list the Examiner even though it disagrees with the J. Lorimer Graham text of RAOP only in one example of hyphenation and one contraction. Poe is known to have had his copy of RAOP with him in his trunk (see Savoye, “Two Biographical Digressions”). It seems likely, then, that for these poems, the Examiner text was set from the changes Poe had already made rather than a new manuscript.

The poems include:

• “The Raven”  (printed in the Examiner, September 25, 1849) (The text matches that marked in Poe' own copy of RAOP.
• “Dream-Land”  (printed in the Examiner, October 29, 1849)
• “To My Mother”  (Heartman & Canny give a publication date as October 29, 1849 [H&C, 1943, p. 183], but Stovall notes that “a careful check of that paper fails to turn up the poem” [Poems, 1965, p. 286]. Whitty says that the text is the same as that printed by the Southern Literary Messenger in December 1849) (The text appears to have been made from a draft manuscript, from which the fair copy for Leaflets of Memory was made.)
• “Bridal Ballad”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, p. 15-16)
• “The Sleeper”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 17-18)
• “Lenore”  (Whitty states that the text followed that of the Richmond Whig, but “with slight punctuation changes” which he does not record [Poems, 1911, p. 213])
• “Israfel”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 24-25)
• “The Conqueror Worm”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 36-37) (Whitty lists this one item as Richmond Enquirer, but with the same date of October 1849 as for the other Examiner items, and without listing the Enquirer elsewhere. It is presumably an error, although the reference remained unchanged in subsequent editions. It does not actually appear to have been printed in any surviving copy of the Enquirer. Two verbal changes Poe marked in his own copy of RAOP both appear in Whitty's text.)
• “The Haunted Palace”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 37-38)
• “The Bells”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 63-66) (although the text matches that of Sartain's Magazine, the poem did not appear until the issue for December 1849. This text was probably set from the “Annie” manuscript, from which the faircopy manuscript for Sartain's was made.)
• “For Annie”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 74-77) (although the text matches that of the Flag of Our Union, it was probably set from the “Annie” manuscript)
• “To — [A Dream within a Dream]”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, p. 123) (This text is presumably based on a draft manuscript that Poe had with him in Richmond, from which the faircopy for the Flag of Our Union had been made. This speculation is partly based on the generic title rather than the longer title used in the Flag)
• “Ulalume”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 82-85) (The text appears to have been set from the “Ingram” manuscript)
• “Annabel Lee”  (Whitty, Poems, 1911, pp. 80-81) (The text follows that of the “Thompson” manuscript. Whitty's printed is misleading since he changes the final line, but gives the original as a variant in the notes)