Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “March 4, 1843 Prospectus - Note,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 31-32 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 31, continued:]

Pollin argues that although the lines in the motto are not artistically notable, since they are by Poe they should be added to the canon of his poetry. Noting how the lines express Poe's critical ideals, he observes that “iron pen” is itself “antique” (Jeremiah 17:1), then discusses the meaning of a drawing of a hand holding a pen, which Poe had Felix Darley execute for use on a proposed title page for the periodical. Pollin, in Discoveries in Poe, says that Poe did the drawing himself (222); in a letter to us, Pollin says that he later learned from Thomas Ollive Mabbott that it is Darley's work. We note that there exists an agreement reproduced in Robertson (Bibliography, facing 206), between Poe, Thomas C. Clarke and Felix Darley for Darley to illustrate the proposed magazine. It is dated January 31, 1843.

Pollin's book points to likely sources, to the persistence of stylus imagery in Poe's writing, and to a January 1848 version of Poe's prospectus, which we insert here for comparison. It differs in a number of small details and in one major matter from the April 1848 version. The January version has a couple of extra words in its heading, and the heading is differently arranged; the owners in paragraph 2 have been demoted from “very worthy” to “worthy”; it includes a hopeful column for number of copies ordered and a line about business correspondence to a corporate entity never listed by Standard and Poor as well as other variants recorded in a note in Pollin's Discoveries in Poe. More important, the January version includes an entire paragraph, the fourth, which is not present in April (a difference not noted in Pollin's Discoveries in Poe, perhaps for reasons explained in “The Purloined Letter.” Such slips are very rare in Pollin's meticulous scholarship).

Motto: Launcelot Canning: Poe used the same name in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). In that story, Poe lists a number of authors and works that are in Usher's library. Poe's intention was to select a collection with which the character Roderick Usher, who fears fear, can frighten himself. Although not all of the titles and authors Poe lists are really appropriate for that purpose, all but Canning and his “Trist” are real (Thirty-Two Stories, 96-100nn10, 11, 15; Short Fiction, 105-6nn9, 10, 14). Sir Launcelot Canning and Canning's “The Mad Trist” are Poe's inventions. Poe very likely derived the name Canning from his knowledge of the life and writings of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70). Chatterton invented a fifteenth-century monk, the author, supposedly, of a history of painting; Chatterton named the monk's patron “William Canynge.” Pollin (Discoveries in Poe) establishes that Poe knew Chatterton's unhappy biography (Chatterton killed himself when he was but seventeen). Poe refers to Chatterton [page 32:] in the course of a discussion of two American verse writers who also died very young.

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Political History: A section of Pollin's Discoveries in Poe explains Poe's changes of mind about which topics his magazine would cover. Poe had experience with journals which were politically active.

world at large ... author: See our note to “Prospectus of the Penn Magazine.”

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sincere ... opinion: The idea of “The Stylus” as an “iron pen” is explained in Pollin, Discoveries in Poe. A gold pen would be subservient to whoever paid the writer; an iron pen meant “sincere and fearless opinion.”