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The New Edition of Poe
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Newly Collected and Edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry, In ten volumes. Vols, I-III, Stone & Kimball.
THE FULL TITLE of this edition authorizes us to hope for much, since all former editions have been merely copies of Griswold's, printed in 1850. Yet the editors, Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry, admit that Griswold's is a tolerably complete collected edition, and find little in it to improve on. They have made use of some manuscript corrections made by Poe on the margins of his published volumes, and one tale, “The Elk,” is added for the first time. The other alterations are not of very great consequence. The form of the edition, however, is very attractive, the illustrations by Mr. Albert Sterner being less out of keeping with the text than usual; and there is a carefully written memoir by Mr. Woodberry, and a sympathetic and learned introduction by Mr. Stedman. Like all previous biographers of Poe, Mr. Woodberry gives a large share of his attention to the habits of intoxication which had so fatal an effect on Poe's career. The mere facts are admitted, and, except for their results on his style, they may now be left to the pathologist — unless, indeed, a writer as gifted as Poe himself arise to tell the story of his downfall. Poe's morbid sensitiveness, the curiously abstract nature of his fancies, are remarked upon by Mr. Stedman. The latter quality he ascribes to a lack of altruism, which, however, was an even more common failing in Poe's time than it is at present. “He started a revolt against ‘the didactic,’ and was our national propagandist of the now hackneyed formula, Art for Art's sake, and of the creed that in perfect beauty consists the fullest truth,” Mr. Stedman says; and he hints that in this way his own writings have been influenced by those of Poe. This is much to say of any writer of latter-day English, for the vice of the didactic is perhaps the worst that can be charged against our modern literature as a whole.
In arranging the famous tales, which fill the first three volumes of the collection, Mr. Stedman has also conferred a benefit upon the reader. He puts first those romances of death which include so much of Poe's most subtle work — “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” Then follow tales of conscience, like “The Black Cat” and “William Wilson”; tales of natural beauty, like “The Domain of Arnheim,” tales of pseudo-science, such as “Hans Pfaall” and “A Descent into the Maelström”; and in the third volume come the tales of ratiocination and of illusion, in which Poe was almost as great a master as in those of pure fancy — ”The Gold Bug,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Premature Burial” and “The Spectacles.” Of the portraits prefixed to these three volumes, two are from daguerrotypes and are remarkably like one another, though apparently taken at a considerable time apart, and still more remarkably unlike the wretched mezzotint-engraving by Sartain, which is reproduced as the frontispiece of Vol. I, In the daguerrotypes it is easy to see the American and the man of his day. We could wish that Mr, Stedman had extended his charming essay by including some estimate of the effect of [page 324:] the land and the period upon Poe as an artist. We have always felt that it was very great — much greater than has been supposed.
This new edition of Poe was discussed at some length in the Chicago Letter in The Critic of Jan. 5.
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Notes:
This review is followed by a short update in the issue of June 15, 1895,
VOLUME IV, of the new edition of Poe, of which we have already noticed the previous issues, is devoted to tales of “Extravaganza and Caprice,” such as “The Duc de l’Omelette” and “Three Sundays in a Week.” The editor, Mr. E. C. Stedman, gives in his notes an account of the number, order and publication of Poe's tales, of great interest to collectors, and a more generally interesting note on Poe's quotations, book-titles and footnotes, showing how greatly he was indebted to encyclopedias and other easily attained sources for the erudition of which he made such great display. The most curious instance of borrowing that is given is that of a long passage in “A Descent Into the Maelström,” which Poe took bodily from “The Encyclopedia Britannica,” crediting only a part to the Encyclopedia, which itself had borrowed without any credit at all from a work on “The Natural History of Norway,” translated from the Danish of the Rev. Erich Pontoppidan. Nor is this all, In the ninth and last edition of the “Britannica,” Poe is credited with having “faithfully collated and thrown into stereoscopic relief the various reports of travellers about the Maelström,” while, in fact, his only source was the Encyclopedia itself. The illustrations, by Albert Edward Sterner, two pictures of “King Pest,” and one to the “Article for Blackwood,” are sufficiently grotesque to please the most unregulated taste. The frontispiece is a portrait, engraved on wood after a daguerrotype in the possession of Mr. Thomas J. McKee, (Stone & Kimball.)
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[S:0 - CNY, 1895] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - The New Edition of Poe (Anonymous, 1895)