Text: Anonymous, “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe,” The Nation (New York, NY), vol. LX, May 2, 1895, pp. 349-350

[page 349, column 3:]

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Newly collected and edited, with memoir, critical introductions, an notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry. Vols. I-III. Chicago: Stone & Kimball. 1895.

FORTY-FIVE years have elapsed since the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe were published by his literary executor, Dr. Rufus William [[Wilmot]] Griswold. The recent expiration of copyright has been taken advantage of by Messrs. Stone & Kimball for the publication of a revised and probably definitive edition in ten volumes. The editors, Prof. G. E. Woodberry and Mr. E. C. Stedman, have collated the various texts published during Poe's life, and, aided by his own marginal MS. notes, have doubtless arrived at the form finally approved by him. They have not tried to show the nature of Poe's revision of his prose, but have given a complete variorum of the poems.

To Mr. Woodberry has fallen the somewhat difficult task of writing the introductory memoir, the bare sketch of the author's unfortunate and unlovely actual life. The facts Mr. Woodberry has to deal with are not pleasant by contrast with the brilliancy of Poe's literary achievement, they are pitifully sordid and squalid. The things he is known to have done need all the benefit of stress upon what he resisted to make him appear, outside of his genius, worthy of any mere kindly sentiment than tolerant contempt. This memoir seems to us to express contempt without tolerance. The tone is given not by the necessary narrative of that sequence of disasters entailed by Poe's constant relapses into drunkenness and by his vain and irritable temper, but by the mention of insignificant incidents which, in a short memoir not designedly censorious, might as well have been omitted. Such are the references to his questionable method of increasing his reputation; his untruthfulness in trifles; his working off on an admiring lady a poem long before addressed to a predecessor in his homage, and other unimportant but depreciatory facts. Prof. Woodberry is not guilty of deliberate disparagement, for he includes the best testimony to be found in Poe's favor; but he gives the impression one whose attitude is not merciful to a fellow man whose worst faults were as surely congenital as was his genius.

To Mr. Stedman is allotted the far more grateful duty of the literary introduction. That to the five volumes of tales (included in the first volume) displays the best critical spirit, being illuminative and sympathetic, cordial yet temperate. It shows how naturally the tales fall into well-defined groups, discusses their animating motives, form, and style, and their author's strength and limitations. Especially valuable as a corrective of harsh impressions derived from the memoir is his comment on the man as revealed in the work. He finds all of that, even the tales composed with purely artistic intent, vividly self-explanatory. “Their author,” he says, “was a being of extreme physical and spiritual sensibility, proudly reliant upon his mental force, and terribly cognizant of his infirmities; so intent upon the one and the other as to bound a world by his own horizon.” This seems to us an exact expression of the problem of Poe's character The clearest inference from his work is that nothing really was for him except his own imagination, his own intellect, his own temperament. Unfortunately, his recognition of his defects took the shape of passionate resentment, passionate exculpation, minute reasoning-why, not of cool criticism; [page 350:] hence the intensity of self-presentation in fiction and the woful failure in living.

The new edition is in every respect a very beautiful one, a fitting tribute to an apostle of the creed that “in perfect beauty consists the fullest Truth.”