Text: J. Arthur Greenwood, “Preface,” Edgar A. Poe: The Rationale of Verse, a Preliminary edition, 1968, pp. vii-xii (This material is protected by copyright)

[page viii:]

PREFACE

The present work had its origin one sleepless night in the summer of 1966. Many are the thoughts that come to me on such nights; and among them entered the question: why should I not be a Poe scholar? The censorious reader will find below ample reason why I should not.

The initial intention was to have produced a polemic edition of ‘The rationale of verse’ illustrating two theses: first, that Poe had a tin ear, and that the allusions to music in his work reflect merely general reading; second, that Poe's four-footed scansion of Integer vitae derived only mediately from Horace, but proximately from Flemming's(1) musical setting of the ode. I have not abandoned the first thesis; but, having found no strong evidence therefor, do not urge it in the notes hereafter.

The logical connexion of Rationale with the other texts printed may be briefly stated. Poe's review of Bryant is the source of his remarks in Rationale on the versification of Pope and Willis, and his earliest discussion of the use of trisyllabic feet; since Bryant had strong views, only partly coincident with Poe's, about such feet, it seemed fair to append them. ‘Notes upon English verse’ has been generally assumed(2) to be a mere preliminary edition of Rationale, and has escaped reprinting. The margins ale on rhyme is the source of Poe's remarkable note on the hedonics of crystalloscopy. The marginale on alexandrines is evidence that Poe's final theory of bastard feet dates from 1847: his original review of Mrs Hewitt (1846) scans her trisyllabic feet as anapaests. The 1850 review of Mrs Hewitt is the only published at, tempt I have seen — whether Poe wrote it or no — to apply Poe's numerical system of marking scansion in routine criticism. The Goold Brown is the only work on prosody or versification(3) that Poe can be proved to have read; and it is more convenient to put it in a lump than to disperse it in footnotes.

The connexion of the Whelpley essay with the other material is tenuous. Attempting to find, through Poole's Index, whether Rationale had drawn any contemporary magazine criticism, I beheld the entry Verses, the art of measuring, which seemed extremely à propro [page ix:] It is remarkable that this essay, which urges the omniprevalence of the spondee to an extent that pales Poe's view of that foot, purports to review Everett's modest and sober little book, whose only peculiarities are the exclusion of dactylic verses from English prosody and a propensity to cite Spanish poetry.

The first note to each Poe item cites the first — and in my opinion the only authoritative — publication; the first note to each other item cites the first — and to my best knowledge only — publication.

Three manuscripts by Poe were used in preparing this edition:

A fragmentary ms. of ‘Notes upon English verse’, extending from the words ‘I shall dismiss’ on p. 56 below to the words ‘the two first’ on p. 58, discovered by the late Thomas Ollive Mabbott in the Gilman collection at the library of the Johns Hopkins University.

A fragmentary ms. of ‘Notes upon English verse’, extending from the words ‘The general rhythm’ on p. 61 to the end of ‘The last leaf’ on p. 72, in the Houghton library of Harvard University.(4)

A fragmentary ms. of ‘The rationale of verse’, extending from the beginning to the words ‘may have failed’ on p. 93, and including Poe's footnote (note 2 on p. 93), in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library.

Except for corrections of palpable errors, the only changes in the text made without ms. authority are:

1. Accents are added on the letter y in Rationale where such accents appear at corresponding places in Notes.

2. The turned crescents at pp. 115, 116, 124, below, are printed pursuant to my best guess at Poe's intentions.

3. The stanza by Cranch on p. 136 is printed with 41 accents, in accordance with Poe's invaluable check sum. [page x:]

In particular, although it appears that Poe wrote terminal punctuation outside of quotation marks, I have restored this order only where I have seen the ms.

THE NOTES

In addition to notes giving documentation only, I have attempted content notes of six kinds:

1. Correct versions of the passages quoted. In transcribing a locus verbatim, Poe occasionally succeeded; punctatim, never.(5) Neither Poe, Bryant, nor Whelpley, moreover, scrupled to wrench a line or couplet from out a sentence: the entire sentence(6) is footnoted.

2. Quotations from the authors whose names these critics drop.

3. Explanations — more comprehensible, I hope, than the metre of Pease porridge hot — of alleged obscurities.

4. Arguments in opposition to the text. A colleague has objected that these indicate that I dislike Poe; I would reply that only arguments worthy of respect are worthy of refutation.

5. Poe's apparent sources, when identified. My indebtedness to Alterton(7) is probably manifest. When Poe wrote so feelingly on cribbage(8) he was writing as an experienced practitioner.

6. Parallel passages, reflecting perhaps a seedy country-house library.

The documentation contained in the notes serves to evidence that the works cited exist. I have ordinarily cited the edition at hand, and it is in general neither the best edition nor the edition Poe can be proved to have used; nor, except in Appendix 4, have I investigated variant readings.

TEXTUAL NOTES

I am no bibliographer — no masorete. Having determined to my satisfaction that Harrison's, Stedman & Woodberry's, and even (except for the notice of Mrs Hewitt) Griswold's editions are without textual authority, I have jettisoned all notice of their variants. The surviving textual notes comprise:

1. Alleged errors in original editions, emended in the present text.

2. The reading of the original edition of Notes or Rationale where I have adopted the reading of the ms.

3. Erasures in the ms. of Notes.

4. Variants between the original of volume 9 of the North American Review (published by Cummings & Hilliard) and the reprint (called ‘second edition’; published by Gray & Bowen).

A superior x in the text calls attention to a textual note.

INDEX

‘Every book that may be used as reference merits a good index, that is, one which enables the reader or student to locate readily the subject or item he seeks.’(9) Amen, say I; and it is with regret that I announce my inability to endorse any of that authority's specific precepts for indexing.(10) The foremost rule in indexing is that all entries that can be arranged in one alphabet shall be.(11) [page xi:] To this end I have used the following typographical conventions:

1. Entries in ordinary type are subject matter.

2. Entries in italics are first lines (or single lines) of verse quotations. In alphabetizing them, the articles a, an, the are regarded.

3. Entries underscored once are the names of words (by semanticists often enclosed in inverted commas for distinction from words): the names of English words in roman, of foreign words in italic.

4. Entries in ordinary type underscored twice are the names of authors cited.

5. Entries in italics underscored twice are the names of magazines.

Whenever convenient, the page reference is followed by a locator: 173 is a direction to look somewhere at the text (not the notes) on p. 173; 167*23, at the sentence or extract in the text of p. 167 to which reference 23 is appended; 167.23, at footnote 23 on p. 167; 167:23 combines the last two. A number in italics promises a quotation from the author cited; the sign # suffixed to a number promises documentation. Greek entries follow at the end of the English alphabet; first lines unadorned, names of words underscored once. The alphabetical order is word by word (New York precedes Newark) up to the first punctuation mark; the articles a, an, the are disregarded in alphabetizing the titles of books &c. [page xii:]

The table of rhymes is arranged strictly alphabetically, not phonetically: how Poe pronounced his rhymes is doubtful; how Spenser, more doubtful. Specifically, the catchword, printed in capitals, comprises the vowel or diphthong of the long syllable (in Greek, the accented vowel or diphthong) and all letters following; and these fragments are alphabetized from right to left. Again, Greek entries follow at the end.

The chronological table should be self-explanatory.

EDITIONS, TRANSLATIONS, &c.

In the notes I have routinely cited Poe's prose works from Harrison's(12) edition, rarely from Griswold's;(13) Poe's verses from Campbell.(14) The reviews of Bryant and Mrs Hewitt were reprinted by Stedman & Woodberry and Harrison. Rationale is reprinted in all editions of Poe that pretend to completeness, and in many popular collections of Poe's poems, or tales, or both; this proliferation of reprints may be attributed to publishers’ considering Rationale a pendant to Poe's popular lecture ‘The poetic principle’.

Neither Baudelaire nor Mallarmé published a translation of Rationale. A French translation by Lalou(15) appeared in 1926; the three declarations of Lalou's title are ‘The poetic principle’, ‘The philosophy of composition’, and Rationale. In his preface Lalou endeavours to suppress his pique at Poe's remarks on the atony of French verse.(16) Rationale has been routinely translated into Spanish(17) and Portuguese(18) as part of editions of Poe's works.(19)

German versification is a bastard art, having successfully assimilated French heroics, Italian sonnets, Greek elegiacs and sapphics, and even English blank decasyllables; and so a faithful German translation of Rationale would amuse and possibly even instruct. The edition of Schuhmann et al.(20) appeared too late in 1968 for me to make any use of its readings.

TYPOGRAPHY

A convincing imitation of XIX-century [[19th-century]] typesetting was neither possible nor attempted; having once resolved to print from typescript, I saw no reason to reproduce the most conspicuous feature of that typography, viz the em quad after each full stop. All ligatures have been ignored; it is convenient to record here that, in the fragments of ms. I have seen, Poe ligated the vowels ae in anapaest and caesura. Italic words, fragments of words, and the marks ; : ! ? follow the text; the use of italic commas and quotation marks reflects my own judgement and is without textual authority. Small caps occurring in the first word of an essay or poem have been suppressed; occurring in the body of a prose extract, they have been rendered by capitals; of a verse extract, by italics plus a textual note. Since the quotation marks supplied with the typewriter types used are not cast in lefts and rights, I adopted the expedient, suggested by but not identical with German usage, of opening a quotation with a dropped mark and closing with a mark at normal height. All hyphens - in the text or extracts have textual authority; the sign « is used to divide words at the ends of lines; « in the interior of a line indicates a hyphen falling at the end of a line in the text, but which may have been intended by the author.(21)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The works cited were read at the New York Public Library, the British Museum, the Library of Congress, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the libraries of Columbia, New York, and Yale Universities. The ms. of ‘Notes upon English verse’ is published with permission of the Harvard College Library. The ms. of ‘The rationale of verse’ is published with permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Astor, [page xiv:] Lenox and Tilden foundations. Figure 3 on p. 137 is reprinted from p. 1012 of A. H. Quinn & E. H. O’Neill, eds., The complete poems & stories of Edgar A. Poe (1946), by gracious permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

I have availed myself of the constructive(22) criticism of Gay Wilson Allen, Lucie Brown, Gordon Hubei, and Paul Shaman; and the enthymematic encouragement of elisabeth gleason [[Elizabeth Gleason]] has buoyed me along. Stig Tibbling kindly went over Tegnér's Nattvardsbarnen with me: the infelicities he pointed out in Longfellow's translation do not affect the extracts below.

In addition to my use of Alterton, acknowledged above, the curious reader will detect draughts — of a kind not readily indicated by citations — upon Augustus De Morgan and his unworthy continuator Martin Gardner.

APOLOGY

This book is a stop-gap. The words ‘preliminary edition’ on the title page do not represent the usual promise to supersede this edition by an edition in cloth binding and sumptuous typography, embodying those improvements or alterations that mature reflexion or the cavils of critics shall dictate: they represent a solemn undertaking that whenever there appears a complete(23) edition of Poe's critical writings, with authoritative(24) text and adequate commentary,(25) I hold it to be a duty and a pleasure to withdraw the present work.

The reader that has persevered through this preface will not need to be told that I have enjoyed my labours — that I am, radically, a dilettante. Those academics that have endorsed the vicious maxim diletto delitto will damn the book unread: I merely pray that the general reader consider the book on its merits, if any; and that the professional extend to Greenwood the courteous consideration that he routinely accords to Gradgrind.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page ix:]

1 Friedrich Ferdinand Flemming (1778-1813) composed Integer vitae in 1811, but the song was first published in 1847.

2 G. P. Putnam's 1902 edition of Poe printed (1:267-286) the parts of Notes that were not reprinted in Rationale. Putnam's editor is commonly stated to have been Charles Francis Richardson: but his share in the editorial work is evidently confined to his signed introduction (Edgar Allan Poe, World Author, 1:ix-liii). The title pages of vols. 2-10 do not name Richardson.

3 Brown divides prosody into the species versification, punctuation, utterance (comprising pronunciation and elocution), and figures (comprising aphaeresis, prosthesis, syncope, apocope, paragoge, diaeresis, synaeresis, tmesis, ellipsis, pleonasm, syllepsis, emallage, hyperbaton, simile, metaphor, allegory, metonymy, synec, doche, hyperbole, vision, apostrophe, personification, erotesis, ecphonesis, antithesis, climax, and irony).

4 catalogued as pf Ms Am 1228.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xi:]

5 And what points Poe did insert his printer treated cavalierly: see textual notes to ‘The last leaf’.

6. Amounting at p. 167, note 24, to 27 lines of Spenser.

7 Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's critical theory, Iowa City, 1 925.

8 Harrison 16:46.

9 A manual of style, &c., Univ, of Chicago Press, 1949 (1961 printing), p. 211, §358.

10 Ibid., pp. 178-187, §§309-319; pp. 211-213, §§359-363.

11 For a modern instance of failure of an index through polyalphabetism, see J. R. R. Tolkien, The lord [[Lord]] of the rings [[Rings]], New York: Ballantine, 1965, 3 vols. The index of 24 pages (a small prick indeed to 1359 pages of text) which Tolkien published (3:521-544) after materials prepared by Mrs N. Smith (sic 1:xii) is divided into no less than eight alphabets.

Why, then, asks Zoilus, has Greenwood & Hartley, Guide to tables in mathematical statistics (Princeton Univ. Press, 1962) both an author index and a subject index? — because I adopted the title ‘author index’ lest I, a non-bibliographer, should presume to publish ‘bibliography’.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xiii:]

12 James A. Harrison, ed., The complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Thos. Crowell, 1902, 17 vols. Often called the ‘Virginia Edition’. The copy I have seen bears the imprint of G. D. Sproul, and the half-title ‘The Monticello Edition’. Reprinted and in print: New York, AMS press.

13 Rufus W. Griswold, ed., The works of the late Edgar Allan Poe, Sc., New York, 1850, 4 vols. What I have seen is the 1859 printing (New York: Blakeman & Mason) of vols. 2 S 3.

14 Killis Campbell, ed., The poems of Edgar Allan Poe ‘ Boston: Ginn, 1917. Reprinted and in print: New York, Russell S Russell, 1962; this is what I have seen.

15 Edgar Allan Poe, Trois manifestes, tr. RenA Lalou, Paris: Simon Kra, 1926.

16 See p. 146 below, text opposite note 67.

17 Poe, ‘Los fundamentos del verso’, Obras en prosa, tr. Julio CortAzar, Madrid, 1956, 2:237-283.

18 AnAlise racional do verso’, Poesia e prosa, tr. Oscar Mendes & Milton Amado, Porto Alegre (Brazil), 194U, 1:179-219.

19 To the reader who retains some part of a baccalaureate knowledge of Latin versification, these translations will convey some notion of Poe's views.

20 Poe, Werke, ed. Kunno Schuhmann, Hans Dieter Muller, Arno Schmidt, & Hans Wollschlager, Olten [Switzerland]: Walter, 3 vols., 1966-68.

2l So p. 56, line 14.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page xiv:]

22 or syntactic.

23 Schuhmann et al. have made an excellent beginning at annotating Poe's tales; it remains to be seen whether the English-speaking reader will consent to read Poe's essays in translation. Schuhmann et al., moreover, are publishing only a selection from Poe's book reviews.

24 Not definitive — some undiscovered manuscript may turn up.

25 Quite apart from the repugnance with which publishers approach scholarship, such an edition may be delayed for want of a competent editor — an editor combining the mind of Edmund Wilson with the soul of Jörgen Tesman.