Text: Ruth Leigh Hudson, “Chapter I.II,” Poe's Craftsmanship in the Short Story, dissertation, 1935, pp. 51-83 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 51:]

The story of Poe's attempts and successes in securing volume publication of his tales throws so much light upon the development of his mind and art that it should be examined in some detail. He received his first encouragement, as we have noted, to aspire to the dignity of a volume in connection with the award of the Visiter prize to his story in October, law. He had submitted six stories carefully copied in delicate print, bound in volume form, and entitled, “Tales of the Folio Club.”(57) The committee recommended that he publish the whole collection, and a project was at once put under way to publish the volumes by subscriptions of one dollar, from the press of the Visiter.(58) It was perhaps unfortunate that Poe did not allow this plan to proceed; but one of the judges, J. P. Kennedy, lent his aid in interesting Carey and Lea of Philadelphia [page 52:] in the volume, and the manuscript sent to the Philadelphia publishers.(59)

The very fact that Poe himself bound his tales in a single volume and gave a title to the whole may have served to inspire the judges with their suggestion; certainly it was an indication that the young author had a sort of “book-unity” in mind and looked forward to a time when the six should be augmented by other tales. The recommendation of the judges and the personal interest of Kennedy gave him such high hopes that he probably set to work at once writing an “Introduction” to the members of his club and fashioning new tales which should suit his general scheme. In the six stories which he submitted as “Tales of the Folio Club” to the Visiter, Poe almost surely did not include any of the five which had been published the previous year in the Courier. With the exception of “Metzengerstein,” those tales of 1832 had been burlesque in tone. Certainly the comments of the judges in the Visiter award upon those which they examined as [page 53:] being “eminently distinguished by a wild, vigorous, and poetical imagination, a rich style, a fertile invention and varied ... curious learning” implied that they were, at least predominantly, serious in manner.(60) When a possibility of a volume publication loomed promisingly, Poe must have written his “Introduction to the Folio Club,” and only then, I think, the six became eleven to include those previously published. The nature of the early group of five probably had something to do with his shaping an introduction that would permit a burlesque tone. He was feeling about for a method of giving a sort of unity to the diversified group of tales which he had already written. Later, when he had added to his supply of stories, the proposed collection of tales became sixteen. This was the number announced in the Messenger in August, 1835, when it published a note about Potts volume forthcoming in the fall. Apparently, Poe also continued to try to find .some original method of tying his stories together in volume form. Even after the refusal of Harpers, transmitted to Poe through the medium of a letter from J. K. [page 54:] Paulding to T. W. White,(61) to publish the “Tales of the Folio Club,” Poe was trying to interest other publishers in the project and again changing his plan somewhat. In a letter to Harrison Hall, a Philadelphia publisher, on September 2, 1836, Poe again offered, his collection and explained his plan.(62) His seventeen tales already printed in the Messenger had been written, he declared, to illustrate a large work, “On the Imaginative Faculties.” He described his entire plan as follows: a group of literary amateurs had formed a club with the purpose of meeting regularly at dinner to read and criticize their respective stories; the critical comments were intended as burlesques upon criticism generally and would occupy about one-fourth of the volume. This latter part of Poe's plan evolved, we may guess somewhat confidently, out of his own experiences as a critic on the staff of the Messenger and also out of an attempt on his part to furnish the volume with some hitherto unpublished subject-natter [page 55:] which would attract a publisher to the collection.(63)

It is clear, at any rate, that Poe meant his volume to be more than an ordinary collection of tales: his design called for a unifying framework, consisting of a prologue, which should briefly characterize the members of his literary junto and suggest the tone of the collection, and of connecting links in the exchange of critical comments. A further unifying device lay in the fact that he meant, according to his letter to Harrison Hall, that the tales should appear to have been made public through the medium of a disgruntled member whose manuscript had been severely dealt with by his associates. The question of whether Poe originally designed to make all the tales in this collection burlesque in intent, as has been suggested by Professor Wilson,(64) is involved with the problem of just when the conception of the “Introduction” took place and also with that of accepting his own explanation of the [page 56:] origin of his plan. If he actually intended from the beginning to make his tales illustrate the imaginative faculties, then he must have designed some of them as examples of the horrible, the mysterious, the poetically singular. The one thing which we know surely about the original plan for his volume is that it was not to be an ordinary miscellany of stories.

It may be worthwhile, however, in estimating his originality to suggest possible origins of his plan. Professor Palmer Cobb has pointed out the possibility of Poe's indebtedness to E. T. A. Hoffman's collection called Serapionsbrüder in which four young men meet and discuss the stories which they read to one another. The general idea is similar certainly, and it is possible that Poe had read somewhere an allusion to Hoffmann's plan. It is extremely improbable that he knew the three-volume collection itself. Hoffmann's method consisted of characterizing very seriously the members of his club and giving each of them come::hat definite predilections and critical opinions. The criticisms form an integral part of the collection. There is nothing of the burlesque in either the tales or the critical frame-work, but the stories, themselves are as varied as the individual personalities of four narrators would be likely to make them. [page 57:]

Professor Pattee has called attention to the resemblance between the structure and atmosphere of Hoffmann's Serapionsbrüder and Irving's Tales of a Traveller.(65) I do not know whether it has ever been suggested that the latter may very well have furnished the inspiration for Poe's collection. In Part I of the Tales of a Traveller a group of jolly guests at a hunting dinner found themselves marooned overnight by a storm at the home of their host. They exchanged stories and chaffing comments and jests when each story was finished. There is much of travesty in the stories related upon this occasion, though one feels that Irving would have liked to make some of them genuine tales of horror. As we shall see in connection with the tales themselves, Poe showed upon more than one occasion familiarity with the work of his great American predecessor in tale-writing. It would have been natural for him to follow slightly the most successful American writer in the field into which he was venturing. Perhaps, then, the link between Hoffmann and and [[sic]] Poe is no more than the latter's following of one who borrowed art idea from the German romancer. [page 58:]

There were other followers of Hoffmann, however, in the plan for publishing a collection of tales held together by some unifying framework. A fragment of such a collection appeared in the New Monthly for October, 1830.(66) A romantic, rambling anecdote, entitled “The Prison Breaker,” was headed by an introductory note which gave an account of a literary club who read and discussed their tales over a cold supper. A group of young men met weekly “to communicate their ideas in writing.” They read their stories to the company and left their manuscripts at the house of the entertainer — it was by this means that the writer came into possession of this strange story by “the old gentleman in spectacles and of a saturnine aspect.” One or two members of unknown merit had been admitted to the party which was to consist of only a dozen. The story which followed this note is long and tiresome; evidently the members considered it boring, too, for there were frequent interruptions from the “gallery,” and in the fashion of Chaucer's “Sir Thopas,” it ultimately arrived nowhere.

If Poe knew at all the current literature of France or had access to French periodicals, he would [page 59:] have ample precedent for his plan to issue a collection of tales which should achieve unity by means of its framework. Victor Hugo had planned such a collection which should be known as Tales Told in Camp, and should consist of adventure stories. His Bug Jargal, is a remnant of this designed volume.(67) With others of the Romantic group he also planned a group of tales which should emanate from the Quiquengrogne,” apparently a literary coterie or club. The collected work of Gérard de Nerval preserves some fragments of ambitious volumes which he planned. One of these, “Le Cabaret de La Hère Saguet,” is an introductory sketch for a group of tales that were supposed to follow. A group of young men resorted to the cabaret and, as true followers of Hoffmann, imbibed their inspiration and gave it forth freely in the good talk and the bohemian atmosphere “chez la mère Saguet.” The sketch was published in le Gastronome, May 13, 1830, with the note, “Les soirées chez la mère Saguet seront publiées sous ce titre: la Vieille Boheme,” a project which, [page 60:] like Poe's, never materialized.(68) in 1832 de Nerval and some of his friends planned a collection of two volumes of tales to be called Les Contes du cenacle Bousingo; of this protect de Nerval's tale, “la Main de gloire,” or “la Main enchantée,” Is the only known remnant. In his introduction to volume II of OEuvres Complètes, M. Marsan writes of this custom so popular in 1830 among the members of the Young France movement — announcing grandly projected works which never saw the light:

At least two reasons, I think, were responsible for Poe giving up his plan to lend unity to his collection by means of a framework. As a reviewer, he had become familiar with various other works which made use of a similar device, and his critical instincts perhaps inclined him to find it unsatisfactory. At [page 61:] least he found it not particularly original. He knew, of course, of Dickens's successful series of the Pickwick Club; he reviewed Legends of a Log Cabin in the Messenger for December, 1835,(70) and commented upon the “readily conceived” plot of having a heterogeneous company amuse themselves by telling stories on a snowy night. After the definite abandonment of his or own scheme, he reviewed Dickens's Master Humphrey's Clock and commented disapprovingly upon the design as “the common-place one of putting various tales into the mouths of a social party.”

Poe would have denied, to be sure, that his plan involved quite such a common-place design; he would have insisted upon a superior kind of unity in his conception of a literary junto with similar interests and in the connecting critical comments.

Perhaps the simple fact that his number of stories had entirely outgrown the framework and that many of them would not have fitted into his design was largely responsible for his giving up the plan for the “Tales of the Folio Club” sometime before the publication of the volume of 1840. An echo of his former purpose of preserving a certain degree of unity remained in his statement in the Preface that the tone of the tales there included had been purposely limited in order to keep a unity of design. In accordance with either his definite change in plan or with the accidents of his creation, Poe changed in 1839 the title of his collection also.

It has been positively stated(72) and commonly accepted that Poe derived his title, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, from an article by Scott, “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition,” written as a review of the works of Hoffmann, in the Foreign [page 63:] Quarterly Review for July, 1827. But the words “grotesque” and “arabesque” had become common ones in Poe's vocabulary by 1839, in fact, he used them repeatedly in his criticism and stories. He must have seen then constantly in his reading, for critical articles of the period, as well as tales, display them with great frequency. It is certainly very doubtful that he was conscious of borrowing the epithets from Scott. If he remembered the words as used by Scott and the details of “grotesque” writing as the latter described it, he would hardly have identified his mode of writing with that type. Scott quoted various authorities to prove that the exhibition of supernatural appearances in fiction ought to be rare, brief, and indistinct. He connected the manner of the grotesque clearly with the supernatural and identified it definitely with the Germanism which Poe denied in his Preface. He wrote of the “FANTASTIC node of writing” of the Germans “in which the most wild and unbounded license is given to an irregular fancy, and all species of combinations, however, ludicrous, or however shocking, are attempted and executed without scruple.” Hoffmann, who, he declared, led the way in this type of writing, was “of a hypocondriac and whimsical disposition, which carried him to extremes in all his undertakings.” He [page 64:] described Hoffmann, “the artist who exhibited the fantastic or supernatural grotesque in his compositions,” as “so nearly on the verge of actual insanity, as to be afraid of the beings his own fancy created.” Scott added, “In fact, the grotesque in his compositions partly resembles the arabesque in painting, in which is introduced the most strange and complicated monsters, resembling centaurs, griffins, sphinxes, chimeras, rocs, and all other creatures of romantic imagination, dazzling the beholder as it were by the unbounded fertility of the author's imagination, and sating it by the rich contrast of all the varieties of Shape and colouring, while there is in reality nothing to satisfy the understanding and inform the judgment.” It should be noted that Scott used. “arabesque” to describe a type of painting; that he associated it with preternatural creatures of a kind that play no part in Poe's tales; and that he declared that it neither satisfied the understanding nor informed the judgment. “Grotesque” composition he associated with Hoffmann insanity.”

It is true that Poe posed in his Preface as having deliberately followed a mode in writing his stories, but he was, I feel sure, not sufficiently indifferent [page 65:] to their association with him aa creator to sanction any such description of their manner. It also must not be forgotten, in this connection, that Poe denied the charge of Germanism in the Preface to his tales.

If a source must be sought, other than in the common literary vocabulary of the time, for Poe's happy combination of wards in his title, one may be found much nearer at band in point of time and with much more pleasant associations. In his Preface to Hood's Own, 1838, Thomas Hood told his readers who knew him through his Comic Annual that he had developed a “System of Practical Cheerful Philosophy” to help him endure the woes of his changed physical state (he was the victim of consumption). He wrote in part:

This gay, heroic tone would have caught the fancy of Poe, I think; indeed, the manner of his own Preface to the 1840 volumes flaunts a note of the same flippancy displayed by Hood. Perhaps it is no more than interesting coincidence, but the Broadway Journal for May 31, 1845, under “Literary Gossip” mentioned Hood's approaching death from consumption and added, “How Hood has borne up against the inroads of a long disease, the consumption, let him tell us himself in a passage of his mirthful philosophy written in 1839.” The writer then quoted from the passage given above beginning at “the very fingers” and going to the end, “nourished the violets.” This may or may not have been written by Poe; it is very likely that he wrote most of the material in the “Literary Gossip.”(74) [page 67:]

Hood's name had been associated by reviewers with this very quality of grotesquerie in complimentary fashion.(75) A review of Hood's works in the Westminster Review(76) described the trait of the grotesque as that which has “overpassed the boundaries of sense and spirit ... watched the growth and decay of strange faces in the bickering fire at even-tide ... bent his ear to listen to counsel in the creaking of the door. It is but going a few steps beyond Nature in the apposition of these things that form the secret of the grotesque.” Of Hood's work in particular, the reviewer wrote:

The first published collection of Poe's tales cannot be dismissed without taking some note of the introductory words with which Poe sent it out. His Preface contained a note of pride and of defiance as he defended himself against criticism:

In support of the view that Poe wrote his stories first of all with an eye to their sales value, we should note especially some of his avowals in his Preface. He declared that he had no peculiar taste for the species of writing represented in his collection; that he had kept in mind book-unity for his volume; and that he admittedly had followed the “vein” or the moment. It is significant, too, that in “his first pronouncement upon his efforts in the field of the short story, he emphasized, almost haughtily, the deliberate art, the “matured purpose,” and the “careful elaboration” of his craftsmanship. Another statement which Poe made in his Preface is of importance in tracing his development in the short story: “tomorrow I may be anything but German, as yesterday I was everything else.” This may be taken either as a [page 70:] trumpet warning of the new mode soon to become evident, in his tales of ratiocination or as an avowal of his intention deliberately to cultivate a new manner in order to prove the diversity of his mind.

Sometime in the early 1840's Poe began making his plans for another collection of his tales. He had apparently become obsessed with the idea that the best way to keep his name before the public and to display his abilities, in furtherance of his project to establish a magazine of his own, was by volume publication. In 1841 he wrote Lea and Blanchard,(77) publishers of the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, offering them his tales with a suggestion of the following title: The Prose Tales of Edgar A. Poe, including ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ the ‘Descent into the Maelstrom,’ and all his later pieces, with a second edition of the ‘Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.’ “The later pieces,” he wrote, “will be eight in number, making the entire collection thirty-three, which would occupy two thick novel volumes.” Probably a few months later, after he had written five more tales, he was [page 71:] again turning over in his mind a plan for collection. A copy of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, owned by Mr. George Blumenthal, is the only record of this phase of his intentions, but it furnishes some interesting sidelights upon the problem.(78) It appears that he had decided upon the title, Phantasy-Pieces, which he had used to describe his tales in the Preface of 1840, and he retained for the keynote of his collection the same motto from Goethe which he had used before. The title-page indicates also that he at first expected to make the work extend through three volumes and corrected this later to two. The Table of Contents lists thirty-eight titles, but of these “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” have been crossed out, perhaps because he was able to sell these new stories while he was still planning the projected volumes, and he did, not wish to give then prior volume publication. Doctor Robertson comments upon the arrangement of the tales as follows: “A study of the page of contents indicates a peculiar arrangement of titles — an intermixing of his serious stories of imagination and ratiocination with his humorous tales. [page 72:] These titles include three unknown stories: The Horse Shade, The Teeth, and A Pig Tale. This curious intermixing of his serious and humorous tales had been a part of Poe's design for the collection of 1840, as an examination of the arrangement of tales in those volumes indicates; it was, of course, a part of his deliberate plan to impress his readers with the variety of the products of his creation. Doctor Robertson suggests that A Pig Tale was probably a new title for “A Tale of Jerusalem”; he does not note, however, what is equally obvious, that The Horse Shade was a new name for “Metzengerstein” and The Teeth, for “Berenice.”

Certain other features of this proposed publication are of especial interests I think. For one thing, it helps to clear up the strange linking of two tales, wholly unlike, in the serial publication, The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, in the summer of 1843. In the Table of Contents of the proposed Phantasy-Pieces, the first two tales listed are “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Man that was Used up.” These are the tales included in the send pamphlet. it is probable that if the whole series of paper-back Romances had come from the press, they would have followed the order of arrangement in the Table of Contents, would have [page 73:] included the titles listed there, and would have given us new titles for some of Poe's stories it is also of significance that this manuscript record is the first indication of Poe's change, from the title, “The Visionary,” to “The Assignation.” So far as I have been able to learn, it offers evidence of the only occasion, upon which Poe proposed to sign himself “Edgar Allan Poe” on a published work instead of his customary “Edgar A. Poe.” Doctor Robertson thinks that the text-emendations and revisions made in these volumes indicate that the date of the proposed publication preceded 1843. He states that many of the corrections were inserted in the serial of 1843. My own cursory examination of the volume of 1843 has led me to believe that it does not show extensive revisions from earlier versions.(79) Many of the changes which Poe was later to make in the texts of his two stories printed as Prose Romances did not appear in that volume. It is possible that the printer used for his copy issues of the magazines in which the tales had appeared with some minor [page 74:] revisions indicated by Poe. Doctor Robertson is doubtless right, however, in assigning the date of the “Phantasy-Pieces” as around 1843, for the stories listed correspond to the tales which Poe had written up to and through the year 1842.

Certainly it is of significance to note that this interesting projected publication bears witness to the fact that Poe bad already made many of the drastic revisions which were to mark his versions of 1845. Every-thing combines to indicate that after Poe left Graham's Magazine in May, 1842, and through the months of 1843 when he was without a job, he was more than ordinarily active both in original creation and in re-working his old materials. In spite of his distressing financial conditions, or perhaps because of them, this was one of his halcyon periods creatively.

In 1844 Poe sought to have his tales brought out by Harpers. His letter bespeaking the influence of Doctor Anthon has already been mentioned. It deserves closer attention, however, in a consideration of Poe's attitude toward the purpose of a volume publication. He wrote of his career as a magazinist and of the handicap resulting from periodical publication and declared his object in seeking a satisfactory collection [page 75:] of his numerous tales was to give the public a fair conception of his abilities. His point of view can be best seen by quoting extracts from his long letter of June, 1844.

At the height of his popularity, the New York publishers, Wiley and Putnam, published a one-volume collection of Poe's tales, a group of twelve selected by their reader, E. A. Duyckinck, and representing chiefly Poe's successes in the field of ratiocination. In letters to friends Poe objected, to this collection because it did not represent his mind in its various phases and have no indication of his “variety and diversity,”’ qualities he believed indispensable for genius.(81)

in January, 1846, Poe wrote Duyckinck that “for particular reasons” he was very anxious to have another volume of his Tales published before the first of March; the collection he proposed was far better, he declared, than the one of 1845, and he would be glad to have fifty dollars in full for its copyright.(82) No doubt he was still turning over in his mind the fancied misrepresentation of the previous volume, and he probably also needed the fifty dollars so desperately that he was willing to resort to any sacrifice in order to get it. [page 77:]

Somewhere in the course of his career as a fictionist and magazinist, a significant transformation took place in Poe's point of view about a collection. In 1833 he was still essentially the creator — the writer. He planned his “Tales of the Folio Club” as a closely knit unit, whether he meant or not that the tales should all be of the same general tenor. In 1839 when he wrote the Preface to the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he avowed that he had purposely written the stories included, in the “grotesque” and “arabesque” tone in order to preserve the “unity of design,” with a view to their republication in volume form as “one book.” But something or his desire to be considered versatile had influenced his arrangement of the tales as a mixture of the serious and the comic. In 1843 and 1844 the idea of variety had predominated over the idea of “unity of design.” In 1846 he declared that he had kept “book-unity always in mind,” “that each tale” had been designed “with reference to its effect as part of the whole,” but he added that “In this view, one of my chief aims has been the widest diversity of subject, thought, and especially tone and manner of handling.” [[Poe to P. P. Cooke, August 9, 1846.]] It is altogether possible that he as merely playing the part he learned so well of adjusting his expressed views to the accidents [page 78:] of his creation. But his changed ambitions may also have had something to do with his re-adjustment. In 1833, and to some degree in 1830, he was more concerned with the work of art itself, its unity, its singleness of impression. In spite of the admittedly varied character of the tales included in his collection, he sought to produce one effect with the whole. By 1846 he had become supremely conscious of what people thought of him and his mental powers. In other words, he had come to prefer, I believe, that a critic should praise the versatility, the diversity of his cell mind rather than the artistic beauty of a story or poem.(83) His conception, therefore, of the purpose of a collection had changed to conform with the transformation which had taken place in his attitude toward his single creations. He confessed, of course, that he desired to show his diversity in order to prove his capacity for editing a magazine. But the truth of the matter, as I see it, lies in the fact that within himself he had buried the artist and impressionist beneath the magazinist and craftsman.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 51:]

57.  In a note on Poe's letter of Nov., 1835, in which he mentioned his manuscript in the hands of Carey and Lea, Kennedy wrote that Poe referred to his Tales sent to the publishers, “being two series submitted for the prize, for which one was chosen, and two others at my suggestion sent to Carey and Lean (Harrison, Biography, 2.) The “two series” may indicate that Poe clearly separated the tales which he submitted in two groups, perhaps serious and satiric. One series may have included “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Visionary,” and “Siope,” the other, “Lionizing,” “Epimanes,” and “King Pest.”

58.  In the Visiter for Oct. 26, 1833 (III, No. 39) under the heading, “The Folio Club,” appeared an announcement of the proposed volume “about being put to press.” The writer commented upon the “raciness, originality of thought and brilliancy of conception” in the tales of the collection.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 52:]

59.  The Visiter for Nov. 2, 1833 (III, No. 40) announced that “Mr. Poe has declined the publication of ‘Tales of the Folio Club’” by the subscription plan and stated that he proposed to bring the volume out in Philadelphia.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 53:]

60.  Baltimore Saturday Visiter, October 12, 1833 (III, No. 37). Reprinted in the Southern Literary Messenger, August, 1835 (I, 716).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 54:]

61.  See previous mention of this letter in section I of this chapter.

62.  Thomas O. Mabbott, “On Poe's Tales of the Folio Club,” The Sewanee Review, XVI (April, 1928), 171ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 55:]

63.  Woodberry noted, II, Appendix C, 402, that Poe's collection was offered to another New York house besides Harpers, and that its London publication was considered. He added, “but the documents in the case are unpublished.” Hervey Allen, Israfel, I, 395, mentions briefly the negotiations in 1836 with Sanders and Ortley of New York, about an English publication of the Tales of the Folio Club.

64.  James Southall Wilson, The Devil Was in It,” The American Mercury, XXIV (Oct., 1931), 215ff. F. L. Pattee believes that the volume, Tales of the Folio Club, if it had been issued between 1833 and 1835, would have been predominantly burlesque in tone (op. cit., 126).

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 57:]

65.  Op. cit., 14.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 58:]

66.  XXIX, 373ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 59:]

67.  Hugo wrote in the preface to the first edition, January, 1826, that Bug Jargal was a fragment of a more extended work. He explained that his plan had originally been to represent a group of French officers whiling away the tedious nights in camp by each narrating in turn some of his own adventures. He declared that the work had never been finished and, for that matter, was not worth finishing. Bug Jargal, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1894, viii.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 60:]

68.  OEuvres Complètes de Gerard de Nerval, Paris, 1928, II, 225f.

69.  Jules Marsan, editor of volume II, p. xxi.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 61:]

70.  Works, VIII, 120.

71.  Graham's Magazine, May, 1841. Works, X, 144f.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 62:]

72.  Woodberry, I, 223-4. See also Palmer Cobb, The influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 7, and Gustav Gruener, “Poe's Knowledge of German,” Modern Philology, II (June, 1904), 125.f.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 66:]

73.  Prose and Verse. Wiley and Putnam, New York, 1845, Part II.

74.  It is worth noting that the date of Hood's Own was given as 1839 when in reality the work appeared early in 1838. This error may be associated with the fact that the Wiley and Putnam volumes, published shortly after Hood's death and reviewed by Poe in August, 1845, gave the date, 1839, with the Preface to Hood's Own. Poe may have seen some of the material in advance of publication.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 67:]

75.  Poe himself as later to stress the element of grotesquerie in Hood's work. See his reviews of Hood's Prose and Verse, August, 1845, Works, XII, 213, 233, 234.

76.  XXXI (April, 1838), 301.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 70:]

77.  Included with the facsimile of the Manuscript of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Drexel institute, Philadelphia [1897]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 71:]

78.  This copy is described by Doctor J. W. Robertson in his Commentary upon the Bibliography of Poe (San Francisco, 1934), p. 182, and the title-page proposed. Table of Contents, and first page are reproduced between pages 182 and 183.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 73:]

79.  Because of its great rarity, this volume is guarded with great care by the libraries fortunate enough to possess it. The copy of the Library of Congress is an association copy, having been presented, with Poe's own signature, to a friend of his. I was not permitted to handle it sufficiently to make more than a general comparison.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 75:]

80.  Letters, 175ff.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 76:]

81.  Letters to Griswold, 1846(?). Letters, 228, and to P. P. Cooke, August 9, 1845, ibid., 256.

82.  January 8, 1846. Letters, 227.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 78:]

83.  It was this spirit, I think, that moved him in the Preface to his Poems of 1845 to write that poetry could not be written for the “more paltry commendation of mankind,” and in the Broadway Journal for Sept., 20, 1845, under “Critical Notices, to comment upon a criticism of himself thus: “If we are an ingenious critic or a prose-poet, it is not because Mr. William Jones says so.”