The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1917), title page and table of contents

Notes:

This table of contents is a reasonable facsimile of the original edition, with some compromises for the sake of formatting.

The dedication page reads:

Henry Peebles Hillard (1859-1942) was president of the Central National Bank, in St. Louis, MI, until his retirement in 1914 due to ill health. He created and subsidized a fund for the Hilliard Library of Southern Literature at the University of Texas, where Killis Campbell was a Professor of English. In 1912, the collection included 190 volumes, including a complete set of the Southern Literary Messenger (38 volumes bound in 30). purchased in 1906.

Although there is no clear indication in the book itself, there are two editions. Although the second edition retains the copyright date of 1917 and bears no formal statement of its status, it must have been printed late in 1925 or shortly thereafter as it adds several references to The Valentine Letters, edited by Mary Newton Stanard and published in 1925, and a reference on p. 162 to an article printed on August 29, 1925. (Campbell himself reviewed the Stanard book in “Recent books on Poe,” Studies in Philology, vol. XXIV, July 1927, pp. 474-479.) According to the Catalogue of Copyright Entries, published monthly by the Library of Congress (no. 95, October 1917, Part I, Group I, Books, entry 4269), the first edition of the book was copyrighted by Killis Campbell in Austin, TX on August 25, 1917 and affirmed September 13, 1917. The book was available in print as early as November 1917, with an inscribed copy having been presented to Eugene C. Barker (1874-1956), a fellow professor at the University of Texas and a personal friend of the editor, dated as November 6, 1917. (This copy is currently in a private collection.) A review appeared as early as December 1917 (in the Dial). Campbell was apparently still giving out copies of the first printing as late as June 16, 1919, when he inscribed a copy to Hyder Edward Rollins (1889-1958) (now in the library of Harvard University, where Rollins was a Gurney Professor of English and a fellow native of Texas), further supporting the publication of a second edition only after this date. In both copies, Campbell has neatly corrected the error on p. 104, replacing the o of the erroneous “down” with an a to make the word “dawn.”

In the original printing, Campbell puts line numbers to the right of the text. In the current presentation, these line numbers have been moved to the left of the text, and the right of the text has been used to create tags for notes and variants, for more convenient reference.