Dictionary of Names and Titles in Poe's Collected Works, (1968), title page and table of contents

NAMES AND TITLES IN POE’S COLLECTED WORKS

By Burton R. Pollin

A unique contribution to the fast-growing body of Poe scholarship, this exhaustive dictionary — prepared in the Institute of Computer Research in the Humanities at New York University — presents a complete alphabetical listing of all names and titles cited by Poe throughout his poems, stories, and essays. Following careful analysis of James A. Harrison's definitive edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe(1902), to which it is cross-indexed, this book was computer-produced in its final stages; as one of the first literary applications of this recently-developed technique, it sets an important precedent and establishes a high standard of accuracy in indexing.

No author in the history of American literature has displayed the onomastic inventiveness and ingenuity of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's canon is filled with references to a wide range of sources: myth, history, the works of other authors, even his own writings. In this index, which contains more than five thousand entries, Professor Burton R. Pollin has created the first guide to this wealth of significant allusions, thereby providing students of American literature with an invaluable reference tool and an immediate key to future studies.

The computer was used by Dr. Pollin to fulfill a variety of purposes. It assured a text which could be subjected to countless proofreadings and corrections; provided guide letters for each page of the listings; permitted the inclusion of annotations indicating Poe's sources, amending his errors, and suggesting comparisons; and, finally, yielded four significant supplementary sections. Derived from the sections, “Names” and “Titles,” these are the only available lists of Poe's characters and of the titles of his poems and tales in all their various forms, of his essays and critical articles, and of all the books he reviewed. The methods employed in programming the computer for these tasks are described in the introduction, and a schematic “flowchart” is also included.

The final significance of the Dictionary, of course, reaches beyond the techniques by which it has been produced, as important as they are, and rests in the great amount revealed about Poe's reading habits, influences, and thought patterns. Its function, therefore, is not only documentary, but also critical, amply fulfilling the hope expressed by Dr. Pollin in his introduction that “there will be provided, in the index as presented, a series of objective sets of data which will enable us to be more specific in our views of Poe as critic and creator.”

Professor Burton R. Pollin

Burton R. Pollin, Professor of English at the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, is the author of Education and Enlightenment in the Works of William Godwin(1962) and Godwin Criticism(1967); editor of three volumes of Godwin material: Italian Letters(1965), Four Early Pamphlets(1966), and Uncollected Writings (1968); and contributor of numerous articles on Poe, Hawthorne, Byron, Keats, Browning, and Shelley to a variety of books and periodicals.

Professor Pollin holds a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University, and has been the recipient of awards from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other sources. He is currently working on manuscript papers of Benjamin Constant, under a Distinguished Research Fellowship from the New York State University Research Foundation. His forthcoming book, Discoveries in Poe, will be derived in part from the data collated in this Dictionary of Names and Titles in Poe's Collected Works.