Two New Editions of Poe

IT is an agreeable fancy to picture the ghosts of famous authors, in those happier seats where they are doubtless free to amuse themselves with their present reputation among mortals, as turning the leaves of modern editions of their books. How suave must be the smile with which Shakespeare examines the net result of the labors of his commentators ! Omar Khayyám is very likely polishing a cynical quatrain at this moment, among some esoteric and delighted circle of the blest, over the latest Variorum edition of his Rubáiyát. But none of the ghosts, surely, snatch at new editions of their masterpieces with such passionate eagerness as Poe. In his lifetime he had not the pleasure, known nowadays to so many lesser authors, of beholding a uniform edition of his writings. More than half a century after his death, a single publishing season brings forth two notable editions, each of which might well fire the pride and please the eye of Poe’s wandering wraith.

His pathetic love for the sumptuous would be flattered by the soft, light paper, ample page, and vellum-backed binding of the Arnheim ¹ Edition. Apart from this outward elegance of form, the most salient characteristic of the edition is Mr. Frederick S. Coburn’s illustrations. He has brought to the interpretation of Poe’s work an uncommon insight into its peculiar nature, and the seventy-five photogravures do full justice to the delicate and harmonious, as well as to the ghastly and nocturnal side of Poe’s genius. In the chatty and inconclusive introductory essay on Edgar Allan Poe, World - Author, Professor Richardson is not at his best, and his chief editorial service has been in the chronological arrangement of the tales, poems, and critical writings.

The motto of the Virginia Edition ² has been chosen from Poe’s own words : “ I am naturally anxious that what I have written should circulate as I wrote it, if it circulate at all.” Its appearance marks an epoch in the history of Poe’s text. While the Stedman-Woodberry volumes seemed, in 1894, to be as perfect an edition as could be produced in our generation, and while they have by no means been superseded, it is undeniable that the painstaking editors of the Virginia Edition have succeeded in establishing a more authentic text of Poe than has ever been printed, and that they have collected an unexpectedly great amount of wholly new material.

A brief summary of the contents of the seventeen volumes makes this evident. The first volume is devoted to a careful biography of Poe, prepared by the general editor, Professor James A. Harrison of the University of Virginia. Barring an occasional lapse into sentimentalism and pardonable sectional feeling, it is excellent. Then come five volumes of Tales, printed in chronological order, following the text which received the author’s latest revision, and with notes — furnished by Dr. R. A. Stewart — giving every variant reading of previous editions. These volumes are prefaced, it should be added, by Mr. Mabie’s skillful address on Poe’s Place in American Literature, which has already appeared in the Atlantic. The seventh volume is devoted to the Poems, for which Professor C. W. Kent has provided a suggestive introduction and ample notes. Six volumes of Criticism follow. Their interest to the student of Poe may be indicated by the fact that more than half of this material has remained uncollected until now. Much of it, it is true, is mere fugitive criticism of authors who have long since been deservedly forgotten ; and yet it should all find a place in such a definitive edition as this. The three volumes of Essays and Miscellanies are also new in part, and give many articles, for the first time, in the precise form in which Poe wrote them. The sixteenth volume contains a bibliography and general index, and the seventeenth, which completes the set, presents Poe’s correspondence. Much of this is wholly new, the letters received by Poe as well as those which he wrote are printed in due order, and the entire correspondence possesses an exceptional interest.

It is not too much to say, therefore, that no student of American literature can afford to neglect the Virginia Edition of Poe. It is to be praised as well for its frank loyalty to his memory as for its exact presentation of the ipsissima verba of that solitary, embittered craftsman who wrote not a few pages incomparably well.

P.