Text: Hervey Allen, “Introduction,” The Book of Poe, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1919, pp. xi-xvii

[page xi:]

INTRODUCTION

IN a personal sketch of Poe written by James Russell Lowell for Graham's Magazine of 1845, the latter, even at that early date, summed up succinctly what has always been one of the chief difficulties to the understanding of Poe's work. Lowell then remarked, “As it is, he has squared out blocks enough to build an enduring pyramid but left them lying careless and unclaimed in many different quarries.”

Even now Lowell's statement holds true to an astonishing extent. Despite a great deal of collation and textual and literary criticism, to all but the special student possessed of the time, means, and inclination to collect and ponder, the approach to anything like a complete understanding of what Poe actually did have to say is still for various reasons a difficult one.

Generally speaking, however, the reasons for this difficulty are twofold: They inhere first in the fact that Poe's method of publication during his lifetime was largely journalistic, frequently haphazard, and often obscure; and second, in the situation in regard to the editing and publishing of his collected works after his death in 1849. But the second reason may with very little doubt be fixed on as much the more important. Since both the excuse for and the value of such an anthology as this will become clear to the reader by an understanding of the situation alluded to, it is the purpose of this introduction to discuss it here briefly.

During his life Poe first published by far the greater part of his work in magazines and newspapers. He then [page xii:] very frequently, indeed, almost habitually, revised and republished it in still other periodicals. Before he died some of this widely scattered material had been collected and published in book form, but for a great many reasons, which need not be detailed here, much of it had not. By the time of his death a great many of the tales and most of his poetry had appeared between cloth covers. But this was by no means true of his criticism, which, consisting for the most part of book reviews, sketches of personalities, editorials, essays, and notebook jottings, lay scattered in the leaves of various periodicals, some of them ephemeral and obscure, in Richmond, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere. Poe himself was dismally aware of this condition and of its probable adverse effect upon his fame. He strove constantly, but for the most part with little avail, to overcome it. In June, 1844, shortly after he had left Philadelphia and gone to New York to enter upon what was his last active creative period, we find him addressing a letter to Professor Charles Anthon, at that time an influential literary adviser to Harpers, asking the professor's influence toward a collected edition of the then already sadly scattered work. Referring to the drawbacks of magazine publication, Poe says:

Thus even up until almost the close of his career we find Poe himself striving to overcome what has always remained one of the chief stumblingblocks [[stumbling-blocks]] to a full appreciation of his message. In the field of the short story he had to some degree been able to overcome this disability of so serious a scattering of his work. A small edition of his collected tales had appeared in Philadelphia early in 1840. They had in volume form, however, attracted [page xiii:] little notice. In 1845 another selection of his tales and the bulk of his poetry was published in New York by Wiley and Putnam. This was after he had written “The Raven” and was well embarked toward fame. The selection of his short stories was, however, made by an editor with an eye to their immediate popularity rather than their permanent literary merit, and there can be no doubt that, as Poe at the time protested, they served to give too narrow an idea of the range of his work. Just about the time of Poe's death the situation was in some ways bettered by a further and much fuller collection of his works edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold — but only in some ways, for the collection was by no means complete, and it was pre- ceded by a biographical sketch which mingled fact and poisonous fancy in such an unscrupulous manner that only the manifest genius of the works which followed the preface served finally to counter the treacherous blow. Thus for a number of years the world for the most part was left to form its judgment of Poe on a portion of his works only, virulently introduced. Despite this, Poe's fame continued to increase both at home and abroad.

After the poet's death, but not until a very considerable time had elapsed, both biographers and textual scholars set about the reconstruction of what may, without any violence to language, be called Poe's “remains.” The work was long, laborious, and curiously beset. Some of the publications, even some of his own volumes, in which his work had first appeared, had almost vanished; Poe's own personality was baffling; ridiculous and sen- timental but bitter controversies continued to rage over his love affairs; amateurs in investigation rushed in where scholars and trained literary men could not afford to be seen; documents were hidden and denied; sectional propa- ganda contributed its fustian — until no less a person than Henry James is said to have remarked that a consuming interest in Poe was the mark of a second-class mind.

Unfortunately a great deal of that which has just been described contrived to get itself “read into the record,” as it were. So that even now if the student or reader interested in Poe visits the library he is only too liable to find [page xiv:] himself lost in a maze of biographical, critical, and purely textual comment on Poe much of which is obsolete or, worse still, positively misleading. General assertions such as this must, however, be qualified carefully, and the special student will find his time and effort amply re- warded by reference to such works as the eighteen-volume set of the biography, letters, and works of Poe edited by Professor James A. Harrison of the University of Virginia. Professor George E. Woodberry has contributed biographical, textual, and critical comment in the Poe field which is invaluable, and more recently Professor Killis Campbell has added richly and definitely to the knowledge of Poe texts and sources. This is equally true of Dr. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. There is also a recent edition of Poe's poems edited by J. H. Whitty, while the Oxford Press has just issued a convenient volume of the same, edited by R. Brimley Johnson. Nor should the able comments of James Southall Wilson, Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia, be neglected. His comments are careful and sound.

It is doubtful, nevertheless, whether many of those who take up the study of Poe will care to specialize in the field. On the other hand, the number of those who desire to familiarize themselves with more than one side rather than with merely a narrow range of his contributions is undoubtedly large. It is to meet the needs of the readers who find themselves in the latter category that this anthology has been especially prepared. Its editor has successfully avoided two extremes, i.e., the general but still careful reader is not confronted with the entire mass of Poe's works in which to lose himself; on the other hand he is given a wide enough range of carefully chosen material to permit him to gain a competent idea of Poe's æsthetic in all of its manifestations — poetry, narrative prose, and criticism. Both a glut and a skimping of material are thus obviated.

The advantage resulting from this method of choice is a very considerable one. There has been a flood of Poe texts, but with the exception of the so-called complete works — frequently out of print or beyond the means and [page xv:] scope of the reader's desires — both Poe and his audience have constantly suffered from a lack of his adequate presentation. Most of the collections of Poe's poems, stories, or criticism are either so attenuated as to give no adequate idea of the scope of his pen, or else assembled with a motive so special as to inhibit their usefulness in any but a peculiar and narrow field. For an approach to the understanding of Poe's message as a whole, the study of a selection of his most melodious lyrics, his comments on his contemporaries, his theory of the short story, or brief excerpts from his criticism, is obviously insufficient and misleading, in view of the bulk and scope of his work. A great deal of misunderstanding of his place and his contribution to American letters has thus come about from the lack of a more adequate approach.

In the field of Poe's literary criticism this condition is particularly true. His meaning is not to be gleaned by a cursory reading of only a few of his more famous and oft-quoted essays, but only by a survey of a large mass of his criticism in essay, comment, and review. In this particular connection it is felt that the present anthology especially fills a legitimate and long-felt want. Poe's criticism lay buried for the most part in obscure old magazines, in the form of book reviews or literary comment. The task of rescuing and assembling this material has been a long and onerous one to Poe students. The present editor has here made every endeavour to select from the mass of material now at hand those examples in which the play of Poe's critical faculties is most evident, and to omit that in which the purely ephemeral notions of his time and place or the personal spleen of the poet himself obviously predominated. Although the book is evidence that the task has been well performed, it is perhaps still advisable to warn the student that much of Poe's criticism was embodied in book reviews and comment upon volumes and writers who at the present day are little known. He was, in fact, due to the contemporary state of American letters, frequently forced to hunt rabbits with a cannon. In such cases the reader's attention should be focussed on the manipulation of the artillery rather than upon its [page xvi:] immediate target. What Poe had to say of many little people was also in its main outlines and principles pertinent to much larger game. Very often, indeed, he is gunning for a whole literary school or movement with the immediate work at hand as only an excuse or an example that has been conveniently fixed upon at the moment. Time has for the most part confirmed his contentions, and with the possible exception of Tennyson, whom he over-estimated and Carlyle, whom he underestimated, his judgments largely remain.

But the criticism of Poe was not entirely literary or personal. He was also a social critic. It is only now beginning to be appreciated that much that he had to say of the “Middle America” of his own time was, and still is, of considerable moment. This social comment was frequently, in fact generally, dressed in a sardonic and mocking garb. For that reason in a sentimental era it repulsed many of his contemporaries and even fell into what approached oblivion. In our own age, which seems to have so notably resurrected both irony and raillery, this much-neglected portion of Poe's criticism is capable of being properly evaluated. The reader should therefore note, and perhaps be prepared to be somewhat astonished by, Edgar Allan Poe's skepticism in regard to democracy, progress, and a civilization which, as he saw it, deliberately preferred comfort and wealth before wisdom and beauty. In this anthology for the first time the editor has assembled, under the general heading of “On Civilization and Society,” several of the social essays of Poe. As some of these were originally without titles, the editor has seen fit to designate them by a descriptive title for the convenience of the reader.

In approaching Poe the student both in the United States and abroad should be wary of reading him with a biographical bias, either for or against. A careful study of Poe's life and of the peculiar conditions of the society in which he moved will undoubtedly add greatly to a more immediate and complete understanding of his works. It is only right to add, however, that legendary and romantic concepts are still rampant, and that anything [page xvii:] short of a competent knowledge of the facts about him may well lead his readers to many false conclusions and curious prejudices.

That the present anthology of Poe's works, well chosen and ingeniously but simply arranged, will greatly aid both the readers and students of Poe to a more complete understanding of what one of the outstanding figures in American literature had to say, is the hope of the editor and the aim of the collection. There can be no doubt that it is well fitted to do so. A large number of the squared and carefully hewn blocks which Poe himself left scattered in various and now long-abandoned quarries have been assembled here and carefully fitted into that “enduring pyramid,” as Lowell called it, of his fame.

HERVEY ALLEN.

December 1, 1928.