∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[page 11, column 6, continued:]
POE'S POEMS
———
To Be Printed as He Revised Them Shortly Before His Death.
The new single volume edition of Poe's complete poems just published by Houghton, Mifflin Company has an unusual history.
When Poe was in the office of the Richmond Examiner in October, 1849, a few weeks before his death, he had all his major poems and several of his minor poems put into type and he revised them more or less extensively. Changes in punctuation were made in almost all of them and in two instances several lines were added and two poems were entirely rewritten
On Poe's death these revised proofs came into the possession of a Mr. Thomas, a member of the editorial staff of the paper, and in turn were committed to the keeping of his successor, J. H. Whitty, who offered them, together with his services as editor, to Houghton, Mifflin Company for publication.
It happens that Mr. Whitty, in addition to being a literary investigator, has been a lifelong student of Poe and has been able to add to the edition eleven authentic and hitherto uncollected poems from manuscript sources, and to contribute a brief memoir correcting certain curious episodes in the poet's life.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Notes:
A brief notice of the edition appears in The Sun for May 20, 1911:
Literature.
From the Houghton Mifflin Company comes a handsome edition of “The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe,” edited and arranged by J. H. Whitty. The poems form but a part of the volume, though the editor has been able to unearth a few pieces of verse that had not been collected before, as well as a few pieces attributed to Poe. He contributes a new memoir of sixty-seven pages in which he considers all that has been brought to light in recent years. The merit of the edition lies in the admirable notes, in the collection of all the variants to the text the editor has established and the bibliography. These take up 116 closely printed pages. It is a thorough, scholarly, critical edition, which admirers of Poe will appreciate.
Whitty was not actually a successor to the Examiner; that would have been Judge Robert W. Hughes (1821-1901), with whom Whitty was in contact.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[S:0 - SNY, 1911] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Poe's Poems (Anonymous, 1911)