Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Poe's Tale of Psyche Zenobia: A Reading for Humor and Ingenious Construction,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 92-103

[page 92, unnumbered:]

Burton R. Pollin

BRONX COMMUNITY COLLEGE

 

Poe's Tale of Psyche Zenobia:
A Reading for Humor and
Ingenious Construction

 

IN THREE different publications, Edgar Allan Poe through a double story presented the fantastic experiences in Edinburgh of Psyche Zenobia, using substantially the same text, but different titles. In November, 1838, the two-part account appeared in the American Museum as “Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time”; a year later Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque included both parts with “Psyche” changed to “Signora”; finally, the 12 July 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal reprinted them as “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament.”(1) Both parts were planned as connecting stories, with Psyche as the main character in each and with inter related themes, concepts, images, and episodes. Yet occasionally one is printed separately from the other(2) and the few passing references in criticism to the set usually single out the first without regard for their organic interdependence or their qualities as narratives with a richly allusive and humorous text.(3) In fact, Poe endows Psyche Zenobia of Philadelphia with a well-defined personality, plunges her, as an inquisitive “blue stocking,” into an ambitious quest in Edinburgh, and then uses her qualities of personality and the details of her new milieu to shape the plot of Part II. Far from being a mere rambling parody or illustration of the first, the second is a well-executed, deftly constructed, highly unified short story, whose quality of sensationalism “à la Blackwood's” is only one phase of its varied humor and its [page 93:] stylistic ingenuity. It is a masterly tour de force which deserves a higher place in the canon of Poe's works than has been accorded it.

The unifying character of Psyche, the first-person narrator of both parts, is a composite of human foibles; she is portrayed as vain, snobbish, rather dull, pretentious, naive, crudely imaginative, inquisitive, pedantic, and moody. She begins by boasting about her “well-known” name, which her enemies through envy vulgarize into “Suky Snobbs.” Her reference to being “all soul” and to her name as meaning “butterfly” is etymologically correct, as any Greek lexicon shows, and is also an adroit portent of the conclusion of Part II. Psyche boasts also about her resplendent clothing. In the only full-scale study of “Zenobia” published, Thomas H. McNeal is misled by his knowledge of Margaret Fuller's flamboyant style of dress into assuming that the 1838 tale was an early satire on the New England Transcendentalist. He has made too much of Poe's paragraph against the Dial, added to the first of the set in 1845, and also Hawthorne's use of the name Zenobia for his character based on Margaret Fuller in The Blithedale Romance of 1852.(4) In 1838 she was completely unknown, having published nothing except an anonymous paper in the Boston Daily Advertiser and five reviews in the Cincinnati Western Messenger. Her first book, a translation, appeared in 1839.(5) Poe's original inspiration did not derive from her or, I suspect, from any specific woman.

Zenobia is, to be sure, a would-be blue stocking or literary celebrity, as is clear from her introduction to us as the “Corresponding Secretary” for the “P.R.E.T.T.Y.B.L.U.E.B.A.T.C.H. Society an acronym chosen by Dr. Moneypenny. Here Poe's puns in the words of the source, “Tea, Total,” and in the good portmanteau phrase, “Young, Belles, Lettres” (for “Y.B.L.”) remind us also that Poe, early and late, was negative toward forceful, learned ladies. In 1845, he wrote, “When we think very ill of a woman, and wish to blacken her character, we merely call her ‘a blue-stocking’ ...” (Works, XIV, 170). Hence, the acronym, Psyche's ambition, and the grim fate that Poe ac cords her for her excessive curiosity. The members of the society, wishing to raise the level of their paper, “The Pretty Blue Batch,” have deputized Psyche to ask advice of Mr. Blackwood, editor of the celebrated Edinburgh Magazine. She knows his scissors-and-paste method for collecting political articles, but wishes to know more about the “bizarreries” and the “intensities.” In Edinburgh Blackwood counsels her to write illegibly and to study as models various “Blackwood articles,” especially “The Man in the Bell,” which was to be the one tale [page 94:] of Blackwood's parodied in Part II(6) He advises that she cultivate an “experimental knowledge” of at least one of many possible misadventures, several examples of which he furnishes. After deciding on her subject, Psyche must consider “the tone or manner” of narration, such as the “didactic,” “enthusiastic,” “natural,” “curt,” “elevated,” or “metaphysical,” like that of Kant, or finally the “heterogeneous,” this being a mixture of the others. Third, she must attend to “filling up” the article with materials to prove her erudition; the first type he calls “Piquant Facts for the Manufacture of Similes” and the second, “Piquant Expressions.” Psyche records this “filling” from his dictation, and his specified series of foreign language tags will all recur, transmogrified through her incomprehension and semi-literacy, in her own sequel. Psyche leaves, determined to apply his rules, in search of “desperate adventures,” attended by her Negro servant Pompey and the lap-dog Diana. Written in “the tone heterogeneous,” the subsequent “important event” constitutes her “Blackwood article.”

Now Psyche Zenobia proves herself an artist, aware of Poe's doc trine of unity, for the first paragraph foreshadows her fate. While strolling along the sidewalks of Edina,(7) with her dog and servant, she finds the populace lively and dancing; yet, her spirit — that “of a genius doomed” — is melancholy. Psyche is seized with a “madness” or “an un controllable desire to ascend” the tall steeple of “a Gothic cathedral” and “thence survey the immense extent of the city.” (In an earlier parody of Blackwood's, “Loss of Breath,” Poe's character laments the dull life of a cadaver because “he has never viewed from any steeple the glories of a metropolis.”) In the belfry, Psyche, on the shoulders of Pompey, becomes enraptured by the view seen through a narrow hole high in the wall. Her gazing and her quarreling with the fatigued Pompey consume almost a half hour, and she now finds that “the huge, glittering, scimetar-like [sic] minute-hand of the clock’ has descended upon her neck in a “terrible trap.” The “scythe of time” has buried itself in her flesh, making her “sensations ... indistinct and confused.” The ticking of the clock sounds like “the most melodious of music” or “the sermonic harangues of Dr. Ollapod” (in 1840, “Dr. Morphine”).(8) The figures on the dial seem to dance, a grim reminder of the joyous dancing at the beginning of the tale, in which the doom ed Psyche had been unable to join.

In her death agony Psyche repeats an unconscious travesty of the quatrain from Cervantes recommended by Blackwood;(9) next, in the fashion of a Blackwood's horror tale, she loses each eye separately and [page 95:] then her head, which plunges down the gutter and out into the street. Like a medieval scholastic, Psyche wonders where her identity lies, in the head or the body. Her head quotes its own Zenobian version of the Ariosto couplet. As Pompey regards the shumping body, Psyche hurls at him her vulgarized version of the Greek “piquant expression.” Cleverly, Poe and author Psyche explain the weird phenomenon of a headless body's talking, through her reference to the “picked bones” of the little dog, devoured by a rat in the belfry. The dead dog presents a vulgar version of “Schiller's” German saying, with a poodle suggestiveness in “stubby duk,” translated by Psyche as: “And if I died at least I died / For thee — for thee.” Clearly, in the heaven of souls Diana has joined Zenobia.

Even a brief summary of Part II shows the quite admirable unity achieved by Poe, one phase of which is the unusual stress upon rhetoric. The satirical thrust at florid and contrived language may have caused Poe to name his character Zenobia, patron of Longinus. Dame Una Pope-Hennessy reminds us that Poe must have known Pope's “Martinus Scriblerus” paper, “Peri Bathos,” with its mention of Longinus. Arthur H. Quinn, while substantiating Poe's authorship of a Scriblerian article of 1838-39, helps to prove her theory by locating Mr. Blackwood's Demosthenes quotation, with its Hudibras translation, in the sixth chapter of the “Scriblerus” papers.(10) Poe was certainly aware of Longinus as the alleged author of “On the Sublime,” perhaps more fittingly called “On Impressiveness in Style.” His form of prescription is exactly the sort of advice tendered Psyche by Black wood. And, of course, Longinus also served Queen Zenobia of Palmyra as her chief counselor in state affairs. Accordingly, she lost her war against Rome and was led captive in Aurelian's triumph, while Longinus lost his life. In the first version of the story, Poe ascribes to Longinus the phrase “insomnia Jovis” (Works, II, 394), repeating an earlier error (Works, XIV, 60). Poe surely knew William Ware's best seller of the day, Letters ... from Palmyra (1837), republished as Zenobia: or, the Fall of Palmyra, in which Longinus is a main character.(11)

Whatever the source and significance of the name “Zenobia,” I feel certain that Poe was using buckshot rather than a bullet in his two-part satire, for he was trying to hit many foibles of taste. The volley at the Blackwood's style is obvious, but he aims at a wider variety of rhetorical flourishes and ineptitudes of writing, and also at the clothing fashions of women. This continued to be one of his “pet [page 96:] peeves,” as shown by his mocking references to bustles in “Scheherazade” of 1845 (Works, VI, 101). Here, the colors, cloth, and cut of dresses are derided in Psyche's “appearance in my new crimson satin dress, with the sky-blue mantelet, and the trimmings of green agraffas, and the seven flounces of orange-colored auriculas” (Works, II, 269). “Agraffes” or “agraffas” — in this spelling a nonce word — could designate ornamented clasps, usually of metal. But what could Poe mean by “trimmings of green agraffas”? The clasps could, of course, be enameled green, but scarcely constitute “trimmings.” One suspects that he really meant colored “”aigrettes” or ornamental tufts of feathers.

Poe deliberately mystifies the reader by repeatedly applying to part of Psyche's garment the word “auriculas,” which has no dress-making usage. All the standard meanings of “auricula” are derived from the Latin for “little ear”: the yellow primrose of Switzerland, one of the chambers of the heart, a kind of ear trumpet, part of the external ear, and a genus of gastropods known as ear-shells. The last must have furnished Poe with the idea of using the word, for he was then beginning to work on The Conchologist's First Book, with illustrations of 215 shells. The book describes the “Genus Auricula” and lists its sixteen species, pictures one of them, and in the “Glossary” defines “auricled.”(12) In the two tales of Psyche “”auriculas” can best represent semi-circular flounces, and her reference to passing “beneath the portals without injury to my orange-colored auriculas” (Works, II, 286) suggests their being on top of the dress. From the emphasis given to the elaborated and exaggerated sleeves of women's costumes during the 1830’, I judge the sleeves to be the “auriculas.”(13) The Ladies’ Cabinet of the period variously specifies the new styles as “amadis sleeves,” the “imbecille” and “the gigot” or “the double bouffant form” or “flounced shoulders,” “mancerons,” “manchettes,” or “pelerines” (strictly capes) with “several falls.” Poe used the term “auricula” in this “piquant” tale as a kind of hoax played on the reader.

The published articles named as models by Mr. Blackwood provided Poe with themes and details for this double story and later ones; for example, “The Involuntary Experimentalist” enters into “The Pit and the Pendulum,” since it concerns a physician who falls into a large cauldron at a burning brewery and describes his sensations as the walls begin to glow. The three-page story, “The Man in the Bell,” in Blackwood's, provided, for Part II of “Psyche Zenobia,” such details as the cathedral (there is none in Edinburgh; St. Giles's Church must be meant); the “belfry”; a reference to a “clockwright who fell from the [page 97:] belfry”; 10,000 furies howling; an exact half hour of torment; “chimeras” seen by the victim's agonized mind; and the high and irregular stairs. For Poe's “A Descent into the Maelstrom” the same tale provided the concept of “a whirlpool ready to suck me into its bellowing abyss.” (14) Another little bit of satire is directed at patent medicine through Blackwood's admonition, “Take a dose of Brandreth's pills, and then give us your sensations.” The popularity of “Brandreth's Vegetable Universal Pills” led Poe to deride Brandreth at the end of “Some Words with a Mummy” in 1845. In the first two versions of the story, Poe used “Morrison” for Brandreth, and he used Morrison again in a later “Marginalia” squib (Works, XVI, 148). The point of the satire is still the same — Poe's scorn of insincerity or false pretensions.

Poe is most inventive, in the first part of the tale, in the section devoted to “Piquant Facts” and “Piquant Expressions.” Obviously derived from “Kubla Khan” is his reference to “the river Alpheus” (distorted into “Alfred” by Psyche), this being an improvement in 1840 over the pointless “Alceus” of the 1840 version of the text. It is noteworthy that in 1840 Poe wished to strengthen the satire of Coleridge; in the sentence, “A little reading of ‘Werter’ will carry you a long way,” he replaced “Werter” with “Coleridge's Table-Talk.” (In 1845 this book became “The Dial.”) He also called the “River Alpheus” reference “rather stale” and spoke deprecatingly of Coleridge (or a “pet baboon”) as the possible author of “Confessions of an Opium-Eater” [sic].(15)

Poe shows considerable aptness and inventiveness in his transformation of other “piquant” examples of Mr. Blackwood. The Muses Melete, Mneme, and Aoede become the Furies Melty, Nimmy, and Hetty. Blackwood's reference to the Persian iris becomes the “Prussian Isis,” the first instance showing that Poe knew members of the Iris family to be native to Persia, one of them providing the orris-root (i.e., iris-root) with which his foster-mother, Mrs. Allan, scented clothing.(16) But where does he derive Mr. Blackwood's “Epidendrum Flos Aeris, of Java,” which lives when “pulled up by the roots” and hung from the ceiling for its fragrance? It probably came from a work by the botanist Patrick Keith, who is later cited by Poe for another plant curiosity directly after a second reference to the Flos Aeris (Works, VI, 92-94).(17) Psyche underscores her ignorance by calling it “the happy-dandy Flos Aeris,” perhaps an unconscious rhyme for “Jack-a-dandy” (cf. Poe's “Jack o’ Dandy,” Works, IV, 122). This phrase meant not only a smart or bright young man but also, in rhyming slang, “brandy” as Poe undoubtedly [page 98:] knew. Another “piquant expression” is “the Venerable Chinese Novel Ju-Kiao-Li,” referring to a Chinese work translated by Jean Rémusat (1826 and 1829); Psyche calls it “the Jo-Go-Slow.” Poe's source of information was a paper by Philip Pendleton Cooke that Poe, as editor, had published in the Southern Literary Messenger of April 1836, “Leaves from My Scrap Book, Part II.” Cooke is commenting on the plagiarism from the “Chinese novel, ‘Yu-Kiao-Li,” in a motto written by E. Irving. Cooke's comment was the sort of expose that Poe himself repeatedly inserted into his “Marginalia” later.(18)

To illustrate his contention that allusions in foreign tongues make articles more vendible, Mr. Blackwood cites “Aussi tendre que Zaïre,” referring to Voltaire's tragedy. He applies it humorously to a chicken; Psyche, to the servant Pompey, applies the same words mangled into “ossi tender que beefsteak,” a phrase which implies in its context a pun on the word for bones (properly ossa in the Latin). This begins a section rich in puns and fanciful allusions. Those in verse have been adequately discussed by Professor Mabbott in his edition of the Poems (pp. 485-86). Several other instances of puns are triple through the device of having the servant or even the dog transform Psyche's distortions of Mr. Blackwood's paradigms. His “ignoratio elenchi,” to be thrown in “the teeth” of a fool, becomes her “ignoramus e-clench-eye” and then Pompey's “an ignorant old squint eye.” Blackwood's recommended “anemonae verborum” from “Lucan” (for Lucian) or “anemone words” becomes “an ennemywerrybor’em”’; his “insomnia Jovis,(19) reveries of Jupiter,” used by Silius Italicus for “thoughts pompous and inflated,” becomes her “insommary Bovis” and Diana the dog's “bow-wow-wow.”

Scarcely any reference is without its humorous point in this many-pronged satire. In Part I, Mr. Blackwood, in words which remind us of the chronically poverty-stricken condition of Mr. Poe, speaks of dying for a “well-fattened capon of the right Molucca breed, stuffed with capers and mushrooms, and served up in a salad-bowl, with orange-jellies en mosaïques.” There was then no edible capon “of the Molucca breed,” but it is evident that Poe had either accidentally or deliberately, for humorous effect, confused Molucca with Minorca, for Minorcan chickens were esteemed in America before they were dethroned by the Leghorn, just being introduced in 1835.(20) The dish, “orange-jellies en mosaïques” — a phrase Poe used also in “Lionizing” (Works, II, 39) — may have come from The French Cook by Louis-Eustache Ude, to whom Poe humorously alludes in a story of 1841 (Works, IV, 231).(21) [page 99:] In all editions from the eighth (1827), which Carey, Lea and Carey of Philadelphia pirated in 1828, through the fourteenth of 1841, appears the same article on “Mosaic Jelly,” an elaborate and spectacular “marbled” concoction.(22) Poe probably converted the English phrase into French, as he often did, for the pretentious advice of Mr. Blackwood.

In the story of Psyche Zenobia, we find that the heterogeneous style includes a wider gamut of rhetorical satire than puns and fantastic allusions. There are also varied figures of speech, startling shifts in style, and even whimsical printer's devices — all in fulfillment of Mr. Blackwood's prescriptions. Individual words strike the reader's attention, such as “bizarreries” (Works, II, 272) or Poe's coinage of “belesprit-ism,” apt for “spicing” an article (Works, II, 277). Spelling changes yield humor also, as when Moneypenny advises her to spell “cant” with a “capital K” (Works, II, 271). Slang gives a jaunty effect: “Just twig [meaning “observe”] that Tau” (Works, II, 281). On the other hand, archaisms suddenly obtrude: ‘thy two letters” and “the overcoat it dropped” (Works, II, 286-87). Poe invokes the aid of the printer for humorous dashes and italics, as when he emphasizes the parallelism of sentences in the mock-serious ending: “Was that a rat I saw skulking ...? Are these the picked bones ...? Ye Gods! and what do I behold — is that the departed spirit ...?”’ (Works, II, 294). Italics also lend a mock-dramatic flavor to the text: “And, mark me, Miss Psyche Zenobia! ... mark me! — that pen — must — never be mended!” (Works, II, 272).

Poe draws heavily for humorous effects upon several figures of speech, such as bathos: Dr. Moneypenny's title for the society “sounded big like an empty rum-puncheon” (Works, II, 270) and Pompey “shut his two eyes as if he were endeavoring to crack nuts between the lids” (Works, II, 294). Personification provides whimsical touches: Epsilon has an “astute look” and Phi ought to be ‘a bishop” (Works, II, 281); the clock dial-plate figures “took to dancing the Mazurka. ... [The figure V] did the pirouette to admiration — whirling round upon her apex” (Works, II, 291-92). We note the hyperbole of Blackwood's offer of fifty guineas a sheet, which Psyche refuses. Alliteration lends humor and charm: “the tone heterogeneous” is “made up of everything deep, great, odd, piquant, pertinent, and pretty.” Poe here uses parallel monosyllables plus a trio of longer adjectives, all with first-syllable accents. There are other reminders of Poe's skill in verse, such as the double rhymes in his allusion to Transcendentalism: “Put in something about the Supernal Oneness. Don't say a syllable about the [page 100:] Infernal Twoness. Above all, study inuendo [sic]. Hint everything — assert nothing” (Works, II 276), and in “such a winking and blinking ... I was forced ... to wink and to blink” (Works, II, 292).

Many diverse types of rhetorical devices are exploited. There are insistent repetitions, as in Psyche's echoes of Blackwood's “piquant expressions,” usually preceded by “thus it is said” (Works, II, 285-86). She seeks emphasis and dignity: “I entered the ominous archway! I entered” (Works, II, 286); “The ticking ... amused me. Amused me, I say ...” (Works, II, 291); “my lamentable situation. Lamentable indeed!” (Works, II, 292); one eye blinks “in exact concert” with the other and in falling takes “the same direction (possibly a concerted plot) as its fellow” (Works, II, 293). Often the syntactical units are repeated; for example, in her death agony Psyche says: “My feelings were now of the most singular — nay of the most mysterious, the most perplexing and incomprehensible character” (Works, II, 293). Mr. Blackwood is emphatic: “Your writer of the intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib” (Works, II, 272). This advice, like the recommended illegibility, is an appropriate whimsy coming from Poe, the expert calligrapher. With rhetorical skill, Poe uses a passage of asyndeton, in part to show Psyche's simple-mindedness, directly before a passage of polysyndeton, in which she is made vaguely to hint at her sad doom:

The implied hairsplitting in the italicized adjectives is part of his satire on fussy mentors of style, who recommend varied sentence structure almost at any cost. Emphasize, they might say, through repetition, but avoid the same syntax: “Diana smelt a rat! ... The rat had been smelled — and by Diana” (Works, 11, 286). Supply all the necessary details: “He stumbled and fell — this consequence was inevitable. He fell forward ...” (Works, II, 287). Be specific: “I thus formed the third of the [page 101:] party. There was the poodle. There was Pompey. There was myself. We were three” (Works, II, 285). Never are we allowed to forget the interlaced trinity of the characters throughout Part II of the tale. Occasionally the style, especially in Part I, is “Laconic, or curt” as Mr. Blackwood advises, with an epigrammatic quality: “The papers were all whipped syllabub” (Works, II, 271); “Hanging is somewhat hacknied [sic]” (Works, II, 275).

One of Psyche's much abused devices for revealing strong emotion is the exclamation: “If! Distressing monosyllable. What a world of mystery ... in thy two letters!” When sententiously speaking of the “great staircase of human life,” Psyche notes, “How vast a sum of human happiness or misery often depends!” Similarly ridiculous is her rhetorical question when she cannot smell out the rat, as does Diana: “Alas! what is the boasted intellect of man?” And at the end, she suitably exclaims, in her dawning awareness of her disembodied state, like that of her dog: ‘”Hearken! for she speaks, and heavens! it is in the German of Schiller ...” (Works, II, 295).

These are only a few instances of the wealth of varied humor in the two-fold tale of Psyche Zenobia. Poe proves himself an adroit master of satire, versatile in “the heterogeneous” style. The major burden of his attack — the Blackwood's article — may no longer be current in magazines, but as long as empty rant and meaningless rhetoric are to be found in the writing of academic tyros or in the effusions of journalists, as long as there are those who can enjoy the amusing display of calculatedly horrible examples, Psyche Zenobia can purposefully trail her orange-flounced auriculas.

[page 101,continued:]

NOTES

1 American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, I (Nov. 1838), 301-310 and 310-317; Tales (Philadelphia, 1840; issued at the end of 1839), I, 213-27 and 229-43; and Broadway Journal, II (July 12, 1845), 1-4 and 4-7. My text is taken from James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1902), II, 268-82 and 283-95, with variants on pp. 391-95. Hereafter cited as Works with volume and page numbers in parentheses.

2 Eg, by Kenneth S. Lynn in The Comic Tradition in America (New York, 1958).

3 K. L. Daughrity, “Notes: Poe and Blackwood's,” American Literature, II (Nov. 1930), 289-92, merely summarizes the first tale and traces several of the titles given in Blackwood's; Walter F. Taylor, “Israfel in Motley,” Sewanee Review, XLII (July 1934), 330-34, summarizes “A Predicament,” but merely mentions the inserted quotations and considers the tale “not humorous, but callously grotesque.” The interesting studies by Thomas H. McNeal and Gerald Gerber are considered below. [page 102:]

4 Thomas H. McNeal, “Poe's Zenobia: An Early Satire on Margaret Fuller,” Modern Language Quarterly, XI (June 1950), 205-16. It is unsound in much of its “proof” and many of its attributions, such as calling Moneypenny Mr. Emerson or ‘’Merson” and Alcott, Dr. Ollapod, and fails to note the 1845 date of the insertion of the attack on Transcendentalism.

5 Gerald E. Gerber, “Milton and Poe's ‘Modern Woman,” Poe Newsletter, III (Dec. 1970), 25-26, follows McNeal's error about Margaret Fuller's prominence in 1838, makes far too much of the Miltonic touch of the Comus motto, added only in 1840, and stresses an unintended pun in Edina for his argument.

6 Actually, not all these articles were published by Blackwood's, q.v. in Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (Iowa City, 1925), pp. 7-45, and Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (New York, 1969), p. 33. The latter errs, p. 126, in considering “The Predicament” to be a burlesque of “The Iron Shroud” and “The Involuntary Experimentalist,” as does Napier Wilt, “Poe's Attitude toward His Tales,” Modern Philology, XXV (Aug. 1927), 101-105, in deeming it a burlesque also of De Quincey's “Confessions.”

7 Alterton, Origins, pp. 44-45, is too hesitant about holding “Edina” to be Edinburgh, since Poe says so, but she is too rash in thinking that Diana and Pompey must represent Edinburgh magazines. Poe invented a classical “Edina” for the origin of the name, in fact derived from Edwin of Northumbria.

8 See my discussion in American Literature, XLII (March 1970), 80-82, and also Robert D. Jacobs, Poe: Journalist and Critic (Baton Rouge, 1969), p. 215, n. 7. One might note that Willis G. Clark, hostile to Poe, wrote the column entitled “Ollapodiana,” often signed “Dr. Ollapod,” for the Knickerbocker from March 1835 through May 1838.

9 See William Whipple, ‘”Poe's Political Satire,” Texas Studies in English, XXXV (1956), 81-95, for the satire on Van Buren. His view about “pork barreling” is not shared by T. O. Mabbott, Poems (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 485, who regards the phrase as unfamiliar at the time.

10 Una Pope-Hennessy, Edgar Allan Poe (London, 1934), pp. 258-60; she disregards the time sequence in “proving” her case through a reference to the Literati sketches. For the Zenobia reference in Pope see Works (London, 1886), X, 346. For the attribution see my paper, “Poe as a Scriblerian,” The Scriblerian, I (April 1969), 30-31.

11 Zenobia reached a ninth edition in 1885 — proof of its popularity. Before publication in 1837 a number of chapters came out in the Knickerbocker, which Poe regularly read. See G. E. Gerber, Poe Newsletter, p. 26, n. 7, for mention of Ware's book and also of Anthon's possible suggestions.

12 The Conchologist's First Book, 2nd ed. (1839; rpt. Philadelphia, 1840), plate 10 (unpaged) between pp. 23 and 25, p. 107, and p. 157.

13 For the suggestion about sleeves I am indebted to Mr. Gordon Stone, Librarian, and others of the staff of The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

14 Blackwood's, X (Nov. 1821), 373-75. Alterton, Origins, pp. 44-45, uncertainly, but correctly, links Psyche's tale with this one.

15 The manifest bias against Coleridge seems to disprove Gerald E. Gerber's inferences about Biographia Literaria in the Emerson Society Quarterly, LX (Fall 1970), 87-91, of Supplement II.

16 See L. H. Bailey, Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture (New York, 1942), II, 1663, 1667, 1679-80; and Mabbott, Poems, p. 62.

17 Keith, System of Physiological Botany (London, 1816), II, 429, mentions the attributes given in Poe's tale save for Java as habitat, q.v. in Linnaeus. [page 103:]

18 Richard P. Benton, “Poe's Acquaintance with Chinese Literature,” Poe Newsletter, I (April 1969), 34, suggests a review in the Asiatic Journal of 1827 as source, largely because of Poe's reference to a current issue in a tale of 1845 (Works, VI, 89).

19 Emma K. Norman, ‘Poe's Knowledge of Latin,” American Literature, VI (March 1934), 72-77, glosses and traces these terms. Lucian does not suggest “empty words’ in his metaphor. See Works, XI, 278 and XVI, 56 for Poe's later use of the phrase.

20 Pierre-P. Grassé, ed., Traité de Zoologie: Oiseaux (Paris, 1950), XV, 1104. The Plymouth Rock, of East Indian origin, was developed only in 1850.

21 The first edition (London, 1813) purports to come from a French original, which I have found in no large collection, including London and Paris. It may simply be a translation from the manuscript of Ude, then employed in London by the nobility.

22 See the 1828 edition (p. 374) and the 1841 London edition, pp. 377-78, Recipe no. 776.