Stauffer, Donald Barlow

English

eGrove (Univ. of Mississippi)

Studies in English, New Series Volume 6 Article 33 1988 Edgar Allan Poe. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson. Donald Barlow Stauffer State University of New York at Albany Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new  Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Stauffer, Donald Barlow (1988) "Edgar Allan Poe. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson.," Studies in English, New Series: Vol. 6 , Article 33. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol6/iss1/33 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Studies in English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in English, New Series by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. REVIEWS 289Simpson apparently forgets the flights of poetry of the young Natty in The Deerslayer, to which some readers (like D. H. Lawrence) have responded with ardor.Reading Simpson is a joy. His theses are clearly stated, and extensive historical research effortlessly marshalled. The political issues he examined are skillfully woven into the fabric of the argument.  And Simpson’s own prose style is a triumph: a matrix of British  academic prose spiked with the energy of American locutions and idioms—American English at its best.Lance Schachterle Worcester Polytechnic InstituteEdgar Allan Poe. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York:  The Library of America, 1984. 1408 pp. $27.50Edgar Allan Poe. Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson. New York: The Library of America, 1984. 1544 pp. $27.50Two thousand nine hundred and fifty-two pages of Poe. What a lot  of Poe for only $55.00—less than two cents a page. These two handsome volumes in the Library of America series do indeed rival the  famous Pléiade editions of French classical authors in heft and feel, in typeface and binding (complete with maroon ribbon bookmark), not to mention quality of editing.Both volumes have been edited with care and  intelligence, with the  convenience of the reader obviously in mind. For example, Quinn includes the illustrations to the four  “plate  articles”: “Some Account of  Stonehenge, the Giant’s Dance,” “The Island of the Fay,” “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” and “Byron and Miss Chaworth,” thereby making a lot more sense out of these pieces by providing the context.For his splendid Essays and Reviews volume Thompson has used the original source for almost all of them. He includes over 125 out of  the nearly 1000 pieces that Poe printed (and reprinted) during his lifetime in one volume that easily fits into the hand. What a pleasure not to have to refer so often to those seventeen little volumes of the 1902 Harrison edition, with its inconvenient index. This is a real boon to all but the most specialized scholar, and a revelation to the General Reader for whom presumably the entire series is being published.  These 1500 pages of essays, reviews, marginalia, etc. on a variety of  subjects, may at last convince her or him that Poe was not just a writer of spooky stories. Here is the whole of Poe before us at last in a readable and (considering the price of books these days) affordable form.1Stauffer: Edgar Allan Poe. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. Essays aPublished by eGrove, 1988290 REVIEWSThe Essays and Reviews are conveniently arranged under six separate subsections: Theory of Poetry, Reviews of British and Continental Authors, Reviews of American Authors and American Literature, Magazines and Criticism, The Literary and Social Scene, and  Articles and Marginalia. The reviews are arranged alphabetically by author, thus making it easy to locate them without consulting the very useful index. Readers interested in dates of publication will find the name of the periodical and date of publication at the end of each selection. And Thompson provides another useful aid in his note on the texts: a chronological short-title catalog containing the original publication data of the texts he reprints in this edition.Quinn’s edition of Poetry and Tales includes The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (reprinted from the first edition), “The Unparalleled  Adventures of One Hans Pfall,” “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” and Eureka, using Roland W. Nelson’s 1975 dissertation edition as text. Poe’s Preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and his description of “The Folio Club” are both found at the beginning of the Tales section. It was a good idea to print these in this volume, although their placement together here may be slightly misleading to the casual reader.Poetry and Tales preserves the spellings, punctuation, capitalization, and wording of the original texts. Quinn sets forth his procedure as follows: “Although typographical errors have been  corrected, errors for which Poe was presumably responsible have not....The reader may be advised that [errors in foreign words and phrases] are not misprints but rather accurate transcriptions of what Poe, for whatever reason, let stand uncorrected.” The notes to this volume include translations of foreign phrases, explanations of terms, and other useful information, but they do not presume to supply critical  interpretations.In all but one case Quinn reprints the last-revised versions  in which  Poe’s own editorial hand can be discerned. He deliberately rejected Poe’s revised text of “The Island of the  Fay” in favor  of the  earliest one  because Poe later omitted allusions to the plate. When Quinn does not use the original source he reprints texts from the Mabbott or Stovall editions, as, for example, in those cases where they had access to the Lorimer Graham copy of The Raven and Other Poems. In view of this it seems likely that these volumes will be widely used by students and  scholars as well as by General Reader.Donald Barlow Stauffer State University of New York at Albany2Studies in English, New Series, Vol. 6 [1988], Art. 33https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol6/iss1/33

Edgar Allan Poe. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson.

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Edgar Allan Poe. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson.

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