The Annotated Poe by Edgar Allan Poe (review)

The Annotated Poe, published by Harvard University’s Belknap Press and edited by Kevin J. Hayes, represents the first significant scholarly annotated volume of Poe’s works since Stephen Peithman’s The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Avenel Books, 1986). While Peithman’s stated purpose was that of engaging the lay reader “who is attracted to, curious about, delighted with or mystified by the tales of Edgar Allan Poe” (vii), Hayes, in his “Notes on the Text,” assumes a more scholarly audience and orientation for The Annotated Poe. From the outset, Hayes assures the reader that most of the tales and poems are based on (and in the case of notes, informed by) Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, the accepted scholarly edition of Poe’s works. Hayes suggests that the offering should be viewed as a selection of some of Poe’s more popular tales and poems—“Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Black Cat” (1843), “The Raven” (1845), and “Annabel Lee” (1849), among others—rather than a “complete works.” Despite the limitations on coverage, the volume does highlight a few of Poe’s less anthologized pieces, including “Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling” (1840), “The Business Man” (1840), and “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840). Hayes’s main purpose, however, is to “reveal the extraordinary complexity of Poe’s work” by providing “extensive new information” about Poe’s sources (ix). Much of the new source material for the annotations (including introductory remarks) for the twenty-four tales and six poems is drawn from Hayes’s own extensive research into Poe’s life and writing, including his numerous articles and three previous books on Poe: Poe and the Printed Word (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (2002), and Edgar Allan Poe (2009).

While the foreword, penned by the novelist William Giraldi, often presents the “mythic” Poe—the “quintessential outcast” (xix), the “saddest writer who ever lived” (xxi)—the solid introduction, written by Hayes, provides a useful historical perspective (both national and biographical) from which to view Poe’s writing. Interestingly, Hayes employs Poe’s understanding of the margin of a book “as that place where author and reader meet” (20) as the guiding model for his notes. For Hayes, the margin offers a space for what he calls the “multitudinous opinion” of scholars from many disciplines as well as his “own penciled thoughts” (21). Hayes draws from a wide range of critics and scholars, including Poe’s contemporaries and major figures from the long tradition of Poe criticism, stretching from Baudelaire to scholarship published as recently as 2014. Although the work of biographical, historical, cultural, and philosophical contextualization is key to Hayes’s strategy for annotating the volume, he has attempted to produce, beyond the etymological and exegetical annotations one would expect in a scholarly edition, the conditions for what amounts to a sustained dialogue between reader, author, and work.

The historical and cultural contexts Hayes’s annotations provide allow readers to regard Poe’s works as artifacts that often reflect the author’s negotiated identity as a laborer-artist. In particular, Hayes calls attention to Poe’s continual process of revision, viewing it as an index of the writer’s shifting professional goals and evidence of his sophisticated awareness of social relations. In his introduction to “Berenice,” for example, Hayes reprints Poe’s letter to the proprietor of The Southern Literary Messenger, in which he defends the 1835 version of the tale, a version which many readers found disturbing. Poe argued that, despite the objections of a few delicate readers, the tale was a reflection of the popular appetite for sensationalism. As Hayes points out, however, Poe “softened the tale considerably” (49) when he republished it in 1845 in The Broadway Journal in an effort not to offend potential financial backers of the literary magazine he planned to...