The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (review)

"Yes, but what's in it for American Studies?" In the years after I founded this journal in 1959 that was the basic question to contributors and reviewers working in traditional fields or with books that seemed more disciplinary than interdisciplinary. The answer in the case of this boxed two-volume set is easy: explain the concerns of any American citizen and you open a window on the age. If the citizen is as deeply involved in the contemporary culture as was "poor Eddie" (as he sometimes called himself), there is a lot to see outside that window.

As Pollin, Savoye and their predecessors frankly note (the editors reprint introductory essays from the earlier editions of Poe's letters), you're not likely to gain great new insights into Poe's puzzling psyche, though all the whining, begging, toadying and scheming are revealing, I suppose. But Poe's personality—this is a terrible confession—bores me. It's the world in which he tries to operate that's furiously fascinating. The mass media already existed, and Poe was a media artist, reacting to the recent rapid spread of literacy, the impact of women's tastes, the "invention of the lady," the advent of instantaneous communication, explosive economic and social instability, political turmoil, the popularization of intellectual tendencies like Transcendentalism. Material culture, too, including diet: I love Poe's gleeful rundown (in Letter 174) of his first breakfast at the New York boarding-house where he located digs: slabs of heavy grub, full tummies for Edgar and Virginia, and hearty fare for scholars hungry for the stuff of American life. The turbulent society that would produce Joseph Smith and Battle Creek, phalansteries and John Brown is the world in which Poe operated.

Having just edited Poe's prospectuses for the magazine he wanted to found, I saw how close to those documents in language were his letters to Washington Irving (June 21, 1841) and to other prominent U.S. writers—though as always in Poe, each revision shows new turns of thought and even contradictions, duly noted by the editors. Poe's implied assessment of the structure of the national reading audience should interest Americanists. Literature scholars mistake the magazines that Poe edited and for which he wrote for literary journals in the modern sense. They weren't; most were closer to the popular general magazines that geezers of my generation grew up with: alongside literary material, they ran pieces (and illustrations) on fashions; they printed celebrity gossip, popular music, puzzles—all manner of content aimed at the new readers.

Collected Letters is careful, comprehensive, and conscientiously constructed. Here are not only letters we're sure Poe wrote, but "Fakes, Forgeries, and Spurious Letters," detailed discussions of folks with whom his correspondence is considerable, even a revealing appendix of "Promissory Notes and Receipts." Each item comes with information on its source and satisfying explanations of all the editors can figure out of its significance. Many of their discoveries provide jumping-off places for Americanists who want to stroll the streets Poe walked, learning how one mailed documents, used new technology (an anastatic letter actually has some advantages over an e-mail), paid bills, went bankrupt.

The story of the project to produce a complete and carefully annotated Poe "Works" is too complicated to tell here. What began with the scholarship of Thomas Ollive Mabbott through Harvard University Press has now bifurcated; at present part is published by Gordian Press, part by University of Illinois Press, and some parts overlap. But care and thoroughness have remained at high levels; the scholar-editors involved cooperate rather than compete. Started before "Center for Editions of American Authors" guidelines were established, a definitive Poe edition really couldn't have followed them anyhow, for Poe requires much heavier explication and more textural variants than the guidelines allow. Often there is no "standard text" to be had. That's part of the story, and part of the reason Poe is so...