There are few American writers who could challenge Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) over the extent of his influence on American culture, both high and low. The Raven is still intoned by young schoolchildren, The Fall of the House of Usher still fascinates intrepid high-schoolers, and graduate students still write dissertations on American-style macabre. A certain professional football team, for its part, continues to win Super Bowls.
Even to make an observation about Poe’s American influence is to commit something of an understatement, for his impact is global. He is the father—as Arthur Conan Doyle gladly attested—of detective fiction, a genre that to this day looms large not only for publishing but also for television and the box office. All of which is to say that one hardly needs to justify another edition of Poe’s work, and when a new arrival displays both aesthetic and scholarly quality, some celebration is in order.
The Annotated Poe is the latest release in a series from the Harvard University Press that has produced stylish editions of Jane Austen, Lincoln, the Constitution, and Declaration of Independence, Darwin, and Wilde. The volumes have a few telltale signatures: they are oversized (but not cumbersome), scholarly (but not esoteric), and, with imagery accompanying nearly every page of the text, visually stunning. Poe is a perfect fit for this collection, and the editor, Kevin J. Hayes, professor emeritus of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, does a magnificent job curating—and that really does capture his task—the book.
Poe’s stories have a tactile, visceral effect matched by few writers, though they retain an elliptical, almost obscurantist quality. These hybrid productions are the natural outgrowths of a life devoted—and with equal attention—toward the pleasures of the body and the mind. Poe’s childhood years were spent in Richmond, where he received a classical education, priming him for entrance into the newly created University of Virginia. Jefferson was a force on campus, frequently inviting students to dine at Monticello and encouraging the boys to avail themselves of the university’s library collection, personally stocked by the former president.
How much of this environment Poe took advantage of is hard to say, but we do know that Poe excelled at Latin and French even as he sunk deeper into gambling debt. He never graduated from Virginia (his foster father, sensing his dissolution, had him pulled), and was transferred to West Point, where, old habits continuing apace, he also failed to graduate. From there on, Poe’s life was a merry-go-round of different editorial positions, drinking bouts, and the bursts of productivity that made him famous—but not financially secure. He died under mysterious circumstances at 40, leaving no children.
The annotations of the 24 tales and 10 poems in this edition provide fine illumination for Poe’s text. Not only is there a scholarly apparatus in place, but paintings, drawings, maps, photos, movie stills, posters, letters—anything you can think of that might elucidate a story, really—is here.
Take, for instance, The Cask of Amontillado. This is the outline: A man, Montresor, narrates a story about the time he entombed—alive—one Fortunato who had, it seems, borne him one too many (he leaves out specificities!) injuries and insults. Montresor, finding Fortunato drunk during carnival season, lures the stupefied man into the Montresor family catacombs with the promise of a pipe of Amontillado. Then he commits the murder.
Except for smattering of Latin at the end of the tale, nothing, it seems, needs much explaining. But here is a small sample of what is gained by reading the Annotated version of the same story. We learn that this tale appeared in November 1846 in Godey’s Lady’s Book, "among the most widely circulated magazine’s of its day." We learn that Amontillado is a high-quality Spanish sherry and that its complicated production process is dependent, to a rather high degree, on chance, for its success. We get a half-page picture of the famed Cappuccino Catacombs in Rome, which store the bones of thousands of Capuchin friars, that leer at visitors while they are greeted by a sign that reads: "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be." We learn the literary history for the motif of immuration. We learn that Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone, used the story for an episode entitled "The Merciful" of Night Gallery. And this is only a fraction of the information adorning the text.
The pedagogical—but not pedantic—project of the Annotated Poe and Harvard’s series more generally deserves much praise. Here we have Mr. Hayes’s discoveries of Poe—may they serve careful readers as a noble inducement to keep searching.