Poe kept no diary or journal so far as we now know; and he left no biographical account of himself beyond the brief and very inaccurate memorandum that he sent to Griswold in 1841.2 Nevertheless, it is possible to glean from his writings a good deal about what he had read. His critical papers of various sorts are especially helpful in throwing light on his reading. Most of these were bookreviews or book-notices,-there were more than four hundred in all, and it is safe to assume that he read, and read pretty carefully, virtually every book that he reviewed.3 In his critical papers, moreover, are to be found numerous allusions and references to books and authors other than those that he reviewed. Both in his essays and in his poems and tales, furthermore, there are many direct quotations from books that he had read either in whole or in part, and there are likewise many echoes or reminiscences of

1For the purpose of this inquiry I have relied mainly upon the Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Harrison, J. A., New York, no date (1902); but I have also taken account of all uncollected matter known to me, including articles in the Southern Literary Messenger, the Pittsburg Literary Examiner, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, the Evening Mirror, the Broadway Journal, the Democratic Review, and the Western Quarterly Review. 2Poe's Works, I, pp. 344-346.

3Where his reading of a book under review had been partial or cursory, it was his custom, apparently, to make an acknowledgment to that effect, as occurs in his review of Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Central America (Poe's Works, X, p. 181). Occasionally, too, he makes an even more categorical statement as to his reading, as when he asserts (ibid., VIII, p. 163) that he had read Niebuhr's Roman History, and (Southern Literary Messenger, I, p. 714) that he had not read Beckford's Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha.

passages that had caught his fancy. Some light has been thrown on the subject, too, by discoveries that have been made as to Poe's sources. And there is also external evidence, though this is scanty. For instance, a newspaper advertisement lists the books read in Poe's time in the Latin course that he took at the University of Virginia; there are bills and accounts in which certain of the books that he studied when a child in Richmond and London are mentioned by title; and there is some testimony proceeding from those who came into personal contact with him either in the schools that he attended or in his various activities in his maturer years.

The inferences that may be drawn from these several sorts of evidence are not, it must be admitted, as definite and as full as could be wished. It must be premised at the outset that Poe read a good many books that he does not refer to in his writings. It stands to reason, too, that his mere mentioning a book does not prove that he had read it, nor does quotation from a book prove that he had read it,—or, at least, that he had read it in its entirety. And it was inevitable that I should meet with quotations or allusions that I could not verify, and that I should overlook allusions here and there that others would have caught. Nevertheless, the evidence at hand seems sufficient to warrant certain fairly satisfactory conclusions as to the content and the general trend of Poe's reading; and in some particulars it enables us to arrive at altogether positive and definitive results.

4 Besides, there are a number of items attributed to Poe that have not been completely authenticated as his. It has seemed to me proper to take account, in the body of my paper, at least, of only such items as are undoubtedly Poe's; though I have referred in footnotes to various more or less dubious articles. To the list of incompletely authenticated articles, should be added a number of articles recently ascribed to Poe by Miss Margaret Alterton in her treatise on the Origins of Poe's Critical Theory (University of Iowa Studies, Iowa City, 1925).

II

He

First of all, it may be said, and that quite confidently, that Poe's reading was mainly in the books and periodicals of his own time. He read, naturally, the newspapers of his day; and he devoured the magazines and annuals. refers time and again in his critical papers to the magazines of the day, to Blackwood's, to the Edinburgh Review, to the Westminster Review, to the North American Review, to Godey's, to Graham's, to the Democratic Review, to the Home Journal, to the Literary World, to the Saturday Evening Post. While editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, he published sundry brief notices of current issues of the leading magazines, and he continued this practice in the columns of the Evening Mirror and the Broadway Journal. His tales likewise attest his familiarity with the periodicals of his time; for aside from various allusions that occur in them, we now know that he drew from the newspapers and magazines the materials out of which he fashioned in some measure several of his stories."

Poe had also read widely in the poetry and in the fiction of his time. Among contemporary English poets he appears to have known best the work of Byron, Coleridge, Moore, and Tennyson.

Altogether, by my count, he refers to Byron thirty-three times. Besides, he quotes from Byron a total of fifteen times, drawing his quotations from "Childe Harold," "The Island," "The Bride of Abydos," "The Siege of Corinth, "Don Juan," and "Stanzas to Augusta," and he clearly

5See, for instance, the Southern Literary Messenger for December, 1835 (II, pp. 59f.), the Evening Mirror for January 10 and February 12, 1848, and the Broadway Journal for April 5 and 12, 1845.

Of his tales, "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," "The Devil in the Belfry." "How to Write a Blackwood Article," and "The Pit and the Pendulum" are among those that were suggested in whole or in part by newspaper or magazine articles, and among the poems both "El Dorado" and his play Politian found their inception in occurrences chronicled in the newspapers.

"Poe, it may be noted, is often inexact in his quotations, a fact already pointed out by Professor Woodberry (Poe's Works, ed. Sted

echoes Byron in several of his early poems, including "Tamerlane," "Spirits of the Dead," "The City in the Sea," and the "The Coliseum," and he affects the Byronic manner in most of the poems of his first two volumes (1827 and 1829) and in one of his tales ("The Assignation"). From one or another of his references or from unmistakable reminiscences, it is plain that he had read, in addition to the half a dozen poems of Byron already mentioned, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," "The Giaour," "Manfred," "The Corsair," "The Dream," and a number of the briefer lyrics. There is, indeed, every likelihood that he had read all of Byron's poems, and that he had read and re-read many of them.

Coleridge he quotes from only five times, twice from the "Ancient Mariner" and three times from the Biographia Literaria. But his references to Coleridge are almost as numerous as his references to Byron: thirty in all, if we include his references to the prose writings. And the influence of Coleridge is palpable in the earlier "To Helen," in "The City in the Sea,' in "The Sleeper," and is vaguely discernible also in the "Sonnet To Science," "FairyLand," and "The Raven." There are echoes also of the "Ancient Mariner," I think, in two of the tales,- "MS. Found in a Bottle" and "Arthur Gordon Pym." It is impossible to say how much of Coleridge he had reador had not read; but it is certain that he was familiar with the "Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," "Youth and Age," and "Genevieve," and he was well acquainted with the Biographia Literaria, and likewise with the Table Talk, which he briefly noticed in one of his "Marginalia" published in

man and Woodberry, IV, pp. 291f.). For instance, of his forty-five quotations from the Bible, eighteen are inexact. Evidently he very often quoted from memory.

Often, too, he uses the same quotation several times, as in his repetition of the phrase "counterfeit presentment," which appears three times in his writings, and of a sentence from Bacon's essay "Of Beauty," which is quoted seven times. In the statistics that I give in this paper, each quotation is counted as often as it occurs, even though it is several times repeated.

1844. He reviewed also in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836 the Letters, Conversations and Recollections of Coleridge compiled by T. Allsop.

The poems of Thomas Moore I imagine he read more freely in his youth than in his later life. Certainly his indebtedness to Moore, which is unmistakable in "Al Aaraaf" and "Evening Star" and is discoverable also in "Fairy-Land," belongs to his earlier years, though he remained loyal to the Irish bard as long as he lived, pronouncing him in one of his later essays to be "the most skilful literary artist of his day-perhaps of any day"; and he reviewed Alciphron upon its appearance in 1839, praising it extravagantly. Aside from the excerpts cited in his review of Alciphron, he quotes directly from Moore only four times (in each instance from the Irish Melodies, though reminiscences of other poems are to be caught in his verses). The poems that he appears to have known best are Lalla Rookh (from which, as Professor Woodberry has noted,s he culled whole lines and also sundry footnotes, for use, but slightly altered, in "Al Aaraaf"), the Irish Melodies (one of which, "While Gazing on the Moon's Light", evidently suggested the "Evening Star"), and Alciphron. He alludes to or echoes Moore, by my reckoning, a total of twenty-five times.

9

His more intimate acquaintance with Tennyson probably dates from some time in the thirties; indeed I find no reference to Tennyson in anything published before 1837. But after this date, and especially in the forties, his references to Tennyson are very frequent. I have noted twenty-seven references to Tennyson, and I find four quotations: "The Death of the Old Year" he quotes twice in its entirety, once he quotes from the song "Tears, Idle Tears," and once he cites a few lines from "Lilian." In addition to these he

8Woodberry, Life of Poe, I, p. 64.

"His enthusiasm for Tennyson knew no bounds. In one of his papers (Poe's Works, XIV, p. 289) he declares that he was "the noblest poet that ever lived."