Amid much matter below the present
standard, it contained some that any editor would be glad to receive. The
initial volume, for 1845, has articles by Horace Greeley, Donald Mitchell,
Walter Whitman, Marsh, Tuckerman, and Whipple. Ralph Hoyt's quaint poem,
"Old," appeared in this volume. And here are three lyrics by Poe: "The City
in the Sea," "The Valley of Unrest," and _The Raven_. Two of these were
built up,--such was his way,--from earlier studies, but the last-named came
out as if freshly composed, and almost as we have it now. The statement
that it was not afterward revised is erroneous. Eleven trifling changes
from the magazine-text appear in _The Raven and Other Poems_, 1845, a book
which the poet shortly felt encouraged to offer the public. These are
mostly changes of punctuation, or of single words, the latter kind made to
heighten the effect of alliteration. In Mr. Lang's pretty edition of Poe's
verse, brought out in the "Parchment Library," he has shown the instinct of
a scholar, and has done wisely, in going back to the text in the volume
just mentioned, as given in the London issue of 1846. The "standard"
Griswold collection of the poet's works abounds with errors. These have
been repeated by later editors, who also have made errors of their own. But
the text of _The Raven_, owing to the requests made to the author for
manuscript copies, was still farther revised by him; in fact, he printed it
in Richmond, just before his death, with the poetic substitution of
"seraphim whose foot-falls" for "angels whose faint foot-falls," in the
fourteenth stanza.
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