SOURCE: Simpson, Lewis P. “Poe's Vision of His Ideal Magazine.” In The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America, pp. 131-49. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

In the following essay, Simpson probes Edgar Allan Poe's attempts to establish a viable literary magazine in mid nineteenth-century America.

“Touching ‘The Stylus’:—this is the one great purpose of my literary life.”

Poe to Philip Pendleton Cooke, 1846

Let us begin somewhat indirectly by looking at two pictures. One is the daguerreotype portrait made of Edgar Poe during the autumn of 1848 at Providence, Rhode Island, where on November 15, 1848—if we can believe his own testimony—Poe attempted to end his life by taking an overdose of laudanum. In this representation Poe appears as a rather seedy gentleman, with his right hand thrust pretentiously into an untidy waistcoat. His haunted...