At a critical point in his tale, Walton reports that his ship is walled in by ice: “I am surrounded by mountains of ice, which admit no escape, and threaten every moment to crush my vessel” (317). With the aid of Frankenstein, he tries to convince the frightened crew to continue north if their ship is freed rather than to retreat for home: “How all this will terminate, I know not, but I had rather die than return shamefully,-my purpose unfulfilled” (320). As he predicts, the promise of discovery does indeed prove strong enough to conquer his fear of danger and death. At the end of Poe’s tale, the narrator is trapped aboard a ship in a similar physical environment: “about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and a t inter- vals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe” (2:145). Though he is being drawn amidst these mountains if ice into the grasp of a deadly whirlpool, his curiosity to discover the truth in the face of death parallels that of Walton: To conceive of the horror of my sensations is, I pre- sume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurry- ing onwards to some exciting knowledge-some never- to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. (2: 14 5)

Both narrators resolve that, if necessary, their sto- ries will be told in spite of their deaths, Walton’s through his letters and Poe’s narrator’s through the manuscript he places in a bottle. Walton is, of course, spared, while Poe’s narrator perishes in the whirlpool [for relevant commentary, see Jules Zanger, “Poe and the Theme of Forbidden Knowl- edge,” American Literature 49 (1978): 533-5431.

To summarize, the phase “darkness and dis- tance” evokes similar moods in the final para- graphs of these two works. Their narrators pos- sess similar backgrounds, interests, and tempera- ments; both are on voyages of polar discovery on ships that become threatened amidst mountains of ice; and both find their fear of death overcome by their desire to discover the truth. There are other major similarities as well, which can be explained partially by the fact that Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner functioned as a source for both tales, partially by the generic similarities of nar- ratives of polar exploration. But based upon the evidence, closer scrutiny of Poe’s knowledge and use of Frankenstein seems warranted.

Don G. Smith, Eastern fllinois University

Preuss and Stoddard on Poe

For the record, it should be pointed out that there are several inaccuracies in J. Gerald Kennedy’s otherwise noteworthy “Elegy for a ‘Rebel Soul’: Henry Clay Preuss and the Poe Debate” [Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieuz, ed. Ben- jamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, Inc., 1990), 226-341. Kennedy speculates that Preuss’s essay and poem in defense of Poe in the 19 May 1853 issue of the Washing- ton Daily National Intelligencer were “in all like- lihood responding obliquely to Griswold and more directly” to an essay and poem critical of Poe that R. H. Stoddard published in the National Maga- zine for March of 1853. However, the first four of the seven stanzas in Preuss’s poem had already appeared in print pseudonymously three years ear- lier under the title “Edgar A. Poe” in the Rich- mond Enquirer for 29 January 1850. There they were identified as having been written “For the Enquirer” by “The ‘Bard of Baltimore’” with the dateline “Baltimore, January 17, 1849,” i.e., 1850. In light of this earlier publication, the six or so pas- sages from these first four stanzas of Preuss’s poem cited by Kennedy could not have been “respond- ing. . . directly” to the essay portion of Stoddard’s 1853 diatribe against Poe.

Also for the record, “Miserrimus,” the poem with which Stoddard closes his 1853 essay in the National Magazine, had in fact been published be- fore: it appeared under Stoddard’s name dated ”October 17, 1849,” in the Supplement to the New York Daily Tribune for 27 October 1849. Because the initial publication of Stoddard’s poem actually preceded the first appearance of Preuss’s by three months, it might still be argued, as Kennedy does for their 1853 printings, that Preuss’s 1850 stanzas were responding particularly to “Miserrimus.” In my view, there were too many obituary mud balls being slung at Poe in late 1849 to build a convinc- ing case that Preuss in 1850 was trying to intercept Stoddard’s poem specifically, although Kennedy’s more general argument-that Preuss’s essay/poem combination in the 19 May 1853 Daily National Intelligencer can be seen “as a reply to Griswold, Stoddard, and critics of that ilk”-remains a rea- sonable one.

It should be noted that Preuss’s poem on Poe appeared in yet another context in 1853. The Shekinah, a Spiritualist magazine to which Preuss was a fairly regular contributor, carried the poem under Preuss’s name in March of 1853 (pages 226- 27), coincident with the appearance of Stoddard’s essay and poem in the National Magazine. In the Shekinah, Preuss introduces his poem with a brief

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exhortation in which he adopts the voice of “a very old man”-he was in fact only in his twenties or early thirties at the time. Having become “con- vinced” that “there is much to be forgiven to poor frail Humanity” in this “‘dark estate,’” Preuss now urges his reader to permit “the unfolding of the divine law of Love in the heart” and “‘temper our judgment [of Poelwith mercy.”’ The text of the poem following this exhoration is virtually identi- cal to the text in the Daily National Intelligencer two months later. Finally, I would also note that the 1850 and 1853 versions of Preuss’s poem are cited in my 1965 doctoral dissertation-“Poe in Imaginative Literature” (Univ. of Virginia), 73, 227, 248-and I discuss the poem briefly in The Image of Poe in American Poetry, The Fifty-Third Annual Poe Lecture (Baltimore: The Enoch Pratt Free Library, The Edgar Allan Poe Society, The Library of the Univ. of Baltimore, 1976).

John E. Reilly, College of the Holy Cross, Emeritus

The Presence of Poe in Borges’s Reviews in El Hogar

The considerable intellectual relationship of Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges (1900-1986), a commonplace of Hispanic readings of Borges since the 1940s, has been increasingly discussed in English-language criticism during the last decade. An excellent treatment of common themes and, in the notes, of prior studies is furnished by Mau- rice J. Bennett [“The Detective Fiction of Poe and Borges,” Comparative Literature, 35 (1983): 262- 75, and “‘William Wilson’ and Borges’ ‘Deutsches Requiem’” in Poe and Our Times: Influences and Afinities, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Bal- timore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1986), 107- 231. Yet a significant body of Borges’s writing- four years of essays and reviews that appeared in EL Hogar, an important Buenos Aires weekly, from 1936 to 1940-has not been previously available outside of Argentina for inclusion in a truly com- prehensive picture of that author’s affinity for Poe. This material was republished in 1986, although in an edition not distributed even in Spain for at least two years. A brief list of the Poe allu- sions and passages in Jorge-Luis Borges / Textos Cautivos: Ensayos y reserSas en “El Hogar,” com- piled by Enrique Sacerio-Gar: and Emir Rodriguez [Barcelona: Tusquets, September 1986,345 pages], should be useful to scholars with access to this edi- tion.

El Hogar (“the hearth” or “the home”) was an illustrated family magazine published in Buenos

Aires from 1904 to 1940. Each issue of this popu- lar journal, which was devoted largely to domestic interests, featured columns treating of new books and literary criticism. The years 1936-1940 were golden ones for the magazine’s literary columns, with many articles written by Borges, an indefati- gable reader and creator of literature and criticism. The magnitude of Borges’s literary concerns is ev- ident in the variety and range of his review texts. His interest in and appreciation of Poe, especially as creator of the detective story, clearly appears in these reviews, although all but one concern non- Poe texts. The following lists Borges’s references to Poe in El Hogar by page number in the 1986 edition and brief remarks on content. Items are keyed as mentions (“m”), brief comments (“c”), or full passages (“p”) on Poe’s works: 40m (“Rue Morgue” as initiating the genre of the de- tective story); 45m (Alan Pryce Jones’s view of Stu- art Merrill as the best American lyric poet since Poe); 54m (Dreiser’s list of the most admired poets, includ- ing Poe); 77p (places Michael Innes’s tales as closer to Poe than to Conan Doyle and notes his prefer- ence for “Purloined Letter”); 95m (praise for Dorthy Sayers’s inclusion of Poe in her compilation of detec- tive fiction); lOlc (David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox” evades the note of horror, typical of Poe); 113 (full article, a review of Shanks’s Poe with its overly neg- ative opinions characteristic of the British, who hold a dim view that his verses will endure); 114c (H. Duver- nois’s hero Portereau truly seeks himself from within, unlike the metaphorical William Wilson); 132p (refers to a Chesterton book and recalls “The Purloined Let- ter”); 145p (in an “Ellery Queen” mystery, notes the influence of “Rue Morgue” in Zangwill, Leroux, and Phillpotts); 148-49c (praises “MS. in Bottle” in Lang’s Poe anthology); 188m (praises a seventeenth-century Chinese novel as having a chapter on the hidden face of the moon, not unworthy of Poe or Kafka); 211p (in reviewing a J. D. Cam novel, observes that Poe in- vented the detective genre and the type situation of the victim’s body in the locked or sealed room); 224c (anent a history of literature, denies the view that Con- rad’s sea tales owe anything to Poe); 230-S2c (despite Gustav Meyrink’s translations of Poe, sees small influ- ence of Poe in his Golem); 251c (applies Poe’s dictum on length and unity to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men); 262c (cites “Marie RogW as an early and very sim- ple detective tale); 271m (concerning Eden Phillpott’s crime story, cites “Rue Morgue” for its important use of the title-word Umurder”); 296m (elevates Poe and other writers above those in a new anthology of tales); 300m (praises C. S. Lewis’s conception of Mars as worthy of Poe’s ideas in his science fiction); 323m (in reviewing an “Ellery Queen” book, alludes to Poe as inventor of the detective genre).

Burton R. Pollin, CUNY, Emeritus