Abstract
This article was first delivered as a paper at the PSA’s Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference in April 2022 in Boston. It recognizes the work of Palmer C. Holt, a little-known independent scholar who devoted over forty years to studying Poe’s career-long displays of erudition and learning. Holt’s research papers and the core of his collection of Poe sources, an archive preserved at Washington State University, constitute a largely untapped resource for tracing Poe’s practice of lifting content from secondary sources as if he were quoting original texts. As have later scholars, Holt argued that Poe was seeking to create the persona of a deeply learned, classically educated gentleman. The article concludes with Holt’s views on whether the author’s borrowing practices constitute plagiarism; on how the always-impoverished Poe managed access to the literary works, ancient to contemporary in multiple languages, woven into his writing; and on why he pretended to possess a deep knowledge of Greek and Roman literature.
