Poe's False Epigraphs

One of the first repeating elements or characteristics of Poe's stories that I noticed was actually pointed out to me by the text itself. The footnote after the epigraph in "Ligeia" states that "Like many of Poe's epigraphs (often added after first publication) this one is fabricated." It goes on to say that the man it is attributed to, Joseph Glanvill, did exist and was a religious philosopher, but he never wrote the lines Poe quotes. While the footnote doesn't explicitly state that Poe wrote the false quote, that meaning is implied by the wording, which begs the question, why? This particular epigraph's diction is more pretentious than others. Like Cooper's Shakespearean epigraphs, this pretension adds a sense of importance and awe to the short story, especially to a reader who doesn't have the footnote's help in identifying the epigraph as invention. Additionally, the unnecessary "-eths" complicate the quote and its wording which makes it difficult to unpack. Therefore, Poe's false pretension might be merited because it veils the epigraph's "message" that (spoiler alert) humans might overcome death simply through strength of will.

There is still the fact that Poe put his own falsely cited, pretentious epigraph, before his story which, individually, I cannot justify, but only suggest that either 1) Poe couldn't find a real quote he liked well enough to use or 2) he actually is trying to add a level of sophistication to his work. "William Wilson. A Tale" also has an incorrectly cited epigraph that gets the author right but the source work and its wording wrong. The repeated use of false epigraphs leads me to believe that they have a direct intention which I see as Poe's message to his readers that not everything is as it seems, or as it is presented. Several of Poe's stories contain unreliable narrators in that they do not account for possible mental illness (as in "William Wilson. A Tale") or the supernatural (as in "The Masque of the Red Death") in there relation of the world around them. The narrators are not intentionally lying to us (as the epigraphs are) and they are sympathetic in that a reader unfamiliar with Poe might not immediately jump to the supernatural as an explanation for a story's events. Poe seems to set up this eerie, not everything is as it seems, atmosphere from the epigraphs. My only remaining questions are 1) how did Poe choose which stories would get epigraphs and which would not, and 2) how did he decide when they would be accurate?