Poe or not Poe? A stylometric analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s disputed writings

摘要

Edgar Allan Poe has left us with a literary legacy that in part lacks a definitive stamp of authenticity. While some of the 'possible Poes' that have been discovered after his death have generated heated discussion among scholars, many others have quickly slipped into obscurity. This paper reevaluates thirty-two of such prose texts as well as ten poems that have been tenuously attributed to Poe in the past, using the 'classify' function (employing Nearest Shrunken Centroid, Burrows' Delta and Support Vector Machines) of the stylo-toolkit for R. It also sheds new light (with the help of rolling Delta) on Poe's possible contribution to the so-called Paulding-Drayton review, infamous in Poe criticism for its defense of slavery. By contrasting and comparing the 'author signal' behind these pieces with unclear authorship, this analysis is able to answer with a high degree of accuracy the question: Poe or not Poe?