This essay discusses Poe’s magazine pieces that are comprised of brief quotations or fragmentary comments upon other works of literature. First, as these piecemeal pieces were artifacts from “the Magazine Prison-House” in which Poe labored, the essay will set out to establish their functions within Poe’s editorial work and his sense of their relation to public and literary erudition. Second, because Poe recycled or returned to many of these marginal comments in the making of his essays, tales, and poems, they are discussed as building blocks or conceptual nodes for his various creative endeavors. Third, the essay will discuss the critical strategies within these pieces that served Poe more generally as statements of opinion on a range of literary topics (e.g., originality/plagiarism, transcendentalism, rationale of verse). The essay concludes by discussing the importance of the marginal as a critical position from which Poe would make his literary inventions and interventions.