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THE SPECTRAL LOVES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE
THE world of Poe is unreal; it is a world of shadows where mystic ravens flap their wings, and Ulalume walks through the ghoul-haunted night. Poe's women are fantastic children of nightmares and of dreams. His caresses were uncanny and his tenderness gruesome.
My lady sleeps. Oh! may her sleep
As it is lasting so be deep,
Soft may the worms about her creep.
Such, surely, is not the language of earthly passion. When the unhappy poet loved a real woman, he was sure to misplace his affection. Only the specter ladies of his dream brought solace to his heart.
Thus there is a story that the mother of one of his playmates befriended the poet, that she became “the confidante of his boyish sorrows,” and that when she died he haunted her grave night after night. It is easy to say, remarks Mr. John Macy in a monograph* on Poe recently published, that this romantic lingering upon a lady's grave foreshadows much in Poe's poetry and prose; it is also easy to see that Poe's prose and poetry suggest a story which he himself has related. He called the lady Helen because Jane, her real name, dis- pleased his fancy. The change, Mr. Macy says, was evidently made by a poet with a mature ear; that is, after he had written “To Helen,” who is nobody in particular. Poe's ladies, we are told, are as visionary as the Altheas and Julias of Herrick. Whereas Herrick expressed a fleshly warmth towards ladies who never were, Poe attaches his phantasmagoria, creatures of a pretty name in his head, to whatever lady happened to interest him at the moment. He fitted the same poetic abstraction to several women, and since there is singularly little human passion in his work, it is likely, Mr. Macy remarks, that his conception of women was usually untinged by [column 2:] desires of the blood. Mr. Macy goes on to say:
“The grave-haunting yarn belongs in Poe's biography because he made it and because it may have root in fact. At the age of thirty-nine, a year before his death, Poe referred to this story in a letter to a poetess. Poets and poetesses communicate and receive ideas which the facts of life do not support.
“It is not necessary either to take too seriously the story of Poe's attachment to Sarah Elmira Royster, his young neighbor, except to credit her statement that her father intercepted Poe's letters. Miss Royster was presently married at the age of seventeen. She appears later in Poe's life as the severe-lipped widow, Mrs. Shelton.”
One real creature of flesh and blood, “Mary,” entered Poe's life, but they quarreled and he ungallantly published a satirical poem about her in a Baltimore paper. When the young lady's uncle interfered, Poe horse-whipped him, and flung the whip at Mary's feet. Two years later he married Virginia, at that time only thirteen years of age. She and her mother, Mrs. Clemm, were tender and loyal to him. The unhappy man who has been so blackly drawn certainly spent a great many days at home, working hard. To his mother-in-law, Mr. Macy affirms, he was more natural and frank than to any other person. For once there was a human tone in his terms of endearment. But it seems that every purely human affection on Poe's part was bound to perish, and soon little Virginia joined the spirit loves of the poet, Leonore, Annabel Lee, Ulalume, Morella and Berenice.
Like Hawthorne, Poe was interested in the shadowy problems of psychology, metempsychosis, the nature of personality and mesmerism. Hawthorne, however, leaves his creatures in the distance of poetic and religious wonder, while Poe, to whom they were more real than life itself, fetches the shadows out of the dark into the flashlight of his brilliant analysis. “The specters in whom Hawthorne embodies mesmeric suggestion,” Mr. Macy avers, “his victories of conscience, the spooks that appear and disappear amid allegorical portents, now [page 49:] and again step forward and speak with human voices.”
“Poe never contrived a human being: the conversations of his characters are but the vehicles of expository ideas. Compared to the dramatically real double person, Jekyll-Hyde, William Wilson is a ghost. ‘Morella,’ ‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ are but the transparent images of revery laid against the plane surface of a mathematical plan. When Poe reached out for a human being, one who might come ready-made from the byways of life into the particular course he was laying out for his story, he pressed human truth out of the figure after a minute of handling. For an instance, the more important because it concerns a minor character who had nothing unnatural to do in the interests of the story, ‘The Gold Bug,’ written three years later, contains a negro servant. Poe had lived at the South and knew negroes, but the talk of Jupiter is more remote from negro talk than the utmost devices of black-faced minstrelsy. Poe found his material in himself and in his reading rather than in his fellows. The first person in one of the tales says, ‘Feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.’”
In his later years in New York Poe was a lion in literary circles. His comportment was dignified and quiet; he was a fluent conversationalist [column 2:] and a gallant and sensible man. began at this time one of his many literary love affairs of which each ended in disillusionment and sorrow. It was Poe's ill luck, his biographer assures us, to leave behind him a multitude of suspicious clews and circumstances for every sin which he had time and capacity to commit. Nevertheless, many of these love affairs were merely epistolary and, in a sense, the ladies who held his affection are less real than those which haunt the pages of his books. It is not necessary therefore to throw up virtuous hands at the tender exchanges of perfervid rhetoric between the female poets of America and this real poet of the glowing eyes, the soft voice and the winning manners.
After Virginia's death he was broken and irresponsible. There was nothing left to charm him in reality. He made love to Mrs. Shew, Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Shelton and Mrs. Royster. He was even engaged at various times; but no mortal woman was able to chain his affection. That belonged to the spirit of Virginia Clemm.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 48, column 1:]
* EDGAR ALLAN POE. By John Albert Macy. Small, Maynard & Company.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - CL, 1908] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - The Spectral Loves of Edgar Allan Poe (Anonymous, 1908)