Text: Anonymous, “[Comment on Ingram's Life of Poe],” The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper (London, UK), vol. XXII, no. 553, July 3, 1880, p. 30, cols. 1-2

[page 30, column 1, continued:]

Poe's face at once shows us that he had too much brain for his physique. The portrait of his mother seems to indicate a hereditary morbidity, such as he attributes to the brother and sister in that weirdest of all his weird tales, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This would account for the restlessness with which he gave up appointment after appointment when to all appearance he was comfortably settled. The real cause of his taking to drink, Mr. Ingram says, was the unbearable strain of his wife's illness. She burst a blood vessel, almost died, recovered, and had a series of relapses — a state of things far harder to bear than if she had died outright. It was this drink that broke off the engagement with Mrs. Whitman which might have saved him. These two volumes will, in large. part, interest Americans only. Enough for us to know that by his bitter sarcasm in “The Literati” and elsewhere, Poe earned the hatred of the American men while he seems to have had some unexplained way of making women jealous and spiteful. We don’t care to touch on the Osgood controversy or the other matters which Mr. Ingram discusses in “Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions” (Hogg, Paternoster Row). He has thought it due to the much maligned poet to refute the unaccountable calumnies of his persistent reviler Griswold. But, happily, his two volumes are not wholly devoted to this; they contain such a good [column 2:] account, with extracts, of Poe's writings that, having read them, we know more, not only of the facts of his life but of his works than we are likely otherwise to do. He made his mark. Victor Hugo said, “Il a cree un frisson nouveau;” he was even translated into Spanish; and the strange vraisemblance of tales like “Hans Phaal” and the “Descent into the Maelstrom” has never, perhaps, been equalled. We heartily recommend Mr. Ingram's book to all who want to know all about Poe.