Text: Anonymous “Who Wrote ‘The Raven’?,” Richmond Times (Richmond, VA), vol. 8, ns. no. 274, January 27, 1895, p. 5, cols. 1-2

[page 5, column 1:]

Edgar Allan Poe did not write “The Raven.” At least, such is the startling literary discovery claimed by Dr. Matthew Woods, the well-known physician of this city, says the Philadelphia Record. He confidently believes that he holds undeniable proofs in hand, which will convince the world that the real author of that unique, immortal poem, which spread like wildfire throughout the young republic and gave Poe his first cisatlantic fame, was Charles [[Henry]] Beck Hirst, a long-neglected poet of Philadelphia, who was in the old days Poe's great friend until a strange quarrel separated them forever. Around that quarrel clusters the whole romance of “The Raven,” and perhaps most of the romance of Hirst's own life, which Dr. Woods asserts to have been as remarkable a poem in itself.

In whatever mood the vast reading world, which is filled with Poe's fame today, will accept this iconoclastic revelation, says the Philadelphia Record, it will undoubtedly — when fully and logically set forth by Dr. Woods himself — fall like a thunderbolt. Despite the enormous popularity of Poe's weird stories, and despite the singularly small body of his poems — at only the most rare Intervals throughout his eventful career the world has been fit to link his memory inseparably with his peculiar poem of “The Raven.” It has recognized in this seemingly mystic masterpiece of rhythm the gloomy, mournful, solitary spirit of Poe incarnate. A whole literature of symbolism has sprung up around this conception, in which the raven and the lost Lenore have been made to assume the most Protean shapes. Poe's drunkennness and remorse, his wife's agonizing affliction and his anguish (as pathetically expressed in “The Black Cat”), his sense of conflict with the world and passionate regret for his art — all manner of interpretations have been deduced by the poem's more analytical admirers, while the great mass of poetry-lovers have accepted it generally as most of them listen to music — as a vague, sensuous appeal, too melodious and mystic to seek to uncurtain its inner holy of holies.

HAD NO PARTICULAR MEANING.

Poe himself has been its most merciless analyst. In his “Essay on Composition,” he has pretended to reveal the true genesis of this world's lyric. His revelation has seemed to everybody painfully incredible. Utterly ignoring all mystical subtleties, he exhibited the poem as a mere tour de force of elaborate artificiality; a sonorous and imposing sleight-of-hand of the clever versifier and symbolist learned in the poetic tricks. According to his account, the poem had no particular meaning, no hidden inspiration, no secret apotheosis of a sad memory or life; it was simply a wonderfully built theater scene, meant for impression on an emotional audience in front, and oniy framework and coarse canvas behind. “Truly,” thought his critics, and still think, “here is another Poe hoax!” Yet what hoaxes have his interpreters perpetrated upon themselves. Even it Poe actually wrote “The Raven,” how much nonsensical symbolism has been woven from the spider brains of his latter day disciples, and how ludicrously vague, has been the public notion concerning the famous poem. All this library of Poe-and-the-Raven literature will be overtoppled with the triumph of Dr. einim, and a new and simple interpretation will displace this cabalistic symbolism.

An attack upon Poe's authorship of the poem is bound to shake the bellettristic world to its very center, and Dr. Woods will find himself confronted by the embattled universe of Poe idolaters. But nevertheless the doctor is entering the lists armed to the teeth and ready for the hottest encounters. His plea for Hirst will make an intensely interesting brief for the plaintiff on appeal, and in this day of literary sensations it is destined to be a nine days’ wonder, if nothing more. Did Hirst's own reputation hinge altogether upon the issue of this advanced title of his to “The Raven,” the doctor's case would be by on means a strong one; but Dr. Woods is enthusiastically possessed by the entire personality and poetical works of Hirst. He may be said, without exaggeration, to have actually discovered the poet, for even in his own day his name was obscured; but now, the doctor predicts, after this half century of eclipse, his sun will shine with a transcendent resplendence. “The Raven” is but one of a rich legacy of the purest poesy — but a stolen flower from a garden of delights. His modern hero-worshiper (for Dr. Woods proudly acknowledges that title) goes so far as even to declare Hirst's “Endymion” to be superior to Keats’ famous poem on the shepherd love of Diana.

THE FIRST ARGUMENT.

The first argument in the chain of evidence for Hirst's title is direct — the fact that Hirst himself claimed the authorship of “The Raven.” He was a flourishing lawyer in the Quaker City during the middle 40s, while Poe was yet running his meteor-like and queer career here. He was 27 years old, when Poe, four years his senior, was called by George Rex Graham in 1840 to the editor's desk of the new Graham's Magazine. He was admitted to the bar three years later, and soon built up a lucrative practice. During these years he became Poe's intimate and confidant. Poe spent many an hour in Hirst's law office on Prune street, and Hirst dined with Poe at Mrs. Clemm's, on Spring Garden street, every, Sunday, upon “potted shad and waffles.” There must have been a real affinity between the two poets — the illustrious tale-teller and the obscure lawyer — which was only broken by an extremely unfortunate occurrence. At least one poem of Hirst's was published in Graham's.

During his life Hirst wrote “The Antediluvians, an Epic Poem;” “A Book of Cage Birds,” “The Coming of the Mammoth,” “The Funeral of Time and Other Poems,” “Endymion, Tale of and Greece;” Other “The Penance of Roland “Guy Poems;” and the Pleasures of Friendship;” Dragon;” “Mutius Seaevo la,” “The Sea of the Mind,” “A Poetical Dictionary,” “The Valley of Repose, “Parisina and Hugo, a Tragedy in Five “Cataline, a Tragedy in Five Acts”; “A Jolly Old Reaper is Death,” “The Coquette, a Comedy in Three Acts”; “Grandfather Lovechild's Fairy Tales,” “The Passage of the Birds,” “A Treatise on Political Economy,” “Lawrence Goodchild's Legends in Metre,” “With Gun and Rod, by Harry Harkaway”; “Prose Tales,” “Armor Vineit Omniam,” “Rhein-wein, in Three Flagons: Flagon First — Pilgrim of Love; Flagon Second The Legend of Lurlei; Flagon Third — The Serpent Lady”; “Joan of Arc,” “The Fall of the Fairies,” “Launcelot of the Ballad of Ruth,” “Charlemagne, a Comle Opera in Three Acts”; “The Song Sparrow, Fringilla Melodia”; “The Death Song of the nightingale,” “The Indigo Finch,” “The American Skylark,” “The Whidah bird,” “The Falcon,” “The Eagle,” “The Owl,” “The Robin.” etc. To this list the Doctor adds, of course, “The Raven” as a finale.

Upon a number of occasions during his declared himself to have lifetime, the author of “The Raven.” Hirst been held in his possession a manuscript copy of the poem, of which only a portion was the handwriting of Poe and all the in his own. He referred to it in variably as “my poem;” and yet never vehemently or disputatiously, but always the quiet, ordinary, air with which with he would speak of his undisputed writings. He was extremely careless of the paternity of his poems. Dr. Woods has discovered that, among other pseudonyms, he wrote under those of Beulah, Harry Harkaway, Grandfather Goodchild and Goodfellow, and many of his Clarence poems he never collected nor printed. With many eccentricities of the poet and nature-worshiper, he was “eccentric looked old upon fellow” by his relatives as an in his latter years, and although he survived until 1874 he died almost unknown, careless of his fame, and without having placed on permanent record his. casual claim to the fatherhood of, the poem with which all the world was echoing.

DID NOT SIGN HIS NAME.

Poe's own adoption of the poem would seem to be striking rebuttal of this direct testimony. But, strangely enough, Poe did not at first publish it over his own name. When it first appeared before the eyes of the world in January, 1815,. it was signed simply most mysterious proceeding. To Dr. Woods, however, that one word has all the vital importance of a Shakespearean cipher to a zealous Baconian. When [column 2:] Poe had left Philadelphia for New York in April, 1841. he and Hirst were no longer friends. The close bond of sympathy between them had been rudely snapped by a most untoward incident. Poe had borrowed a valuable book of an acquaintance and never it. Poe excused himself by declaring that he had confided it to Hirst, leaving it at the law office for delivery. Hirst was overcome by a momentary outburst of indignation. One of the “irritable tribe of poets,” he gave way to an impulse anger, and the two friends parted forevermore. In after days the missing book was discovered in a distant State, and the purchasers claimed to have bought it of a certain Philadelphia old book firm. The first stated positively that it was one of a number sold to them by Poe's mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm. What then was the meaning of Poe's “Quarles?” Why did he hesitate to sign his own name? Was there not a hidden pun in this name of the old English bard, Francis Quarles, and did not Poe intend it to mean to Hirst as it sounds — Quarrels? Their quarrel was still fresh in mind. Poe had added one or two touches only, let us say, to the poem, but, theretore, felt some right, and perhaps possessed some prior consent, to its publication. When the poem took its sudden leap into fame, Poe could not resist the temptation and he fell. He sought afterward to add a connecting link between the verses and himself by his “Essay on Composition.” Such is the new inference.

POE WAS NO ORNITHOLOGIST.

Why should Poe have written “The Raven?” Scarcely his own defenders will allow that he honestly chose the bird, if he did choose it at all, as a symbol in the same way in which he himself asserted. On the other hand, this is his only bird poem. Poe was not a naturalist, even if he did condense He knew nothing of a book on shells. flowers and birds in the intimate sense. Could he have been inspired to “The Raven” through his remarkable Sherlock Holmes-like foreshadowing of the plot of Dickens’ “Barnaby Rudge,” which made Dickens ask if he were the devil himself. In sharp contrast to Poe Hirst was bird lover, great deal of an a a ornithologist, a3 well as an observant comrade of the little feathered songsters. Audubon pronounced him to be the best amateur ornithologist in America, and he drew several bird plates for Alexander Wilson's great work. He wrote Book of Cage Birds,” in which he treated even of the discases of the imprisoned choristers of our homes. His house was almost an aviary. He was endowed, too, with the rare gift of being able to imitate the birds. Dr. Thomas Dunn English — who by odd coincidence is also famous through a single poem, “Ben and who also had a famous quarrel with Poe is one of the witnesses to this gift of Hirst's. The birds used to fly to him.

But, above all, he was a poet of the birds. He watched them as he watched his flowers — with the transfiguring eye of the bard. In his poems he has left sanctified memories of his little walled-in garden close — a typical Philadelphia back-yard idealized in verse — and in “The Wren” he tenderly remembers a certain day whereon one of his flowers blossomed and his linnet sang for the first time. He was in his day almost the sole singer of American birds and flowers. The rest sang of the English lark, the nightingale and the English meads, seen reflected in their books.

“In his poem of “The Raven,” commented Dr. Woods, in his study, last evening, “Hirst has described the bird with that absolute accuracy possible only to the closest observer. Have you ever had a raven? I have — have had two, in fact, and have been strangely impressed by the queer bird. It is almost human in rather I should say in its slyness, or rather I should say moniacal. Such is the spirit of the bird as revealed in Hirst's poem. Its tapping as at the door, its lordly gait and preening, its manner of hip-hopping by degrees to perch, its ability to articulate a lofty such a word as all these things Hirst had observed, but hardly Poe. Hirst's home was crowded with The Doctor did not divulge whether or no there was a “pallid bust of Pallas” just above Hirst's chamber door.

think of all the metaphysics that “The Raven’ has provoked!” exclaimed the Doctor, as he picked up one of the slender Hirst volumes. is absothe bird, except his lutely no mystery to with evil omen. The bird association himself is portrayed.”

”THE LOST LENORE.”

“But how about ‘the lost Lenore,’ Doctor?” the interviewer interrogated.

“That is the poet,” came the answer, as the Doctor turned to one of Hirst's poems, entitled “Eleanore.” He read poems, softly mournful tone. The interviewer was forced into an involuntary start of surprise. “Truly,” he admitted to the reader, “Eleanore seems to contain the germ of the lost Lenore.” The resemblance was, indeed, striking. The latter conception seemed to be fully contained within his earlier poem.

“But what of the peculiar rhythm of “The Raven” the champion of Hirst was asked.

The interviewer felt that he had introduced the backbone of the contention, and so Dr. Woods agreed.

“The rhythm would seem to be Poe's rhythm chief title to the poem,” he stated, “and that is one of the most convincing features of Hirst's own claim. Eight years before ‘The Raven’ was published, Hirst used precisely that same rhythm.”

Dr. Woods thereupon read Hirst's poem entitled “The Unseen River.” The rhythm fully bore out the Doctor's claim for it. To a person not acquainted with “The Raven,” the verses would appear to be from the same poem. That unique, haunting melody of the Poe-accredited lyric characterizes these stanzas, which antedate it by eight years, and the rhythm is handled in the masterly manner which has its prototype only in the later poem. Long before Poe formulated his celebrated definitions of poetry and beauty, Hirst had declared poetry to belong solely to nature as it existed in the mind of the creator, and to the ideals of beauty.

“He pleaded long ago for beauty for beauty's sake,” declares Dr. Woods. “He was the last of the Greeks. His personifications of nature are exquisite and forcible. So sensitive was he to nature that he could almost hear the lily tinkle its crescent bell. He would lie with his head buried in grass hours. He could hear the patter of rabbits’ feet a mile away. So learned was he in the murmurs of nature, that in one of his poems he actually describes the sound of night creeping up the Delaware. His imagery, as of the bird-winged iris, is original and delicate.”

WHAT HIRST SAID.

In speaking of “The Raven” Hirst used to declare, I wrote all of the poem except a few stanzas added by Poe, which he plagiarized from Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett. This curious fact was not discovered by Critic Stoddard until twenty years ago, although long before that Hirst told of this characteristic Poe borrowing from the English poetess’ “Lady Geraldine's Courtship.”

“The strange neglect of Poe by his contemporaries, which has resulted in his modern obscurity,” emphatically declared Dr. Woods, “was due, in my opinion, to the enmity of a clique. When the Philadelphia periodicals quoted his poems they invariably omitted his name. His earliest work, ‘The had enjoyed quite a fame and been noticed in England. Christopher North had Hirst. But a conspiracy seems to have worked against his later works. He became unknown. Stedman does not mention him in his American literature. Woodberry knew of him only as a poetaster through Poe's article on Hirst in his literati articles. The late Dr. Holmes had heard of him only once — through Bayard Taylor — and wrote me just before his death that he knew nothing about Hirst. And yet I have found a poem by Holmes in the same number of Graham's Magazine with a poem by Hirst.”

Dr. Woods is creditably known in letters as the author of “Rambles of a Physician.” He will publish a life of Hirst and edit two volumes of poems. He has unearthed a hitherto unknown miniature by Rembrandt Peale, of the Philadelphia poet, whom fame has condemned to her hardest frowns.