Text: John H. Ingram, “Edgar Allan Poe and ‘Stella’,” Albany Review (London, UK), vol. 1, no. 4, July 1907, pp. 417-423

[page 417:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE AND ‘STELLA’

THE censorship Edgar Poe assumed in his critical series, The Literati, excited more hostility and provoked more virulent slander against him than did any of his personal errors. Whilst creating a sensation these caustic notices of contemporaries injured Poe's prospects by increasing the number of his foes and intimidating the less courageous of his friends. The fears of the latter were justified: Poe's writings were boycotted in many desirable publications and his reputation sadly mauled by the victims of his sarcasm.

Had Poe confined his criticism to the demolition of literary pretenders posterity would have righted his wrongs by approving his judgements, but, unfortunately, other motives than justice occasionally biassed his decisions. In 1846, when The Literati sketches were causing aspirants for literary fame to quake, lady writers, who so far had received the most courteous treatment from Poe, strenuously sought to conciliate him. Many of them vied with each other in seeking to secure his sympathy, his friendship, and even his affection. They were not over scrupulous about the means employed as long as the desired end was gained. Deeming that praise from the autocrat of the hour gave “the guinea stamp” to their productions they left no scheme untried to procure it. As Mrs. Osgood wrote to Rufus Griswold, certain of them besieged the poet with letters, verses, and requests for introduction, and even visited his lodgings to endeavour to obtain his favour.

Mrs. Clemm, writing to a relative after the poet's death, declared that, in accordance with Edgar's wish, she had destroyed hundreds of letters written to him by literary [page 418:] women, and in another letter she remarked that Griswold had offered her a large sum of money for a certain literary lady's correspondence with Edgar, but fearing poverty might at some future time induce her to give up the letters she had destroyed them.

At times the persecution of these harpies was so persistent and their bickerings, rivalries, and slanderings so unendurable that the bewildered poet lost his temper. Driven to desperation he wrote to a correspondent, “Of one thing rest assured; from this day forth I shun the pestilential society of literary women. They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonourable set, with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem. Mrs. Osgood is the only exception I know.”

One of the ladies who was importuning the much-harassed poet for literary assistance and, above all, for public commendation, was Mrs. S. A. Lewis. Her baptismal names appear to have been Sarah Anna, but when she entered into the world of letters her ambition craved a more romantic appellation, and she adopted that of Estelle. One of Rufus Griswold's letters to this lady's husband, Mr. S. D. Lewis, is a claim for a considerable sum of money for the cost of altering Mrs. Lewis's baptismal to her poetical name, in a laudatory account of her he proposed to publish.

When Edgar Poe was distributing his awards of praise or blame in The Literati series, Mrs. Lewis became desirous of propitiating him. Personally Poe might have been inaccessible, but through the medium of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, he was easily “got at.” Poe's “more than mother “ had to provide the ways and means of living, and could not understand so acutely as the poet would his humiliation in belauding verse he did not admire. When, therefore, the small household was needy, no unusual circumstance in those times, the advances of Mrs. Lewis, whose husband was willing to pay, were accepted: the loan or gift obtained had to be repaid by the unfortunate poet in notices and praises of the lady's productions. To a confidential friend Poe expressed the mortification and even horror such things were to him, but in the hands of Mrs. Clemm he was powerless. [page 419:]

“I have often found her” (Mrs. Lewis), says an informant, “sitting in Mrs. Clemm's kitchen at Fordham Cottage, waiting to see the man of genius, who had rushed out to escape her to the fields, or forest, or to the grounds of the Catholic school in the vicinity. I remember Mrs. Clemm sending me after him one day, and I found him sitting on a favourite rock, muttering his desire of death so as to be free from literary bores for ever.”

Naturally Poe loathed the prescribed work, but “his poverty and not his will consented” to act as his wife's mother dictated. One result of this influence was that in 1848 he published an essay on Mrs. Lewis, in which, after a description of her educational accomplishments, her character, and her appearance, and conventional commonplaces about her literary acquirements, he forced himself into extravagant commendation of the lady's productions, and referred to her lyric, “The Forsaken,” as “the most beautiful ballad of its kind ever written.” It is really a pretty and pathetic poem, and had not its prototype been written by Motherwell some years previously, as Poe well knew, “The Forsaken” would have deserved his praise. Mrs. Lewis's “Child of the Sea” might likewise have merited some share of his encomium on it had it not been forestalled by Byron's “Corsair,” and so might many of her other verses, had not the sources of her inspiration been so apparent. Another tribute to Mrs. Lewis from Poe, which eventually appeared in The Union Magazine, was a sonnet entitled “An Enigma,” in which the letters of the lady's real name, “Sarah Anna Lewis,” were blazoned forth to the public, somewhat to the lady's discomfort in after years.

A still more conspicuous yet hitherto unknown attempt to aid “Stella” in her literary career came into my possession several years ago. In her volume of verse, The Records of the Heart, are some lines entitled “The Prisoner of Perote.” The original manuscript of this piece had been handed to Poe, with the suggestion that his editorial supervision would be considered valuable. The desired revision was obtained, and the combined production of Edgar Poe and “Stella “ appeared over the lady's name. Poe, in returning the MS., wrote: — [page 420:]

DEAR MRS. LEWIS,

Upon the whole I think this the most spirited poem you have written. If I were you, I would retain all the prose prefix. You will observe that I have taken. the liberty of making some suggestions in the body of the poem — the force of which, I think, would be much increased by the introduction of an occasional short line, for example: —

These short lines should be indented — as for instance : —

In order to comprehend the improvement Poe's “suggestions” effected in the poem, it is necessary to print a portion of the lines as they were originally written by Mrs. Lewis, together with the alterations Poe made in them, which alterations are now printed for the first time as Poe's.

THE PRISONER OF PEROTE(1)

Poe's alterations were evidently made in hot haste, on the spur of the moment, but they transform the lady's commonplace verses into some semblance of poetry. Such of the lines as are now printed are given in their original shape, bepeppered with capitals irrespective of consistency, and with all their irregularities of rhythm and metre. One cannot help wondering how many other pieces by “Stella” and her contemporaries underwent similar processes of revision at the hands of Poe, and whether any more telltale manuscripts of similar editorial care still exist.

The famous author of “The Raven” had to submit to [page 422:] being exhibited at the receptions of Mrs. Lewis and duly to earn his wage. He was grateful for kindness shown to his mother-in-law and for pecuniary aid through her hands: for favours past or to follow. When he left New York on his last and fatal journey for the South it was from the Lewis residence that he took his departure, leaving Mrs. Clemm in care of the authoress and her husband.

It was a comfort to Poe to think that Mrs. Clemm would be cared for during his absence, but that unfortunate and perhaps not altogether blameless lady left New York the day after the poet's departure. Writing to a friend on August 4, 1849, she says, “ Mrs. Lewis promised him (Poe) to see me often and see that I did not suffer. Fora whole fortnight I heard nothing from her. At last I went there, and would you believe it, she had a letter from Eddie to me begging her for God's sake to send it me without a moment's delay? It was enclosed in one to her of two lines, saying it was of vital importance that I should receive it immediately — if I had received it I would have gone on to Philadelphia if I had to have begged my way, and then how much misery my darling Eddie would have been saved. You will see in Eddy (sic) letter to me what he says of Mrs. Lewis. It is gratitude to her for what he thinks her kindness to his poor deserted Muddy. He would devotedly love any one that is kind to me. . . . She says she knows Eddy does not like her.”

When Poe died, and Griswold published the outcome of his long-repressed hatred and jealousy, he was careful to conciliate as many persons as he could who had really known the poet. He was now to a large extent the chief arbitrator of Fame in the literary circles of the Northern States, reigning at last without fear of Poe's heavy stylus, and was, therefore, a critic to be propitiated. Mrs. Lewis was one of those who responded to his advances: writing to Griswold, in 1853, she says, “Nothing has ever given me so much insight into Mr. Poe's real character as his letters to you, which are published in this third volume” (of Poe's Life and Works). “They will not fail to convince the public of the injustice of Graham's and Neal's articles . . . I have ceased to correspond with Mrs. Clemm on [page 423:] account of her finding so much fault, and those articles of Graham's and Neal's. I cannot endure ingratitude. I have felt and do feel that you have performed a noble and disinterested part towards Mr. Poe in the editing of his works. At the time you published the article on his death in The Tribune, you did not know that you were his appointed editor, and, therefore, you had a right to say what you thought of his merits and demerits.”

When Griswold and his writings were consigned to their natural limbo, and another view of Poe dawned on the reading public, naturally “Stella,” as she now called herself, veered to the new light and posed as the poet's defender. She published three sonnets to his memory, the initial one on their “First Meeting,” in which she referred to the presumed attraction her “youthful lyre” had for the poet; the second was devoted to their supposed conversation “Beneath the Elm,” at the Fordham Cottage, where they discussed “song and classic lore,” whilst the third was addressed “To his Foes,” with an expression of regret

In her later days Mrs. Lewis believed, or affected to believe, that she had performed many acts of kindness for the departed poet, which had really been done by others, and assured us, verbally, and in writing, that on his final leave-taking Poe, filled with gloomy foreboding, had requested her to write his life when he was dead. As a matter of fact she never accomplished the ungrateful task, and in the hundred or more letters she wrote to us on various matters her references to Poe do not evince much real knowledge of the man.

Shortly before his death, Mr. Gabriel Harrison, best known for his writings about John Howard Payne, wrote to us, “Stella was a singular woman, full of romance and imagination. . . . I got my friend, Alonso Chappell, to paint a portrait of Stella, but the poor artist found it next to impossible to make the portrait beautiful enough to satisfy the poetess.”

JOHN H. INGRAM

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 420:]

1 The words in italics are by Poe.