Text: Mary Bradford Whiting, “The Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe,” Bookman (London, UK), January 1909, pp. 173-181

[page 173, continued:]

THERE are few modern poets of whom so little is known as the brilliant and erratic genius who first saw the light on January 19, 1809. This ignorance arises not so much from lack of information as from the amount of false information that has been given to the world by Griswold and other of his early biographers. They would have had us believe that Poe was a dissolute being, the child of a couple of [column 2:] strolling players, who inherited his parents’ vagrant and unsatisfactory habits of life.

There is a grain of truth in this story, as there is in most misstatements; but it is not the less misleading on that account. The poet's mother was certainly an actress, touring in the States at the time of her marriage with David Poe, but she was a clever and beautiful Englishwoman, and her husband was well born. His [page 174:] grandfather, John Poe, was descended from one of Cromwell's Irish officers who went to Pennsylvania in 1745; and his father, who fought in the War of Independence, was an Assistant Quartermaster-General in the United States Army.

David's marriage so displeased his father that he was forbidden the house, and the struggles and privations that he and his young wife endured ended in their early death. The little Edgar Allan, not three years old at the time of his parent's death, was adopted by his godfather, from whom he had received his second name. There can be no doubt that he inherited from his paternal stock the Celtic characteristics of which he speaks in “William Wilson,” a tale which is to some extent autobiographical:

It was whilst he was at school in England that Poe came under the care of Dr. Bransby, who found him not a “bad “ boy in the ordinary sense of the term; he needed wise watching and careful discipline, certainly, but his caprices and passions sprang from genius and not from depravity. How naturally and purely spiritual his youthful passions were is evidenced by the verses “To Helen,” which were written after his return to America.

As nearly as can be ascertained, Poe was fourteen when he first saw Mrs. Stannard; she was the mother of one of his school-fellows, and her beauty and the sweet welcome with which she received him at her house thrilled him with an instant admiration, or rather, an adoration:

This is not love; it is a purely imaginative devotion, and yet it is not the outcome of imagination alone. Real grief can only be aroused by real passion, and when Mrs. Stannard soon afterwards died, the boy haunted her grave for months, weeping over it in an anguish of regret for all that he had lost, drowning his soul, as it were, in a wild melancholy the echoes of which are plainly heard in his later lyrics.

The statement that Poe was expelled from college has been frequently repeated since it was made by his first biographer, Griswold, and it is not surprising that a movement should have been set on foot by the members of the University of Virginia, with the object of clearing his name. The University librarian, as far back as 1869, made an exhaustive search among the records, and stated that although Poe left without taking a degree, he had already passed several successful examinations, and that as no entry of his expulsion could be found, it was certain that he was not expelled. What happened at this period of his career remains a mystery. What is really known is, that after an absence from home, he returned in February, 1829, find that his adoptive to mother was dead; and his godfather's speedy second marriage led to his expulsion from home. Brought up as the heir to great wealth, petted, spoiled, and encouraged in expensive tastes, allowed, as he himself says, to make his voice “a household law,” he now suddenly found himself penniless and with absolutely no prospect open to him. He resolved to earn his living by writing, and with the need of womanly sympathy which was so marked a feature in his character, he went to Baltimore in the year 1833 to make his home with his widowed aunt, Mrs. Clemm.

Mrs. Clemm had a lovely young daughter, Virginia, who was at once the play- mate and pupil of her cousin, and in the year 1835, when he was twenty-eight and she was fourteen, they were married.

One of the darkest accusations made against the [page 175:] poet is that by his unbridled passions and his propensity to drink, he broke his child-wife's heart, that he squandered the pittance that should have provided her dying hours with comforts, and that he wounded her loving nature by his continual neglect. But if this accusation were true, it is scarcely possible that Mrs. Clemm would have been devoted to him through life, nor that in death she would have desired to be laid beside her darling Eddy.” The correct account of the matter 0 is probably given by Mr. Graham, the proprietor of the magazine for which Poe wrote during several years :

Poe's love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship 0 of the spirit of beauty, which he felt was fading before his eyes. I have seen him hovering round her when she was ill, with all the fond fear and tender anxiety of a mother for her first-born, her slightest cough causing him a shudder, a heart-chill that was visible. I rode out one summer evening with them, and the remembrance of his watchful eyes bent upon the slightest change of hue in that loved face haunts me yet as the memory of a sad strain.”

The description given by a friend of the last days of Virginia's life might have inspired the well-known scene in “La Boh erne”:

In reading these accounts, the question naturally arises, How is it that Poe had fallen into this state of abject poverty? From the time that he had gained the prize of a hundred dollars offered for the best story by the proprietors of the Saturday Visiter, he should have had little difficulty in finding employment. His contributions to Graham's magazine brought the circulation up from five to fifty-two thousand, and Mr. Graham spoke of him as “the soul of honour in all his transactions.” His severance with the magazine was entirely his own act; it was apparently impossible for him to submit to the trammels of regular occupation, and Mrs. Clemm undertook the office of his literary agent.

But Poe's unbusinesslike habits were not the only cause of his distress. His caustic temper made him an ever-widening circle of foes, and his finest productions were so miserably rewarded that “The Raven” is said to have brought its author no more than the sum of two pounds.

Though those who knew him best found most excuses for him, there can be no doubt that his way of life did need excuse, and in the following letter to a friend (for the use of which, as of other matter concerning Poe's life and work, I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. John H. Ingram) he gives the explanation of his irregularities:

“You say, can you hint to me what was the terrible evil that caused the irregularities so profoundly lamented? Yes, I can do more than hint. This evil was the greatest that can befall a man. Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved wife before, ruptured a blood-vessel in singing. Her life was despaired of; I took leave of her for ever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially, and I again hoped; at the end of a year the vessel broke again. I went through precisely the same scene. Then again and again, and even once again, at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death, and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive — nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane — with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank — God only knows how often and how much. As a matter of course my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity. I had, indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can and do endure as becomes a man. It was the horrible, never-ending oscillation between hope and despair which I could not longer have endured without total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I received a new but, O God, how melancholy an existence!”

A man's own account of himself is not always to be trusted, but the testimony of Poe's friends shows his extraordinary susceptibility. Mrs. Shew was the one [column 2:] most capable of understanding his case, for she was a qualified doctor, and she made the following notes while helping to nurse him after his wife's death:

Her description of the composition of “The Bells” shows the unnatural condition of his brain. Coming one day to her house, he told her that he had a poem to write, but that he had “no feeling, no sentiment, no inspiration.” She gave him some tea in the conservatory, and on his complaining of the noise of the bells which were ringing in the neighbouring church tower, she wrote on the paper before him:

He seized the pen from her and finished the poem without hesitation, but immediately on its completion he fell into a state of exhaustion.

This calm and sensible woman advised her patient to take a calm and sensible remedy :

“I did not expect him to live long; I knew that organic disease had been gaining on his physical frame through the many trials and privations of his eventful life. I told him that nothing could or would save him from sudden death but a prudent life of calm with a woman fond enough and strong enough to manage his affairs for him.” [page 178:]

By most heart-broken husbands this advice would have been looked upon as an insult, but Poe viewed the matter in a different light; to him, inconstancy was a proof of constancy, a paradox which he sets forth in the story called “Eleonora.”

“She whom I loved in youth,” he says, “and of whom I now pen calmly and distinctly these remembrances, was the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We had always dwelt together beneath a tropical sun, in the valley of the Many-Coloured Grass.”

But a blighting touch fell upon Eleonora, and as she faded away, she wept to think that her lover would forget her after she was gone.

“And then and there I hurriedly threw myself at her feet and offered up a vow to herself and to Heaven that I would never bind myself in marriage to any daughter of Earth, that I would in no manner prove recreant to her dear memory or to the memory of the devout affection with which she had blessed me. And I called the mighty Ruler of the Universe to witness the pious solemnity of my vow. And the curse which I invoked of him and of her should I prove traitorous to that promise, involved a penalty the exceeding great horror of which will not permit me to make record of it here.”

To most men, under these circumstances, a second marriage would have been an impossibility, or, at any rate, could only have been entered upon by the abjuration of the vow; but Poe was able to discover a third course — the forming of a new union would not destroy but fulfil the old, and he therefore entered upon it as a duty :

“What indeed was my passion for the young girl of the Valley in comparison with the fervour and the delirium and the spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration with which I poured out my whole soul at the feet of the ethereal Ermengarde? I wedded, nor dreaded the curse I had invoked, and its bitterness was not visited upon me. And once — but once again, in the silence of the night, there came through my lattice the soft sighs that had forsaken me, and they modelled themselves into a familiar and sweet voice, saying, ‘Sleep in peace! For the spirit of love reigneth and ruleth, and in taking to thy passionate heart [column 2:] her who is Ermengarde, thou art absolved for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven of thy vows to Eleonora.’”

But the love into which he plunged for Helen Whitman was not only the fulfilment of his love for Virginia, it was also to him the fulfilment of his love for Helen Stannard, and in the lines which he addressed to her, he declares that he felt it a “duty” to love her.

After Virginia's death a friend persuaded Mrs. Whitman to send Poe some of her verses, a gift which he at once acknowledged in a letter in which he told that ever since he had first heard of her, “your unknown heart had seemed to pass into my bosom.”

“Judge, then, with what shuddering, overwhelming joy, I received the Valentine which gave me to see that you knew me to exist. I wished to contrive some means of acknowledging, without wounding you by seeming directly to acknowledge, my sense of the honour you had conferred upon me. To accomplish as I wished it precisely what I wished, seemed impossible, however, and I was on the point of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume of my own poems, and then the lines I had written in my passionate boyhood to the first purely ideal love of my soul, to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you, flashed upon my recollection. They expressed not only all that I would have said of your person, but all that of which I most wished to assure you in the lines commencing ‘On desperate seas long wont to roam.’ Think of the rare agreement of names, and you will no longer wonder that to one accustomed as I am to the Calculus of Possibilities, they wore an air of positive miracle. I yielded at once to an over-whelming sense of fatality.”

At the time that he sent this he had not been introduced to her, but they no sooner met than he found himself carried away by a flood of emotion. He wrote :

“As you entered the room, pale, hesitating, and evidently oppressed at heart, as your eyes rested for one brief moment upon mine, I felt for the first time in my life the existence of spiritual influences altogether out of the reach of reason. I saw that you were Helen, my [page 179:] Helen, the Helen of a thousand dreams — she whom the great Giver of all good had preordained to be mine, mine only, if not now, alas ! then hereafter and for ever in the Heavens!’”

It was not much wonder that Mrs. Whitman shrank from the addresses of this strange and vehement lover; for a while she held back, deterred alike by her own misgivings and by the warnings of her friends, and in a frenzy of feeling he went to the house and besought her to have pity on him. His excitement was so great that her mother sent for a doctor, who carried him off for the administration of a course of treatment. This incident was afterwards misrepresented by Griswold in his Life of Poe, and Mrs. Whitman published an indignant denial. Whatever there may have been to forgive, she readily forgave; and on condition that he promised never again to touch the intoxicants that acted like poison on his sensitive frame, she agreed to marry him. Every arrangement was made for the wedding, and Mrs. Clemm, who seems to have fully approved, was waiting to welcome her son-in- law's bride; but when Poe went to Mrs. Whitman's house, she met him with the announcement that she had been told he had broken the promise he had so solemnly made, and that the marriage could never take place.

The blow was a terrible one. Poe's friends did their best to help and comfort him, but the end was now near at hand. On October 2, 1849, he to Baltimore. Before leaving went [column 2:] he had complained of feeling unwell, and it is supposed that he took a sedative and fell into a state of stupor. It was election time, corruption and bribery were rife and votes were openly bought and sold; Poe was seized upon by ruffians, drugged, carried from one polling-booth to another until he had been made to vote in as many as eleven different wards, and then flung out into the streets. He was found by some passers-by, picked up and taken to the hospital, where he died in two or three days.

The tale is best told in Mrs. Clemm's words. When news of his death reached her, she wrote thus of Edgar Poe to a friend who had known many of her troubles:

“Neilson Poe of Baltimore has written to me and says he died of congestion of the brain, and not of what the vile, vile newspapers accuse him. He had many kind friends with him, and was attended to the grave by the literati of Baltimore. Severe excitement (and no doubt some imprudence) brought this on; he never had one interval of reason. Some of the papers, indeed nearly all, do him justice. But this, my dear Annie, will not restore him. Never, oh! never, will I see those dear, lovely eyes. I feel so desolate, friendless, and alone!”

The keenest grief of Mrs. Clemm's closing years was the use that Mr. Griswold made of the letters and papers that she had unreservedly put into his hands. Many of the accusations which his book contained were merely the repetition of ill-natured slander; but the lines in which he sums up the poet's character show that he entirely misunderstood the man of whom he wrote :

“Poe's harsh experience had deprived him of all faith in men and women: he had made up his mind upon the numberless complexities of the social world, and the whole [180:] system, with him, was an imposture. He had to a morbid extent that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the esteem or love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed — not shine, not serve, succeed — that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his self-esteem.”

Such censure is altogether beside the mark; it would have been well for Poe if he had had a stronger wish to succeed — a little wholesome ambition would have been a very effective spur to action; but as he himself said, poetry was not a purpose with him, but a passion. Professor Harrison, in his book “New Glimpses of Poe,” published in the United States in 1901, speaks of the poet as “ a human opal,” and says, “The Hamlet-like nature of the man, with its unsteady purpose, its poetic flickerings, its strange logic and boundless inconsequence, makes him a unique psychological study truly Shakespearean in the multiplicity of its facets and angles.” It is this “Hamlet-nature” that gives the life and the writings of Poe a never-failing interest; cast adrift in a world too hard for him, he struggled, sorrowed, sinned, and repented, while his whole being was tinged with a sadness that was not less real because he deliberately turned it to poetic uses.

“The tone of the highest manifestation of Beauty is sadness,” he says in his “Philosophy of Composition.” “Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development [column 2:] invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetical tones. Of all melancholy topics, I asked myself, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy? Death, was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ The answer here is also obvious. ‘When it most closely allies itself to beauty.’ The death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

Poe is here telling the story of the composition of “The Raven,” but the same strain of poetic melancholy runs through many other of his poems, “Ulalume,” “The Haunted Palace,” “The City in the Sea,” “The Vale of Unrest,” etc., and perhaps finds its most perfect expression in the lines “To One in Paradise.”

This inherent sadness is a recurring note through the whole of Poe's writings; in the stories, as in the poems, you walk almost always under the shadow of death, but in the stories he reveals less of the melancholy and the beauty of death than of the grim mystery, the agonies, the grotesque horrors, the tragedy and the terror of it. His weirdest, uncanniest imaginings are built up with such a Defoe-like, matter-of-fact, detailed realism that the impossible grows into probability, the marvellous puts on a face of every-day truth and seems perversely natural and real when it is least so. “ The Gold Bug “ [page 181:] has been the germ of hundreds of tales of treasure-hunts and puzzling cyphers; there are foreshadowings of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in “William Wilson”; M. Dupin of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” is a wonderful ancestor of Sherlock Holmes; the “MS. found in a Bottle” has had a long line of descendants that have been found in [column 2:] other bottles. It is no exaggeration to say that Poe has influenced, more or less, most of the world's great short-story writers, those of France and England and Germany in particular. America has produced no poet of higher imaginative power or more original genius: he is greater than all but one of her writers of stories, and not second even to Hawthorne.