Text: Appleton Morgan, “Poe in Ann Street,” The Sun (New York, NY), vol. LXXXVI, no. 362, August 28, 1919, p. 8, col. 6

POE IN ANN STREET.

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Judge Shea's Account of the Fabileation of “The Raven.”

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN — Sir: Several letters are forwarded me here touching the statement a correspondent of THE ‘SUN, one “J. E. R.,” that the late Judge Shea of this city asserted to me that Poe's “Raven” was a composite production, having been evolved “line by line and stanza by stanza” “In Sandy Walsh's beer cellar in Ann street” frequenters of that resort, of whom Poe was the most conspicuous, which assertion “J. E. R.” characterizes as “a marvellous tale, quite too bizarre for notice!”

I should so say myself were that the story. May I say, however, that what Judge Shea did tell me bears no such construction?

This is my memory of what Shea did tell me — it was in the charming study in his residence at 305 West Forty-sixth street in 1876 or 1877 — though of course not in his words at this lapse of time.

Poe was exceedingly timid as to a possible public reception of “The Raven.” Especially did he dread the comments or possible sneers of his fellow litterateurs, whom for about a year he had been mercilessly criticising and castigating in the pages of the Evening Mirror, in which N. P. Willis, its editor, permitted him full swing.

Poe nevertheless carried the poem about with him wherever he went, and on all occasions would produce it, and, if permitted, read it “line by line and stanza by stanza,” and himself point out what he considered or claimed to consider its blemishes and invite suggestions for its betterment from any one attentive, though doubtless he would have not for an Instant contemplated accepting any of the suggestions he invited. And he did this not once a but many times in Sandy Walsh's beer cellar in Ann street — apparently predecessor of Pfaff's, beloved of George Arnold, Fitz James O’Brien, and that finer sort of bohemian which the civil war dispersed. For example, he would express his doubt about “the velvet, violet lining” being “gloated over” by the same lamplight which in another stanza threw a shadow over a bird perched above that chamber door, upon the same floor where “each dying ember wrought its ghost.”

“But my father,” said Judge Shea, “told him not to worry about these; that as an experiment in rhyme they were permissible, and finally prevailed on Poe to allow my father to offer the poem anonymously to a publisher as an experiment in rhyme.”

The New York city literary periodicals at that date were the Democratic Review, a rival called the American Whig Review, which had just been started by a Mr. J. A. Colton, and Willis's Evening Mirror, a daily of which the New York Mirror was the weekly edition. Mr. John Augustus Shea took the poem to this Mr. Colton, who accepted it, and on page 143 of the American Review for February, 1845, you find “The Raven, a Poem by Quarles,” prefixed by twenty lines or so in fine print discussing the relative superiority of English over classic, Sapphic, Adonaic, rhyme assonance, alliteration, and the like, signed “Ed. Am. Rev.,” but which are so palpably in Poe's style in this vein as to deceive nobody.

But before the American Review, titularly dated “February, 1845,” left the press, had either shown to Willis the poem or Willis bad somehow got wind of it. At any rate, in the Evening Mirror for February 28, 1845, appeared the poem with the rubric, “We are permitted to copy in advance publication from the second number of the American Whig Review the following remarkable poem by Edgar A. Poe.”

Upon the appearance of this copy of the Evening Mirror the poem to spread like a prairie fire. It was copied everywhere throughout the United States and soon got over to England. And Poe, who for twenty years had been only more or less known in limited literary circles in Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities — he had only arrived in New York city April of the previous year — awoke to find himself famous and pointed out on the street as “Poe, the man that wrote ‘The Raven.’”

“The Judge Shea confessed himself very proud of his father's sponsorship at the baptism in print of one of the most famous poems in all literature. But THE SUN's readers will see that the tale that he did me the honor of telling me forty-odd years ago was neither “marvellous nor quite too bizarre for notice.”

APPLETON MORGAN.

GREAT BARRINGTON, August 27.