Text: John E. Reilly, “Notes,” Poe in Imaginative Literature, dissertation, 1965, pp. 238-267 (This material is protected by copyright)


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[page 238:]

NOTES

CHAPTER I

1 Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend (New York, 1963), p. 12.

2 N. Bryllion Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore, 1949), p. 3.

3 Ibid., pp. 16, 60-61.

4 From Poe's own account of his life furnished by him to Griswold and reprinted in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols. (New York, 1902), I, 345. These volumes will be cited hereafter as Works.

5 These poems, addressed to Poe by Mrs. Osgood and Mrs. Ellet, are discussed in Chapter II and in Appendix A of this study.

6 Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), p. 49.

7 A notorious example of fabricating a fantastic image is the article on Poe by the Scottish cleric and Spasmodic, George Gilfillan, which appeared originally in the London Critic in 1854.

8 It was in the course of a conversation with Mrs. Mary Gove Nichols that Poe expressed his longing for fame. Mrs. Nichols recorded the conversation in her “Reminiscenses of Edgar Allan Poe, Six Penny Magazine (February, 1863). The “Reminiscenses” have been reprinted, with a Preface by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, by the Union Square Book Shop (New York, 1931), where the discussion of fame occurs on p. 12.

9 The statement about Griswold's lies was made by Charles F. Briggs in a letter to James Russell Lowell, March 19, 1845. The letter is reprinted in George E. Woodberry's The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols. (Boston, 1909), II, 128,

10 Ibid., II, 147. [page 239:]

11 Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang: or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruptions and Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia, 1860), p. 285.

12 This statement, from the “Ludwig” obituary, is reprinted by Harrison in Works, I, 356.

13 Mary Gove Nichols, “Reminiscenses,” p. 12.

14 Dudley Robert Hutcherson, “One Hundred Years of Poe: A Study of Edgar Allan Poe in American and English Criticism, 1827-1927,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Virginia, 1936), pp. 129-130.

15 “Recent Poetry,” Current Literature, XLVI (March, 1909), 322. The article is unsigned.

16 Charles Alphonso Smith, Edgar Allan Poe: How to Know Him (Indianapolis, 1921), pp. 3-4.

17 I do not mean to suggest that the romantic image of Poe has disappeared entirely. As recently as 1957, Patrick F. Quinn (The French Face of Edgar Poe, p. 228) wrote that

the “I” who narrates such a story as “The Black Cat” is writing his own confession of disgrace and failure. Poe could record the triumphs of a hero only indirectly, but there is no discernible distance between him and the victims he writes about. They are Poe in a much fuller sense.

As a possible means of accounting for Quinn's approach, it should be observed that he is a student of the French attitude toward Poe, an intensively romantic and, in the case of Quinn, evidently a highly contagious one. For the most part, other students of Poe who still insist upon reading his works as records of his life tend to be psychoanalytical in their approach to literature, and their scientific attitude toward Poe is a far cry from the partisanship he evoked in days of yore.

18 See, for example, G. Thomas Tenselle's review of Sidney. P. Moss's Poe's Literary Battles in American Notes and Queries, I (June, 1963), 161-162. With a casual allusion to the “staying power of the Poe myth,” the reviewer casts some doubt upon the author's objectivity. [page 240:]

CHAPTER II

1 The text of Merlin, along with an account of Wilmer's life and of his relationship with Poe by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, has been published by Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints (New York, 1941). Poe's Brother (New York, 1926) contains facsimile texts of William Henry Leonard Poe's works along with an account of his life by Hervey Allen and Thomas Ollive Mabbott.

2 “The Pirate” is reproduced in facsimile from the North American on pp. 55-59 of Poe's Brother.

The North American for November 10, 1827, (Poe's Brother, pp. 65-67) carried “Recollections,” another pirate tale by W. H. L. Poe which might be based upon the Elmira episode. In this case, however, fiction is ‘so remote from fact that the tale cannot be numbered with certainty among works inspired by Edgar Poe. The narrator of “Recollections” tells of his search for his brother, Leonard, who had absented himself “from his friends for several years, on account of such a slight misunderstanding.” The search carried the narrator to the coast of Spain, where on a moonlit night he saw a boat, which had been lowered from a vessel lying off shore, beach and discharge a young man who hastened in the direction of a “nunnery.” Overhearing the conversation among the seamen remaining on the beach, the narrator learned that they were a pirate crew and that the young man was their “love-sick” captain foolhardy enough to undertake the landing in the face of an impending storm. When the captain returned in the company of a young lady, the boat “dashed gallantly off in the direction of the vessel.” Before it could clear the shoals, however, the vessel was caught in the violent storm and wrecked. Locating the body of the young captain the following morning, the narrator identified him to be his “long-sought Brother!”

3 Merlin, pp. 11-12.

4 Poe's Brother, p. 59.

5 Ibid., pp. 58-59.

6 Atkinson's Saturday Evening Post, XVII (August 11, 1838), 1. In spite of its title in the Post, Wilmer's poem is an imitation not of Horace's “O Venus, regina Cnidi Paphique ... (Book I, Ode XXX but of his “Quid dedicatum poscit Apollinem sates ... ” (Book I, Ode XXXI). [page 241:]

7 The identity of Wilmer as the author of his series of imitations is established by Poe in the course of a favorable notice of Wilmer's work in the Southern Literary Messenger for February of 1836: “His Satiric Odes in the Post, over the signature of Horace in Philadelphia, have attracted great attention, and have been deservedly admired” (Works, VIII, 237).

8 The identity of “W — s” and “C — e” is a matter of speculation, “W — s” is very likely Nathaniel Parker Willis. Although Willis resided in New York at the time, he was sufficiently prominent as a poet and journalist to be known to readers of the Post. It is Professor Mabbott's “guess” (letter to this writer, November 9, 1962) that “C — e” is Willis Gaylord Clark, twin brother to Lewis Gaylord Clark. A poet and journalist, Willis Gaylord was editor of the Philadelphia Gazette when that publication attacked Poe for his slashing criticism in the Southern Literary Messenger. That the proper spelling of Clark's name does not fit into “C — e” does not disqualify it from “Ode XXX.” Authorities more prominent than L. A. Wilmer have mistakenly added a final “e” to the name (see Works, XVII, 442). Another but less likely candidate for “C — e” is Thomas Cottrell Clarke. He was active in Philadelphia journalism as early as 1821, when he revived the Saturday Evening Post. In 1838, Clarke was a publisher of the Philadelphia Saturday Museum. This is the same Clarke who in 1843 entered into an abortive agreement with Poe to publish the Stylus.

9 It is in a letter to F. W. Thomas that Poe established the date of Virginia's attack to be January of 1842. See The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1948), I, 191. These volumes will be cited hereafter as Letters.

10 For an account of the relations between Poe and English’and of the background to English's treatments of Poe in literature, I am indebted to William Henry Gravely, Jr., “The Early Political and Literary Career of Thomas Dunn English,”unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Virginia, 1953).

11 Gravely, p. 352, points out that the “Don” with the “mustachios” whom the intoxicated Poe offended at Fuller's Hotel in Washington, D; C., in March of 1843, was none other than Thomas Dunn English. See The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1948), I, 228-230, for Poe's account of the episode.

12 The Doom of the Drinker was republished in book form in 1847 under the title Walter Woolfe or, the Doom of the Drinker (New York: William B. Smith and Company). [page 242:]

This, novel has been the subject of several articles in addition to Gravely's dissertation: Willard Thorp, “A Minor Poe Mystery; The Princeton University Library Chronicle, V (November, 1943), 30-31; Thomas Ollive Mabbott and William Henry Gravely, Jr., “Two Replies to ‘A Minor Poe Mystery,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, V (April, 1944), 106-114.

13 Cold Water Magazine, III (October, 1843), 118.

14 No copies of the Irish Citizen bearing the story survive. The earliest extant printing is in the Baltimore Republican and Daily Argus, February 1, 1844, with the headnote “From the Irish Citizen.” The identity of English as the author of this burlesque is established by its reappearance in the John-Donkey, I (June 3, 1848), 364-365, under the title “Tale of a Gray Tadpole.” English was one of the editors of this humorous magazine which often attacked Poe.

15 Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Poe and the ‘Philadelphia Irish Citizen:” Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, XXIX (1930-1931), 124-125.

16 Killis Campbell, “The Poe Canon,” PMLA, XXVII (1912), 342.

17 Gravely, 367-369.

18 Letters, I, 241-242.

19 Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man, 2 vols. (Philadelphia [[Chicago]], 1926), 851-854, insists that “The Ghost of a Grey Tadpole” is really the work of Poe, a “fine self-allegory” recording the author's “heroic conflict” with what Miss Phillips likes to call his “nervous-congestion.” Such an interpretation is patently a failure in critical perspective.

20 Pioneer, I (February, 1843), 51.

21 Works, XVII, 232-233. Alfred H. Marks, “Two Rodericks and Two Worms: ‘Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent’ as Personal Satire,” PMLA, LXXIV (December, 1959), 607-612, argues that “there are a number of passages in Hawthorne's ‘Egotism: or, The Bosom Serpent’ [published in March of 1843] which seem to allude to Edgar Allan Poe or his writings.” Marks marshals a formidable quantity of parallels to support his thesis that Roderick Ellison of Hawthorne's story is a composite of Poe and of some of Poe's fictive characters. He admits, however, that “there is much in the story that cannot be applied to Edgar Allan Poe,” and he fails to explain how Hawthorne obtained the intimate knowledge [page 243:] of Poe he must needs have had to probe so deeply into the soul of a man whom he never saw, spoke to, or, up until that moment, corresponded with. In the absence of more conclusive evidence, I hesitate to include this tale among treatments of Poe in imaginative literature.

22 See A. H. Quinn, pp. 438-455.

23 The text used here is that of the Broadway Journal, I (April 26, 1845), 266. Volume X of the New World covers the period during which the poem appeared. This volume is a rare item which I have not been able to locate — the only complete copy, indicated by the Union List of Serials to be at the Yale University Library, is missing. The “Courier's Colonel” alluded to in the poem is James Watson Webb, owner of the New York Courier and Enquirer and former military man. See “Webb, James Watson,” DAB.

24 Broadway Journal, I (April 26, 1845), 266.

25 Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, XXXIV (April, 1847), 192.

26 I am indebted to Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (Durham, North Carolina, 1963), for much information upon the background of literary hostilities involving Poe.

27 Professor Moss surveys Poe's relations with New England journalists in his chapter “Culmination of a Campaign,” pp. 132-189, and on pp. 190-207 of his chapter “Epilogue.”

28 Boston Evening Transcript, March 5, 1845.

29 Ibid., January 2, 1846.

30 New-York Mirror, IV (September 19, 1846), 381.

31 Works, XV, 64-66.

32 Gravely, pp. 627-641, has a detailed account of the back-ground to this novel, an account to which I am indebted.

33 New-York Mirror, IV (September 5, 1846), 339-340.

34 Ibid., N (September 19, 1846), 371-372.

35 Ibid., IV (October 3, 1846), 403.

36 Ibid., V (October 24, 1846), 36-37. [page 244:]

37 Ibid., V (October 31, 1846), 49-50.

38 Ibid., V (November 7, 1846), 66.

39 Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, XXVIII (November, 1846), 425.

40 Moss, pp. 85-131.

41 Works, XV, 121-122.

42 Woodberry, II, 123 and 141.

43 Works, XV, 20-23.

44 Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956), pp. 177-183.

45 New-York Mirror, V (February 27, 1847), 323-326.

46 Walter Woolfe; or, the Doom of the Drinker (New York, 1847) The sketch of Poe appears in Chapter VI, pp. 19-22. I am indebted to the authorities of the Columbia University Library for making a copy of this rare volume available to me through interlibrary loan.

47 Gravely, pp. 688-693.

48 John-Donkey, I (June 3, 1848), 364-365.

49 Ibid., I (February 12, 1848), 99-101.

50 The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, 4 vols. (Boston, 1892), III, 72-73.

51 Works, XIII, 174.

52 Although this satire has been cited several times (e.g., Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe, and Other Studies, p. 59; and Moss, p. 243), the identity of its author has not hitherto been established. Circumstantial evidence points to Duganne. Duganne's Works (1855) includes “Parnassus in Pillory,” a satire in the neo-classical manner originally published in 1851 under the pseudonym “Motley Manners, Esq.” Furthermore, Duganne was a contributor to Holden's Dollar Magazine at the period in which that magazine carried the satire on Poe. “A Mirror for Authors” appeared in Holden's for January, 1849; the issue for March (pp. 161-167) carried Chapters I-V of The Atheist; [page 245:] or, true and False Religion, a serialized novel by Augustine J. H. Duganne.

It should be noted, by the way, that Holden's was then under the editorship of Charles F. Briggs, who by this time had become an enemy of Poe.

53 Holden's Dollar Magazine, III (January, 1849), 22. Poe's reputation as a “slasher,” a “butcher, and a “savage” among critics dates from his tenure as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, 1835-1837. The subject has often been treated by students of Poe, e.g., Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe, and Other Studies, pp. 57-59; and Moss, pp. 38-62.

54 A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, p. 479.

55 The poems are “The Rivulet's Dream” and “So Let It Be, To —— “ on April 5; “Love's Reply” and “Spring” on April 12; “To Lenore” on May 31 (although this poem is signed “Clarice,” its appearance in Mrs. Osgood's 1846 collection of poems, p. 136, identifies it to be her work); “Slander” on August 30; “Echo-Song” on September 6; “To — “ on November 22; “To —— “ on November 29; “A Shipwreck” on December 13; and “To ‘The Lady Geraldine!” on December 20. The short story, entitled “Ida Grey,” appeared in Graham's in August of 1845. See note to Appendix A of this study for the possibility of a twelfth poem by Mrs. Osgood in the Broadway Journal.

56 The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James H. Whitty (Boston and New York, 1917), pp. lii-liii.

57 A. H. Quinn, p. 479.

58 See Appendix A.

59 Broadway Journal, II (December 13, 1845), 349.

60 Moss, pp. 207-221. I am indebted to Professor Moss's study for untying many of the knots in the Poe-Osgood-Ellet entanglement.

61 Josephine Poe January, “Edgar Allan Poe's ‘Child Wife,’ with art Unpublished Acrostic by Her to Her Husband,” Century Magazine, LXXVIII (October, 1909), 894-896.

62 Ibid., p. 896.

63 See Appendix B. [page 246:]

64 This is one stanza from Mrs. Whitman's “To Edgar A. Poe,” Home Journal (March 18, 1848), p. [2]

CHAPTER III

1 Oquawka (Illinois) Spectator, October 31, 1849, p. 1. Patterson confirmed the report of Poe's death in the Spectator for October 24, p. 2: “Edgar A. Poe is dead! He died at Baltimore on the 7th inst., after a few days illness. We at first hoped that this was a mistake, but the announcement of the fact in the papers of that city deprives us of the solace of such a hope.”

2 Frances S. Osgood, Poems (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 465-466.

3 Chivers published two other poems about Poe. One of them is “The Vigil in Aiden,” the first poem in Chivers’ Enochs of Ruby: A Gift of Love, 1851. A long, elusive narrative in tedious stanzas imitating “The Raven,” “The Vigil in Aiden” allegorizes the relationship between Poe and the spirit of Virginia in terms of characters named Politian and his wife Lenore. On her deathbed Lenore elicits from Politian a promise to remain faithful to her memory:

Should you ever love another,

Love her only as her brother —

Or as we shall one another

When we meet on that bright shore!

After her death, however, Politian is tempted by “foul Lucifer,” a “Demon” who threatens to “seduce him from Lenore” by imitating “the voice of his dear Leman.” Perhaps Chivers meant the tempting voice to represent the women Poe became involved with after Virginia died. Lenore conquers, of course, and the narrative draws to a close with her return to earth to accompany Politian to Alden:

Then, from earth, so long benighted,

Glorified, redeemed, requited,

In her Chariot, Angel-lighted,

Soared Politian with Lenore —

Crying out, now joyful-hearted —

Never more to feel deserted —

Never more to be Death-parted —

“We are going now, sweet Maiden!

To the Heavenly Bowers of Alden

On the Asphodelian Shore!” [page 247:]

The other poem, “The Rappings,” appeared in the Georgia Citizen (Macon, Georgia) on March 20, 1852. It is an eight-stanza parody of “The Raven” in which the spirit of Poe is made to torment his old enemy Lewis Gaylord Clark:

‘Clark!’ said the ‘immortal spirit

Of great Edgar — ‘listen! hear it!’

‘ ’Tis the truth I speak’ — ‘I hear it!’

Said the ‘Editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine’ —

‘While I owned the Broadway Journal,

Like some fiery Fiend infernal,

You did vex my soul supernal!

Now I come to turn you green —

Not to vegetate your soul with thought — but green,

Your yellow, pumpkin face, already shamed with grassy green.’

4 Works, XV, 241-242.

5 Macon (Georgia) Georgia Weekly Citizen, October 18, 1851.

6 Peterson [[Peterson's]] Magazine, XVII (February, 1850), 102.

7 Thomas Holley Chivers, Virginalia; or, Songs of My Shimmer Nights: A Gift of Love for the Beautiful (Philadelphia, 1853), pp. 30-31.

8 See Appendix B.

9 Supplement to the New York Daily Tribune, November 13, 1849, p. 1.

10 Mary Gove Nichols, Mary Lyndon; or, Revelations of a Life (New York, 1855). Poe is treated in Chapter XIX, pp. 341-343.

11 The only treatment of Poe in drama of the period, at least the only one to survive, is a brief tribute in George Henry Boker's The Bankrupt, a play written in 1853 and produced for the first time at the Broadway Theatre, New York, on December 3, 1855. The complication in this melodrama surrounds a conspiracy which has been maintained by means of coded messages. At the climactic moment, Pike, a police officer, confronts Shorn, the villain, with a discovery:

The cipher, in which the papers were written, was no go. We got hold of a poet — a great genius people will say, after he's dead — and he read off the cipher, as if it had been printed. Mr. Poe is waiting at the office to explain his system to you. [page 248:]

Boker is using Poe's reputation as a cryptographer (earned while he was editor of Graham's) to resolve his plot, but the allusion to his “great genius” is a gratuitous tribute. Poe, by the way, does not appear on stage. The text of The Bankrupt is published in Glaudus and Other Plays by George Henry Boker, ed. Sculley Bradley. This is Volume III in the series America's Lost Plays (Princeton, New Jersey, 1940). The passage on Poe appears on p. 107.

12 Willis made this observation in his “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” originally published in his Home Journal on October 20, 1849, and reprinted by Harrison, Works, I, 360-367.

13 New York Daily Tribune, October 16, 1849, p. 4.

14 Supplement to the New York Daily Tribune, October 27, 1849, p. 2. Stoddard incorporated his poem in an unsigned and hostile essay, “Edgar Allan Poe,” National Magazine, III (March, 1853), 193-200. The earlier appearance of the poem in the Tribune under Stoddard's name identifies him as the author of the essay.

15 Home Journal (October 27, 1849), p. [2].

16 Joy Bayless cites this poem without identifying “E. S.” — see Miss Bayless's Rufus Wilmont [[Wilmot]] Griswold, Poe's Literary Executor (Nashville, Tennessee, 1943), p. 172. However, Mrs. Locke identified herself as the author of the poem by reprinting it in her The Recalled: In Voices of the Past, and Poems of the Ideal (Boston and Cambridge, 1854), pp. 29-31.

17 Home Journal (November 17, 1849), p. [2].

18 Richmond (Virginia) Enquirer, January 29, 1850, p. 4. The poem is dated “Baltimore, January 17, 1849 [sic].” Preuss identified himself to be the “Bard of Baltimore” when he republished an expanded version of the poem under his own name in the Shekinah, II (1853), 227-228.

19 Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, XL (February, 1850), 143.

20 Works, XV, 258-259; XII, 110.

21 Rebecca S. Nichols, Songs of the heart and Hearthstone (Philadelphia, 1851), pp. 315-316.

22 Ibid., p. 320. [page 249:]

23 National Magazine, I (October, 1852), 362-365.

24 John Reuben Thompson, Virginia: A Poem. Delivered before the Virginia Alpha of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in the Chapel of William and Mary College, Williamsburg, July 3, 1856 (Richmond, 1856).

25 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Ballad of Babie Bell and Other Poems (New York, 1859), pp. 70-71.

26 The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Boston, 1865), p. 151.

27 Southern Literary Messenger, o.s, XXXI, n.s. X (November, 1860), 394.

28 See Davidson's “Edgar A. Poe,” Russell's Magazine, II (November, 1857), 161-173.

29 See Appendix B.

30 According to James H. Whitty, another poem written in the 1860's honored Poe through a tribute to his mother, Elizabeth. Written by Will Henry Thompson, brother of Maurice Thompson, the poem was first printed in the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, October 6, 1935, sec. V, p. 3, with the following comment by Whitty:

It is not generally known that arrangements to mark Mrs. Poe's grave at St. John's were under way when the War Between the States broke out, which ended the project. A woman's organization existed in Richmond, at that period, sponsering the memorial plans. They had commissioned Colonel Will Henry Thompson, author of “High Tide At Getteysburg,” and a brother to Maurice Thompson, the author to prepare a proper wording for a tablet. This was found at the time of Thompson's death in Seattle, in August 1918: and is now with his brother, Oscar Thompson.

There seems to be some confusion here. According to the DAB (XVIII, 460), Will Henry Thompson was born in 1848. If the DAB and Whitty are both correct, Thompson was no more than thirteen years of age when the “woman's organization” commissioned him to compose the poem.

31 Southern Illustrated News (Richmond, Virginia), July 4, 1863. [page 250:]

32 George George Alfred Townsend, Poems (Washington, D. C., 1870), pp. 136-138.

33 Harrison Hayford, “Poe in The Confidence Man,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XIV (December, 1959), 207-218, suggests that Melville drew at least in part upon Poe for a character who appears briefly in Chapter XXXVI of The Confidence Man. The character, a seedy looking individual in a “tattered, single-breasted frock-coat, buttoned meagerly up to his chin,” interrupts a conversation between the Cosmopolitan and Winsome, an Emersonian-like Transcendentalist:

Fortunately, to arrest these incoherencies, or rather, to vary them, a haggard, inspired-looking man now approached-a crazy beggar, asking alms under the form of peddling a rhapsodical tract, composed by himself, and setting forth his claims to some rhapsodical apostleship. Though ragged and dirty, there was about him no touch of vulgarity; for, by nature, his manner was not unrefined, his frame slender and appeared the more so from the broad, untamed frontlet of his brow, tangled over with a disheveled mass of raven curls, throwing a still deeper tinge upon a complexion like that of a shriveled berry. Nothing could exceed his look of picturesque Italian ruin and dethronement, heightened by what seemed just one glimmering peep of reason, insufficient to do him any lasting good, but enough, perhaps, to suggest a torment of latent doubts at times, whether his addled dream of glory were true.

As Hayward points out, Melville's attitude toward this character is a mixed one of pity and disdain.

34 Lizzie Doten, Poems from the Inner Life (Boston, 1864), p. 145.

35 Sarah Gould, Asphodels (New York, 1856), pp. 157-163. The passage quoted is from p. 161.

36 An account of the episode survives in a fragment of a letter from Mrs. Whitman to James Wood Davidson, October, 1858. The manuscript is among the Sarah Helen Whitman Papers in the Harris Collection at the John Hay Library. I am grateful to the authorities at the John Hay Library in Providence for providing me with a photocopy of the manuscript.

37 “Edgar Poe in the Spirit World,” Herald of Light, I (July, 1857), 106-117. [page 251:]

38 The article is unsigned and makes no mention of R. Allston Lavender. I arrived at his identity as author by a circuitous and frankly tenuous means: one of the poems, “The Raven,” was collected in Walter Hamilton's Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors, 6 vols. (London, 1884-1889); II, 59; here Hamilton identifies Lavender as the author of the poem. The fact that Hamilton was a friend of John H. Ingram (an authority on matters concerning Poe) lends weight to his word on the subject. It is from Hamilton (II, 59) that I derived the information about Lavender's sojourn in the insane asylum.

39 Herald of Light, I (July, 1857), 107-109.

40 Ibid., pp. 110-112. The poem is entitled “The Awakening.”

41 Ibid., pp. 112-116.

42 Ibid., p. 115.

43 Ibid., p. 117.

44 Doten, pp. 124-127.

45 Ibid., pp. 109-117.

46 Ibid., pp. 162-171.

47 Ibid., pp. 118-123.

48 Ibid., pp. 104-108.

49 Ibid., pp. 128-133.

50 Evidently Poe's posthumous utterances were not confined to verse. Henry Kiddie, “The Dark World Described by Edgar A. Poe,” Spiritual Communications (New York, 1879), pp. 159-161, purports to reprint several prose messages inscribed by the departed author. Now “given, through God's kind grace, to good works,” the spirit of Poe candidly acknowledges what he was in life: “On earth I was a drunken and benighted sot — lost to many loves, lost to much good, given to many temptations, and feeling no insight into my future victory or destruction.”

51 Hamilton, II, 93. 252

CHAPTER IV

1 Hutcherson, p. 114, and John Carl Miller, John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1960), p. 240, identify “Abel Reid” to have been William James Linton, a New York printer. Unfortunately neither Hutcherson nor Miller offers evidence to support this assertion. In the absence of firm evidence that Linton was “Abel Reid,” I would suggest the possibility that Pot-Pourri was the work of two men, Abel Stevens and John Morrison Reid. If this is true, the pseudonym is constructed from the given name of the former and the surname of the latter. Stevens and Reid, both of whom were Methodist ministers, worked together in the 1850's as editors of a Methodist journal called the National Magazine, published in New York. That these two men probably subscribed to the censure of Poe expressed in the poems of Pot-Pourri is suggested by the fact that under their editorship the National Magazine printed two anti-Poe pieces mentioned in the previous chapter to this study: the anonymous “A Great Man Self-Wrecked,” I (October, 1852), 362-365, and an article on Poe by Richard Henry Stoddard, II (March, 1853), 193-200. For information on Reid, Stevens, and the National Magazine, see the DAB, XV, 478-479; XVII, 604-605; and Frank Luther Mott's A History of American Magazines, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1957), II, 31.

2 Pot-Pourri, p. 1.

3 Ibid., p. 24.

4 A record of the ceremonies was published as Edgar Allan Poe: A Memorial Volume, ed. Sara S. Rice (Baltimore, 1877). Winter's poem appears on pp. 48-49.

5 Walt Whitman was the only prominent literary figure to attend the ceremonies. Shortly after the event, the New York World (November 26, 1875) ran “The Monumental Mockery of Poe,” an anonymous setae twitting the American literati for the transparent excuses they had offered, to avoid being in Baltimore on the appointed day. For a sardonic account of the ceremonies at Westminster Churchyard and the events which led up to them, see H. L. Mencken, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Prejudices: First Series (New York, 1922), pp.. 247-249.

6 One of the poems appended is Stephane Mallarme's “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe.” It appears on p. 93 of the Memorial Volume. Although perhaps the best known poem about Poe, it does not fall within the scope of this study of Poe in ‘imaginative literature of American origin. [page 253:]

7 Memorial Volume, pp. 94-95.

8 Ibid., p. 95. This poem appeared earlier in the Richmond (Virginia) Daily Enquirer, October 12, 1875, p. 1.

9 “Poe as Poet,” Literary World, XIII (March 25, 1882), 96-97.

10 John Hill Hewitt, Shadows on the Wall, or, Glimpses of the Past (Baltimore, 1877), pp. 240-241. In spite of the allusion to “the marble shaft” in the lines quoted below, Hewitt maintained (in a footnote to his poem) that the poem was “written before the memorial stone was placed over the remains of the poet.”

11 “To A. L. R.,” a sonnet enclosed in A.L.S., Sarah Heywood to John H. Ingram, July 6, 1877, Poe-Ingram Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. John Carl Miller, John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1960), p. 251, assigns the approximate date of April, 1877, to the poem .

12 A Sonnet, no title, clipped from an unidentified newspaper and enclosed in A.L.S., Rose Peckham to John H. Ingram, July 3, 1878, Poe-Ingram Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. One would be tempted to identify “G. W. P.” as George W. Peck, a partisan active in Poe's behalf during the decade immediately following the poet's death. Peck, however, died in 1859.

13 See Appendix B.

14 Home Journal (February 11, 1880). The poems are dated “London, December 1879.”

15 In spite of the fact that the two sonnets are dated December, 1879, and were published in the Home Journal in February of 1880, James H. Whitty maintained that they first appeared in an edition of Mrs. Lewis's Records of the Heart, and Other Poems. Whitty also maintained that these two sonnets were accompanied by “To His Enemies,” a third sonnet in which Mrs. Lewis castigates the “ruthless spirits! who for love of wrong, / Essayed to link his [Poe's] name with infamy.” See Whitty's article “Poeena” in the Step Ladder, XIII (October, 1927), 240. Whitty seems to be in error. None of the three editions of Records of the Heart (1844, 1857, 1866) contains any of the three sonnets. What Whitty had in mind and where he located the text of “To His Enemies” (the sonnet is reprinted in Whitty's article, p. 240) remain mysteries. [page 254:]

16 The Dedication Exercises of the Actors’ Monument to Edgar Allan Poe Sculptured by Richard Henry Park and Unveiled in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Monday, May 4 1885 (New York, 1885), pp. 41-45.

17 Ibid., p. 41.

18 Ibid., p. 45.

19 Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, XVII (November, 1889)

20 This stanza was deleted from the poem for its presentation at the exercises at Fordham cottage in 1909.

21 “Poe at Fordham,” Chatauguan, XXV (November,1896), 185.

22 The poem appears in Benton's In the Poe Circle (New York, 1909), p. [5].

23 Chap-Book, II (November 15, 1894), 3.

24 A record of the exercises appeared in the University of Virginia Magazine, XLIII (December, 1899), and was published as The Unveiling of the Bust of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Charles William Kent (Lynchburg, Virginia, 1901).

25 The Unveiling of the Bust of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 60-61.

26 Ibid., p. 79.

27 All eight poems are published in The Poetry of Father Tabb, ed. Francis A. Litz (New York; 1928).

28 Ibid., p. 297. The sonnet, entitled “Poe,” is dated 1882.

29 Ibid., p. 268. The poem, entitled “Poe's Critic,” is dated February, 1885.

30 Chap-Book, V (May 15, 1896), 17. In The Poetry of Father Tabb, p. 348, the poem is dated December, 1895.

31 Poe's Cottage at Fordham,” Bookman, V (May, 1897), 216.

32 “Poe's Purgatory,” Independent, LVI (March 3, 1904), 494. In The Poetry of Father Tabb, p. 270, the poem is erroneously dated 1907. [page 255:]

33 This poem has been entitled both “Excluded” and “Rejected.” There is a manuscript copy of it in the Poe-Ingram Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, bearing the notation “Received Nov. 7, 1905 J. S. P.” “J. S. P.” is John S. Patton, former Librarian of the University of Virginia. For subsequent publications of this poem, see the bibliography appended to this study.

34 The Poetry of Father Tabb, p. 269. The date given here, January, 1908, is probably a misprint for January, 1909, the date of the centennial of Poe's birth.

35 Critic, XLII (1903). 499-503.

36 Two of these poems are Walter Malone's “Poe's Cottage at Fordham,” Critic, XXXVI (February, 1900), 122, and Jared Barhite's “Apostrophe to Edgar Allen [sic] Poe's Fordham, N. Y., Home,” Book-Lover, V (June, 1904), 746-747.

37 Joyce's poem, entitled “Poe,” appears in the Complete Poems of Colonel John A. Joyce (Washington, D. C., 1900), p. 128, and in Joyce's Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1901), p. [vii]. Some inkling of the Colonel's eccentricity can be had from the following excerpt from the Preface, p. [v], to his Complete Poems:

These rocks of rhyme and pebbles of poetry I throw into the world of thought, trusting that they may macadamize the highway of life with confidence, love and beauty;, and as they have sprung spontaneously from my impulsive heart during the past forty years, I leave the Brain Babies to the justice and mercy of mankind.

Oliver Leigh is the author of a madcap book entitled Edgar Allan Poe, The Man; The Master; The Martyr (Chicago, 1906). Leigh assumes one of Poe's pseudonyms, “Geoffrey Quarles,” on the title page. On pp. 69-78, Leigh publishes a chaotic poem called “The Organ, a Fan-tasie.” He claims to have written it in the manner in which Poe described the composition of “The Raven” in “The Philosophy of Composition.” On p. [80], Leigh prints “His Monument,” a poem lamenting the lack of a monument to Poe in Central Park, New York City. A note indicates that

“His Monument” is here “Reprinted, slightly changed: from the New York Critic, 1888.” There is, however, no poem of this kind in the Critic for 1888 or for several years previous or subsequent to that date. I assume, by the way, that Leigh was the author of “His Monument.”

38 p. 64. [page 256:]

39 “Edgar Allan Poe,” Current Literature, XXXVIII (February, 1905), 141.

40 LXXVIII, 243.

41 E. A. U. Valentine, “The Centenari-ed Poe,” in the “Poe Miscellany,” a six-volume scrapbook compiled by John S. Patton which is on file in the Manuscripts Division of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia. The poem is an unidentified newspaper clipping in IV, 19.

42 “In Memory of Edgar Allan Poe,” Christian Advocate (Nashville, Tennessee), LXX (January 15, 1909), 8 (72).

43 “The Poet's Passion,” Carolinian, XXI (February, 1909), 264.

44 “Westminster Churchyard (Edgar Allan Poe),” Edgar Allan Poe: A Centenary Tribute, ed. Heinrich Ewald Buchholz (Baltimore, 1910), pp. 15-17. The passage quoted is from p. 17.

45 “Whose Heart-Strings Are a Lute,’ The Book of the Poe Centenary, ed. Charles William Kent and John Shelton Patton (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1909), pp. 20-24. The passage quoted is from p. 23.

46 “Edgar Allan Poe,” The Book of the Poe Centenary, pp 111-116. The passage quoted is from pp. 114-115.

47 Edward Reinhold Rogers, “To Edgar Allan Poe,” The Book of the Poe Centenary, pp. 24-25. Rogers was the headmaster of the Jefferson School for Boys, Charlottesville, Virginia.

48 In Memoriam: Edgar Allan.Poe. 1809-1849, in Transactions of the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences (New York, 1910), Vol. I, pt. ii, pp. 18-20. The passage quoted is from p. 20.

49 Charles W. Hubner, “Edgar Allan Poe,” a holograph manuscript in the Barrett Library at the University of Virginia. Although this poem was not published in The Book of the Poe Centenary (the record of the exercises at the University of Virginia), a note on the manuscript states that it was “Read at University of Virginia Poe Centennial Celebration, January, 1909.”

50 The three dramas now existing only as titles are by S. B. Corrington, Webster Edgerly, and Henry Tyrrell. For further information, consult the bibliography appended to this study. [page 257:]

51 My discussion of Hazelton's play is based upon a typewritten copy filed for copyright on August 2, 1893.

52 Because the version of the play used here is a typescript, I have made no effort to cite the text by page number.

53 Baltimore Sun, October 12, 1895.

54 The text of The Poet covers pp. 175-255.

55 Ibid., p. 188.

56 Ibid., pp. 184-185.

57 Ibid., p. 181.

58 Ibid., p. 219.

59 Ibid., pp. 227-228.

60 Ibid., p. 238.

61 Ibid., p. 252.

62 Ibid., p. 255.

63 Ibid., p. 183.

64 Ibid., p. 225.

65 If we include Henry Kiddie's alleged posthumous message from Poe (cited in a note to the previous chapter), the total number of works of fiction is six.

66 The Valley of Unrest was published as an independent volume by John P. Morton and Company of Louisville, Kentucky. Its pages are printed on only one side of large sheets of heavy red paper (not unlike construction paper) bound with ribbon. The volume bearing the date 1883 purports to be a second edition, but I have found no trace of an earlier edition.

67 Letters, I, 4-5.

68 The Valley of Unrest, pp. [9-10].

69 Ibid., p. [9]. [page 258:]

70 Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, XLVIII (August, 1891), 240-246.

71 Ibid., pp. 244-245.

72 Ibid., p. 246.

73 University of Virginia Magazine, LII (January, 1909), 216-220. Widener was a law student at the university when the tale was published.

74 Ibid., pp. 218-219.

75 The Raven, p. 114.

76 A second edition of The Dreamer appeared in 1925.

77 The Dreamer, p. [v].

78 Mrs. Stanard admits in her foreword to The Dreamer, p. [v], that she is “indebted to Poe himself for the revelations of his personality which appear in his own stories and poems, the most part of which are clearly autobiographic.” Accordingly, the story “Lenore” provides the basis of Mrs. Standard's romantic account of Poe's domestic life.

79 In the second edition of The Dreamer, Mrs. Stanard tries to avoid this absurdity by having Poe aware that his poem places his first glimpse of Mrs. Whitman “in the far past,” p. 353.

CHAPTER V

1 Chancellor Williams, The Raven (Philadelphia, 1943), p. 170.

2 Christian Century, LXI (January 5, 1944), 20.

3 Cothburn O’Neal, The Very Young Mrs. Poe (New York, 1956), p. 3.

4 Among a number of innocuous freedoms Miss Dow takes with the events of Poe's life is one that is genuinely ironic and made doubly so because Miss Dow evidently did not intend irony. The irony is that Miss Dow has the first rupture of a blood vessel in Virginia's throat occur while she is singing “Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt” (pp. 145-146). This plaintive song was written by none other than Poe's enemy Thomas Dunn [page 259:] English. In fact, however, English's song could not have brought on the attack. Virginia burst the blood vessel in January of 1842 (see Letters, I, 191), and English wrote his song more than eighteen months later — see Thomas Dunn English, “The Origin of ‘Ben Bolt,” Harpers Weekly, XXVIII (July 21, 1894), 682.

5 Dark Glory, pp. 286-287.

6 Laura Benet, Young Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1941), p. vii.

7 Just how pervasive Miss Benet makes this Shadow in Poe's life is suggested by its appearance upon the following pages of the book: 2, 5, 49, 77, 82, 129, 143, 186, 242, 329, 346, 347, 348, 350.

8 I quote here from the Preface to the 1934, one-volume edition of Israfel, p. viii.

9 Ibid., p. 110.

10 Ibid., p. 576.

11 Irwin Porges, Edgar Allan Poe (Philadelphia, 1963), p. 6.

12 From time to time mention of Poe turns up in fiction. For example, Prince Amerigo of Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904) had read Pym “as a boy.” Later (1944) the mystery in Amelia Reynolds Long's novel Death Looks Down surrounds a Poe manuscript and a seminar on Poe. And recently Humbert Humbert, the narrator in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, offers a garbled account of Poe's relations with Virginia:

Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imaqine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. “Monsieur Poe-poe,” as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet.

13 Francis Hopkinson Smith, Kennedy Square (New York, 1911), p. 221.

14 Anya Seton, Dragonwyck (Boston, 1944), pp. 205-206.

15 Vance Thompson, “A Tenement of Black Fumes,” The Carnival of Destiny (New York, 1916), pp. 277-314. [page 260:]

16 Robert Bloch, “The Man Who Collected Poe,” Night's Yawning Peal: A Ghostly Company, compiled by August Derleth (New York, 1952), pp. 99-113.

17 Vincent Starrett, “In Which an Author and His Character Are Well Met,” Seaports in the Moon: A Fantasia on Romantic Themes (Garden City, New York, 1928), pp. 228-254. Although I treat this as a short story, it is, strictly speaking, one of a series of episodes loosely strung together on the theme of a vial of water from the fountain of youth.

18 John Dickson Carr, “The Gentleman from Paris,” Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, XV (April, 1950), 9-30.

19 Miriam Allen deFord, “The Mystery of the Vanished Brother,” Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, XVI (November, 1950), 57-64.

20 Ray Bradbury, “The Exiles,” The Illustrated Man (Garden City, New York, 1951), pp. 131-145.

21 Fagin, p. 224.

22 See the section on drama in Appendix C of this study for un-produced scripts on file in the Copyright Office.

23 My discussion of this play is based upon a typewritten COPY filed for copyright at the Copyright Office on April 3, 1920. I am grateful to B. Iden Payne for permission to obtain o microfilm of the typescript.

24 Although the Columbia (South Carolina) State, March 12, 1933, p. 6-B, and March 17, p. 8, announced the Palmetto Players production to be “a world premiere,” there are records of the 1920 production at Carnegie Tech among the Thomas Wood Stevens papers at the library of the University of Arizona at Tucson. Both Fagin (p. 230) and Francis B. Dedmond (in his bibliography) repeat the error made by the State.

25 My discussion of this play is based upon a typescript filed for copyright in 1925. I am grateful to the family of the late Miss Cushing for permission to obtain a microfilm of the typescript.

26 New York Times, October 6, 1925, p. 31. [page 261:]

27 Plumes in the Dust is based upon a four-act play by Miss Treadwell entitled Poe, a typescript of which was filed for copyright on January 21, 1920. Plumes in the Dust represents extensive revision of the original play. Miss Treadwell tightened up the action by shifting scenes and by reducing the original four acts to three. She also used information made available through the publication of Poe-Allan correspondence. I am grateful to Miss Treadwell for permission to obtain microfilms of a prompt book of Plumes in the Dust on deposit at the New York Public Library and of the typescript filed for copyright in 1920. My discussion of the play is based upon the prompt book.

28 Brooks Atkinson discussed Plumes in the Dust on three occasions in the Times: October 26, 1936, p. 21; November 7, p. 14; and November 15, xi, 1. The first occasion was to review the premiere performance at Princeton, New Jersey, on October 25. The second was to review the opening in New York on November 6. And the third was to offer observations upon the dramatic potentialities of Poe's life and character. I quote here from the November 7 review or the opening performance in New York.

29 I do not mean to suggest that the motion picture industry has not exploited Poe extensively. In 1951, for example, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer released a film version of John Dickson Carr's “The Gentleman from Paris” under the title The Man with a Cloak. For other films exploiting Poe, see the bibliography in Appendix C.

30 I am grateful to the authorities at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer for the opportunity to examine a mimeographed copy of the screenplay on deposit in the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore.

31 I quote here from directions in the screenplay.

32 Fagin, p. 232.

33 My discussion of Poor Eddy is based upon a prompt book on deposit in the New York Public Library. I am grateful to Mrs. Dooley for permission to obtain a microfilm of the prompt book. I am grateful also to Professor Milton Smith for his comments in a letter to me (February 14, 1963) upon the 1953 production of Poor Eddy, which he directed.

34 Village Magazine, I (1910), 38-39. The Village Magazine never got beyond its first number. [page 262:]

35 See Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay; A Poet in America (New York, 1935), pp. 217, 227; and Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay (New York, 1959), pp. 41-42, 101, 150, 170.

36 North American Review, CXCVIII (September, 1913), 352-353.

37 Bookman, XXXVII (June, 1913), 380-381.

38 New York Evening Telegram, September 23, 1916.

39 Clinton Scollard, Ballads: Patriotic and Romantic (New York, 1916), pp. 126-127.

40 “Edgar Allan Poe Speaks,” Life, LXXVI (November 25, 1920), 964.

41 The poem is printed in Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man. 2 vol (Chicago, 1926), I, [iii]

42 “To Edgar Allan Poe,” Contemporary American Poets, ed. Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928), pp. 168-170. This poem might. have been published elsewhere before it became a part of this anthology.

43 Sewanee Review, XXXIX (October, 1931), 484.

44 Lineta Belle Caples Morris, “Poe,” Versecraft, II (January-February, 1932), 21.

45 The Enchanted Years. A Book of Contemporary Verse Dedicated by Poets of Great Britain and America to the University of Virginia on the Occasion of Its One-Hundredth Anniversary, ed. John Calvin Metcalf and James Southall Wilson (New York, 1921). On pages 27-28 of this volume is a poem by Hilda Doolittle entitled “Egypt.” It is an obscure production bearing no apparent relation to Poe beyond the parenthetical dedication “(To Edgar Allan Poe). “ With the elimination of this dedication in subsequent publications of the poem, Miss Doolittle removed the only clue that “Egypt” might possibly have been written with someone in mind.

46 Ibid., pp. 24-25.

47 Ibid., p. 26.

48 North American Review, CCXVI (Jury, 1922), 65-66. [page 263:]

49 Lyric (Norfolk, Virginia), VI (January, 1926), 1-7. For more readily available reprintings of this poem, see the bibliography in Appendix C.

50 Ibid., pp. 2-3.

51 Ibid., p. 7.

52 “Letter to Virginia Clemm” is on pp. 51-53 of this edition of Letters to Women.

53 The Collected Poems of Hart Crane (New York, 1933), pp. 51-52.

54 The Muse Anthology of Modern Poetry: Poe Memorial Edition (New York, 1938), P. [4] .

55 Ibid., p. 668.

56 Ibid., p. 194.

57 Ibid., p. 192.

APPENDIX A

1 The figure of eleven poems contributed by Mrs. Osgood to the Broadway Journal does not include “Impromptu: To Kate Carol,” a poem attributed to Poe by Whitty and Campbell but now believed to be the work of Mrs. Osgood. See John Grier Varner, “A Note on a Poem Attributed to Poe,” American Literature, VIII (March, 1936), 66-68.

2 See Mrs. Osgood's Poems (Philadelphia, 1850), Pp. 449-450. The poem appears in the Broadway Journal, I (April 5, 1845), 215.

3 Pp. 403-404, as “Perhaps You Think It Right and Just.”

4 Broadway Journal, I (April 5, 1845), 217.

5 Ibid., I (April 12, 1845), 231.

6 Ibid., p. 231.

7 Ibid., I (May 31, 1845), 347. [page 264:]

8 The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James H. Whitty (Boston and New York, 1917), p. liii.

9 Works, XIII, 17-26; and a copy of the edition in the Library of Congress bears a stamp noting that it was entered in the Clerk's Office, District Court for the Southern District of New York, in 1845.

10 Broadway Journal, II (August 30, 1845), 113.

11 Ibid., II (September 6, 1845), 129.

12 Ibid., II (November 22, 1845), 307.

13 Ibid., II (November 29, 1845), 318.

14 Ibid., II (December 13, 1845), 352.

15 Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles (Durham, North Carolina 1963), p. 213. I am indebted to Professor Moss's study, op. 211-221, for untying many of the knots in the Poe-Osgood-Ellet entanglement.

16 See Chapter II of this study for Mrs. Ellet's poem.

17 Broadway Journal, II (December 20, 1845), 365.

18 Whitty, p. liii, maintains that Mrs. Osgood “sent some lines to the Metropolitan about Poe in January, 1849, and published others, in her volume of poems, prior to her death.” The 1849 poem Whitty alludes to is “Lines from an Unpublished Drama,” American Metropolitan Magazine, I (January, 1849), 45. There is no evidence, either internal or external, that this item is addressed to or about Poe. The 1850 edition of Mrs. Osgood's poetry contains only one new poem can definitely be identified as devoted to him. It is “The Hand That Swept the Sounding Lyre,” and it is discussed in Chapter III of this study along with other verses prompted by Poe's death.

19 That Mrs. Osgood seems to have been intent upon exploiting the sentimental potentialities of her relationship with Poe is suggested by “Ida Grey,” a short story she published in Graham's, XXVII (August, 1845), 82-84. Here the heroine, a coquette, “a-humming-bird to hearts,” is shaken to her fickle foundation when she falls in love with a certain gentleman, “cold and calm yet courteous” in manner, whom she meets at a soiree. This much of the tale sounds like Mrs. Osgood's relationship with Poe. But Ida Grey is a widow whose husband had been “a sort of cypher in the world — scarcely more a cypher dead than alive,” [page 265:] and Ida retires to a convent when she learns that the gentleman she loves is married. Obviously one would be ill-advised to read much biography into “Ida Grey.”

APPENDIX B

1 Unless otherwise indicated, background information upon the Poe-Whitman relationship has been drawn from the unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Virginia, 1941) by John Grier Varner, Jr., “Sarah Helen Whitman: Seeress of Providence.”

2 Home Journal (March 18, 1848), p. [2].

3 Letters, II, 385.

4 Quoted by Varner; p. 296, from A. L. S., Sarah Helen Whitman to Julia Deane Freeman, January 20, 1859. The original letter is among the Sarah Helen Whitman Papers in the Harris Collection at the John Hay Library. In addition to sending these two stanzas to Poe in a letter, Mrs. Whitman published a longer version of the poem (consisting of five stanzas, of which the two quoted are the last) in the Home Journal (July 29, 1848). Poe later explained to Mrs. Whitman (see Letters, II, 386-387) that he failed to see her poem in the Home Journal but did receive her letter containing the verses.

5 Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, March 16, 1874, A. L. S., Poe-Ingram Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

6 Letters, II, 410.

7 Sarah Helen Whitman, Hours of Life, and Other Poems (Providence, 1853), pp. 77-78.

8 Letters, II, 419.

9 Varner, p. 376.

10 American Metropolitan Magazine, I (February, 1849), 68

11 Southern Literary Messenger, XV 1849), 362. The third installment of Poe's Marginalia appears on pp. 336-338 of this number of the Messenger. Hence Poe could hardly have missed seeing her poetic message. [page 266:]

12 Graham's Magazine, XXV (November, 1849), 303. The date of the poem, “September, 1849,” is given in Mrs. Whitman's Poems (Boston, 1879), p. 79.

13 Varner; p. 301, identifies the Swan Point Cemetery as the place where Poe and Mrs. Whitman walked along the bank of the Seekonk. See also Letters, II, 383.

14 E. g., Letters, II, 385-390, 394.

15 Varner, pp. 386-387.

16 Graham's Magazine, XXVI (January, 1850), 91.

17 The Memorial: Written Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood, ed. Mary E. Hewitt (New York, 1852), pp. 163-164. This volume was reissued in 1854 as Laurel Leaves: A Chaplet Woven by the Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood.

18 Graham's Magazine, XXXVI (June, 1850), 383.

19 Ibid., XXXIX (November, 1851), 295; XL (May, 1852), 472.

20 Shekinah, II (1853), 19-20.

21 Sarah Helen Whitman, Hours of Life, and Other Poems (Providence, 1853), pp. 194-195.

22 Ibid., pp. 66-69.

23 Ibid., pp. 70-72.

24 Ibid., pp. 77-78, 79-81. It should be noted that the poem entitled “Arcturus. Written in October” was originally composed during the hectic night of November 13-14, 1848 (see above). In a letter written many years later (Sarah Helen Whitman to John F. Ingram, March 16, 1874, A.L.S., Poe-Ingram Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia), Mrs. Whitman offered an amusing explanation for the anachronistic title:

Just after I sent off my letter to yon by Wednesday's Steamer I remembered that the printed Lines to Arcturus said “Written in October”, while I had just told you the lines were written on the 13 of November. This puzzled me very much for a few [minutes] when I recollected that I had discovered soon after the lines were written [page 267:] that Arcturus & Orpheuses [?] must have been below the horizon when I thought I saw them thro the Western clouds & that it must have been some other stars that I mistook for them.

When the poem was printed in my Volume of poems it was therefore dated as if written in October.

25 Ibid., pp. 115-117.

26 Ibid., p. 167.

27 Ibid., pp. 75-76.

28 Ibid., pp. 85-86.

29 Ibid., pp. 89-92.

30 Ibid., p. 102.

31 The first of the six sonnets bears the title “To —” printed beneath the number of the sonnet in the sequence. Since no other member of the sequence has a title, I would assume that “To —” is meant to be the title of the sequence as a whole.

32 Hours of Life, p. 193.

33 Ibid., p. 194.

34 Ibid., p. 195.

35 Ibid., pp. 196, 197.

36 Ibid., p. 198.

37 Sarah Helen Whitman, Poems (Boston, 1879), pp. 195-197. The poem bears the date 1870. For the earlier poems Mrs. Whitman devoted to Poe which are reprinted in this volume, see the bibliography in Appendix C to this study.


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Notes:

None.

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[S:0 - JER65, 1966] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe in Imaginative Literature (Reilly)