Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 018: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Mar. 6, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 60-62 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 60, continued:]

18. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 128

[Penciled note in Mrs. Whitman's script:] Introductory to the letters which you shall see hereafter.

In the early summer of 1848 I received through the post a poem in the handwriting of Mr. Poe commencing — “I saw thee once — only once — years ago:” There was no signature to the poem, nor any title.(1) I knew the handwriting, because I had previously received another anonymous offering from him & had been told by a gentleman from New York who was present when I received it that the direction was in Poe's handwriting. Soon after I received the poem, an English lady, Miss Anna Blackwell, who knew Mr. Poe in New York & who had come to spend the summer in Providence, told me that she had recently received a letter from him expressing great interest in me — telling her that he had once seen me, etc., etc. Miss Blackwell did not answer the letter, but gave it to me to do as I liked with it.(2) It was not until August, or late in July, that I heard anything further in relation to him — I mean anything directly in relation to him. Mr. Griswold, who was then preparing to bring out his Female Poets of America, had visited me to say that he wished to obtain my consent to publish some of my poems. I had not at that time published any collection of poems, but I gave my consent that he should use anything of mine which pleased him.

He spoke of Poe's interest in my writings & said that he [Poe] had been delivering a lecture on the poetesses of America in Lowell, & he thought would visit Providence during the summer.

I asked him how it was that Poe had incurred the enmity of so many of the literary men of New York. He said it certainly was not that he [page 61:] had done anything exceptionably wrong to deserve it — that he had always said Poe was not so much to blame in his literary embroilments as were his enemies. He seemed to speak with great earnestness. It was not until after Poe's death that I discovered the rancor of his feelings toward him.

Soon after Griswold's visit to Providence, Miss Maria J. McIntosh, the authoress of several popular works published by the Harpers, being on a visit to our city, came to spend an evening with me, &, in the course of conversation, told me that she had recently spent an evening with her friend Mr. Lindsey at Fordham & had had the pleasure of meeting there that wonderful genius Edgar Poe.(3)

I listened with profound interest to all that she said of him, & especially when she told me that on learning she was about to visit Providence, he had spoken of me, of my writings, etc., in terms which gratified & charmed me.

She apparently knew nothing of the poem which he had sent me earlier in the summer, nor did I speak of it to her.

After listening to her report of him, I began to feel that it must seem very ungracious in me to make no acknowledgement of the beautiful lines that he had addressed to me, & regarding his interest in me as a purely intellectual one, I wrote six lines, without title or signature, which I directed to him & addressed to Fordham.

They reached him at Richmond, Va.

On receiving the lines, which I intended only as a gracious & playful acknowledgment of his beautiful poem, he returned at once to New York & after obtaining a letter of introduction to me from my friend Miss McIntosh, he came to Providence & presented it in person.

The lines which I enclosed to him were the last stanza of a poem called “A Night in August.”(4)

Out of this stanza was evolved the poem printed under that title in the Home Journal, which after several alterations took the form which you will find in the volume.

You shall hear the result of this visit another time.

 

1. Mrs. Whitman had sent this manuscript of Poe's second “To Helen” to Dr. J. R. Buchanan in Louisville, Ky., for a psychometic reading, but he never returned it.

2. Miss Anna Blackwell, an English poet who had boarded with the Poes in 1847 during several weeks of her visit to the United States, wrote Poe ca. May 24, 1848, to ask his help in getting a volume of her poems published in America. He replied to her on June 14, 1848, regretting that he could not help her. When John Ingram wrote to Miss Blackwell in France in early 1877 asking for her reminiscences of Poe, she replied on Feb. 12, 1877, that she had seen Poe but twice and knew nothing of him.

3. Miss Maria J. McIntosh (1803-1878) was a member of the New York literati. It was she who gave Poe the letter of introduction to Mrs. Whitman in 1848. [page 62:]

4. The lines below are the last stanza of Mrs. Whitman's poem “A Night in August,” as published in her 1853 volume, Hours of Life and Other Poems: