Edgar Allan Poe (21 page)

Poe responded to English in kind. Louis Godey, who had encouraged Poe to write a response, had not realized Poe’s capacity for personal vituperation. He decided against publishing Poe’s answer and offered it to John Du Solle, who published ‘Mr Poe’s Reply to Mr. English and Others’ in the 10 July issue of the Philadelphia
Spirit of the Times –
not to be confused with the similarly titled sporting paper. Poe also brought suit against Fuller and Clason for publishing English’s reply. His libel trial was initially scheduled for September but later delayed until February.

While the case was pending, the
Evening Mirror
published English’s
1844: or, The Power of the S. F.,
a serialized novel telling how a secret political organization named the Startled Falcons attempts to fix a presidential election. Set in New York, the story includes several characters based on real-life literary figures, including a journalist and poet named Marmaduke Hammerhead: a cruel caricature of Poe. Making the character a drunkard, English showed that Poe’s drinking problem was common knowledge. English also denigrated Poe’s physical appearance. The previous year he had celebrated Poe’s massive forehead, but he gave Hammerhead a ‘broad, low, receding, and deformed forehead’, thus shrinking Poe’s organ of ideality to almost nothing.
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Poe took this novel as a challenge. Having met English’s earlier reply with a reply of his own, Poe now met this fictional work with one of his own. Though insignificant in itself,
1844
contributes to American literature as the inspiration for ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. Whereas English sought revenge in heavy-handed satire, Poe transmogrified their personal dispute to create a short story that transcends time, place and personality. ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ is one of the great revenge tales in world literature.

Appearing in the November 1846 issue of
Godey’s
, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ was the first short story Poe published this year. Under different circumstances, the Fordham cottage could have been an ideal place to write, but other factors hindered Poe’s creativity. Virginia’s hopes of curing her weakened lungs were of no avail. Each time her condition seemed to improve, it only got worse. This up-and-down path of hope and despair adversely affected her husband, who turned to the bottle for solace. Earlier, Poe’s drinking sprees had been separated by months, even years of sobriety, but now he had lost all control. And Maria Clemm, whose daughter required her full attention, had lost the ability to control her son-in-law.

By November, Virginia was in dire straits. Appeals for charity to support the Poes appeared in the New York papers. Poe endured the humiliation for his wife’s sake. These newspaper notices brought some of the more sympathetic and useful members of New York society to Fordham to help. Mary Gove and Mary Louise Shew came over from Manhattan, and Mary Starr came up from Jersey City. Despite their hard work and good intentions, Maria and the three Marys could do little. Their task was a melancholy one. Instead of nursing Virginia back to health, they simply sought to make her last days more comfortable. On 30 January 1847, Virginia Poe finally succumbed to tuberculosis.

New York literary society went on as before. Two weeks later, sure enough, Anne Lynch hosted another Valentine party during which guests read poems to each other. This gala evening was a huge success. Eighty or ninety guests attended, including nearly all the city’s notable authors – except Poe. Though still in mourning, he did manage to write one Valentine this year. Written to Mary Louise Shew, the poem expresses his gratitude to her for comforting his wife during her last days. Exacerbated by depression and drink, Poe’s own illness persisted through much of this year. Shew continued visiting Fordham to nurse him. Poe won his libel suit in late February, but it proved a hollow victory. He wrote little in 1847. ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ was the only new tale he published. As a revision of ‘The Landscape Garden’, it can scarcely be considered new. He did write one masterful poem, which many consider superior to ‘The Raven’: ‘Ulalume’.

Like so many of Poe’s finest works, ‘Ulalume’ began as a challenge. The Reverend Cotesworth P. Bronson, a renowned teacher of elocution, dared Poe to write something suitable for recitation, something allowing students to demonstrate their range of vocal expression. While the mellifluous sounds of ‘Ulalume’ answered Bronson’s challenge, the poem’s setting may have answered a personal challenge Poe set for himself. In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, Poe said he considered setting ‘The Raven’ outdoors but concluded, ‘A close
circumscription of space
is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident – it has the force of a frame to a picture.’
¹⁴
Setting ‘Ulalume’ outdoors, he achieved a circumscription of space through the use of an overarching canopy of tree branches. Taking place on Halloween and relating the story of a distraught man who inadvertently visits the tomb of his dead lover, ‘Ulalume’ is the single best Halloween poem in American literature.

Poe is the poet of Halloween. But Valentine’s Day makes a more useful holiday for retelling the story of his last years. By 1848, Anne Lynch’s annual Valentine’s Day party had become the highlight of New York’s social calendar. Though Poe’s name no longer appeared on Lynch’s invitation list, she had a new lion this year: Herman Melville. Raven had given way to Mr Omoo. Also this year Lynch solicited verses from Sarah Helen Whitman, a Rhode Island poet and widow. Though Whitman did not yet know Poe personally, she admired his work tremendously. Detached from New York’s literary scene, she remained unaware of the negative attitudes society held toward Poe and assumed he would be attending the party. She wrote a Valentine for him. Lynch passed it over to someone else to read aloud.

On Valentine’s Day two years earlier, Nathaniel P. Willis and George P. Morris had established their newest magazine, the
Home Journal
. They continued their close association with the holiday in the coming years. In 1847, the day before Valentine’s Day, they published a letter suggesting that a subscription to the
Home Journal
would make an ideal Valentine’s Day gift. After the holiday, they published many of the Valentines recited at Lynch’s party. In 1848 Willis again encouraged Lynch to submit Valentines from her party for publication. The
Home Journal
published dozens of Valentines from the party in a single batch, but Whitman’s was not among them. Lynch explained to her: ‘The one to Poe I admired exceedingly and would like to have published with your consent with the others, but he is in such bad odour with most persons who visit me that if I were to receive him, I should lose the company of many whom I value more.’
¹⁵
Whitman persisted, and Willis published her Valentine to Poe separately.
¹⁶

When Frances Osgood read Whitman’s poem, she winced with jealousy. Expressing her feelings to Whitman, she started with a clever metaphor and ended with a quote from Tennyson: ‘I see by the
Home Journal
that your beautiful invocation has reached the Raven in his eyrie and I suppose, ere this, he has swooped upon your little
dove cote
in Providence. May Providence protect you if he has! – for his croak [is] the most eloquent imaginable. He is in truth “A glorious devil, with large heart and brain”.’
¹⁷
Osgood’s conjecture was premature. Raven had yet to swoop down on Providence. He did find Sarah Helen Whitman’s interest in him alluring. Since she went by her middle name, Poe clipped out ‘To Helen’ from a copy of
The Raven and Other Poems
and sent it to her anonymously.

Whitman gradually captured Poe’s attention over the course of this year. For the nonce he kept busy with the longest and most intellectually challenging work he had yet attempted. Having initially sketched out his cosmological ideas in ‘Mesmeric Revelation’, Poe developed them further, presenting them in February as ‘The Universe’, a long lecture he delivered to a select audience at the New York Society Library. After some additional tinkering, he submitted his manuscript to George P. Putnam, who accepted it.
Eureka: A Prose Poem
appeared in July 1848 to generally excellent reviews. Poe impressed readers with his breadth of scientific knowledge and his imaginative understanding of how the universe worked.

Whitman and Poe corresponded over the course of the summer, and he made plans to visit Providence. He arrived on 21 September 1848 and stayed until 24 September. Their shared love of poetry gave them much to discuss. They also shared a birthday. She, too, was born on 19 January – though six years before him. The age difference did not seem to matter to Poe. He proposed marriage, but Whitman, understandably, hesitated to accept such a sudden proposal. He returned to New York with the situation unresolved. Receiving an indecisive letter from her in early November, he impulsively decided to return to Providence. He dashed off a letter to her, promising to arrive Saturday night, 4 November. The keen mind that had plumbed the mysteries of the universe earlier this year had stopped thinking rationally.

Poe travelled to Providence by way of Lowell, Massachusetts, the home of Annie Richmond, a bright, charming woman Poe had met when he lectured there earlier this year. Poe had developed strong feelings for her, and she greatly enjoyed his company. As the wife of Lowell industrialist Charles B. Richmond, she kept their relationship platonic and advised him to marry Whitman. He reached Providence that Saturday highly conflicted and deeply depressed. Instead of seeing Whitman, he spent the night in his hotel: ‘a long, long, hideous night of despair’, he called it.
¹⁸

Delusional as well as depressed, Poe apparently imagined himself in the role of the romantic lover in ‘The Visionary’, with Annie Richmond as Bianca and her husband as the old, cold-hearted Mentoni. On Sunday morning he bought two ounces of laudanum. An opium solution, laudanum was typically dispensed in drops, not ounces. Two ounces was enough to kill two people. Poe took the train from Providence to Boston. He had a plan: he would take half the laudanum and then send for Annie Richmond. It is unclear whether she was supposed to save him, witness his death or take the rest of the laudanum herself. Before he reached the post office, the drug took hold. He later told the story to Annie Richmond, but he remained reticent about this part of it. The next two days of his life were filled with unknown horrors as the near-fatal overdose of opium worked its way through his system.

He returned to Providence Tuesday morning. Angry with him for not showing up on Saturday night, Whitman initially refused to see Poe but ultimately relented. Family and friends had warned her away from him, and she refused his proposal. He saw her again the next day, but she would not change her mind. Poe returned to his hotel Wednesday night and started drinking heavily. Still drunk the next morning, he showed up on Whitman’s street, boisterously yelling toward the house. To avoid further embarrassment, her mother asked Poe in but spent two hours calming him down and sobering him up before she let him see her daughter. Poe’s behaviour could have and perhaps should have led to their estrangement, but Whitman now understood that he needed a stabilizing influence in his life and decided that she could reform him. To the shock and dismay of her family, she accepted Poe’s marriage proposal, and they began planning their wedding.

Poe returned to Providence the next month to lecture at the Franklin Lyceum. On Wednesday, 20 December, he presented ‘The Poetic Principle’. In this, the fullest elaboration of his aesthetic principles, Poe stressed the idea of art for art’s sake, denounced the longstanding notion that art should both delight and instruct, and emphasized that the only object of poetry should be the ‘Rhythmical Creation of Beauty’.
¹⁹
The lecture was a brilliant success. Nearly two thousand people attended, with Sarah Helen Whitman seated front row centre. His impressive performance reaffirmed her confidence in him, and she agreed to accelerate their wedding plans.

After urging her toward the altar, Poe suddenly seemed to get cold feet, behaving in a way certain to alienate her. When she had some friends over on Friday evening, 22 December, he showed up drunk, not crazy drunk like before but drunk enough for others to notice. Disappointed, Whitman made him promise to quit. They planned to meet Saturday morning. Before heading to her house, however, Poe ducked into his hotel bar for quick eye-opener. He had long since forgotten Thomas W. White’s admonition against drinking before breakfast. Partway through the day, she received a note from a friend who had seen him at the bar that morning. She could not mask her disappointment. Neither one explicitly ended the engagement, but both realized it was over. Poe said goodbye to her and left Providence by train that evening. He never saw her again.

Birthdays, especially ones with zeros on them, are always a time for taking stock. On 19 January 1849, his fortieth birthday, Poe could see his literary goals slipping away. His numerous attempts to establish
The Stylus
had failed. During his recent courtship, his writing career had come to a virtual standstill, and he had little motivation to get it moving. This seemingly bleak situation would soon change. In quick succession, he received two offers destined to shape the rest of his literary life. Edward H. N. Patterson, the junior editor of the
Oquawka Spectator
, a weekly Illinois newspaper owned and edited by his father, took control of the paper’s print shop on his twenty-first birthday, 27 January 1849. A great admirer of Poe’s work, Patterson offered to publish a national magazine with Poe as sole editor.

In Patterson, Poe found the person he had been looking for ever since he first imagined his ideal magazine, someone with the resources and the desire to support
The Stylus
. Their ideas did not precisely coincide. Patterson wanted to publish a more egalitarian three-dollar magazine – so-called after its annual subscription rate – whereas Poe had always foreseen
The Stylus
as a more upscale five-dollar magazine.
²⁰
Patterson’s geographical location presented another problem. How could anyone publish a national magazine from Oquawka, Illinois? Throughout his literary career, Poe had been a staunch supporter of the literature of the American South and West, but when faced with the reality of publishing
The Stylus
so far west, he hesitated. Despite his misgivings, Poe ultimately accepted the offer – provided Patterson agreed to a five-dollar magazine. Patterson did, and the two began planning their partnership.