Text: Eugene Lemoine Didier, “Poe: Real and Reputed,” Godey's Lady's Book (Philadelphia, PA), vol. 128, no. 4, April 1894, pp. 452-455

[page 452:]

POE: REAL AND REPUTED.

WE are told that

It is not so astonishing that the birthplace of the Father of Poetry should be unknown, for he lived at the dawn of literature, at a pre-historic period; but it is strange that so famous a poet as Edgar A. Poe — a poet of our own century, of our country, and almost of our own age — should have lived and died a mystery to his contemporaries, and remain in many respects a mystery still, although more than forty years have elapsed since his death, and nine lives of him have been written.

Conversing with one of the most accomplished women of Baltimore, one evening, the name of Poe was mentioned.

“What a strange contrast between the poet and his poetry!” she exclaimed. “In his poetry he ascends to the sky; in his life he grovelled upon the earth. With a love of the beautiful that takes us back to the most glorious days of Greece, his degraded life takes us back to the days of the drunken Helots. Tis poetry is all as sweet and pure as wild-flowers, while his life was one wild debauch.”

This is a fair specimen of the world's opinion of the author of “The Raven.” For more than twenty years after his death the time of his birth was unknown, and the place of his birth was uncertain. ‘The present writer knew Mrs. Clemm, the poet's aunt and “more than mother,” in her last years; she said positively that “Eddie was born on the 19th of January, 1809, at Boston.” Thus Poe was one of that illustrious group whose genius has been the glory of the nineteenth century : Tennyson, Gladstone, Holmes, and Mrs. Browning, the greatest of all poetesses. At [column 2:] the time of our poet's birth, Byron, Scott, Shelley, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, and Tom Moore had revived the glory of the “elder day” of English poetry, and “the delusive splendor that had so long gilded the Augustan age of Anne paled before the comprehensive culture, the marvelous intellectual expansion, that distinguished the first thirty years of the present century.” Not since the “spacious times of great Elizabeth” had the English language been enriched by so brilliant a galaxy of poets.

For several years after Poe's death his grave was unknown, and for more than a quarter of a century no stone marked the resting-place of the poet whose genius has conferred more glory upon American literature than any other American writer. Strangers from far-off countries came to Baltimore and visited Poe's grave as a pilgrim's shrine, and great was their astonishment when they discovered, after much inquiry and diligent search, the poet's grave in a neglected spot of an obscure church-yard.

The opinion of Poe's character — already mentioned, of the Baltimore lady — is the opinion of many persons who should know better. ‘They believe that he was a drunken vagabond, a literary Ishmael, a Pariah among poets. Whereas the truth is that Edgar Poe was a most refined and cultured gentleman, whose friends were the purest and loveliest ladies in the land — a man whose society was sought by all who admired genius and pitied the misfortune that often attends it.

Tom Moore had his Russell, Carlyle his Froude, Poe his Griswold. When Dr. Johnson heard that Boswell intended to write his life, he said: ‘I will prevent that by taking his.” But he didn’t, and Boswell wrote the most fascinating biography in the world. Johnson is better known by his biography than by his works. Rufus W. Griswold was the self-chosen biographer of Poe, and he produced the most infamous biography that has ever been published [page 427:] in any language. Lies were invented, facts falsified, the truth tortured into falsehood, and everything was done to blast forever the poet's memory.

Griswold's false and malignant memoir was accepted as true, written as it was supposed to be by Poe's chosen friend. The world did not know that Griswold, smarting under Poe's severe but well-deserved criticism of his Poets and Poetry of America, had nursed his wrath and kept it warm until the poet vas dead and helpless, and then told his venomous story. Upon this unscrupulous memoir the author of “The Raven” has been misjudged by many persons for forty years. It is much easier to start a falsehood than to stop it when once on its travels. No man has suffered more from slander, living and dead, than Edgar A. Poe. I have been at much trouble in order to obtain the truth about the poet, from his earliest years until his tragical death. I have consulted with the living, and unearthed the opinions of the dead, and this is the result

When a schoolboy in Richmond, teacher was Prof. Joseph IL. Clarke, who, in speaking of his famous pupil, described him as having a “tender and sensitive heart;” he said he was “a boy who would do anything to serve a friend,” and that “his nature was entirely free from selfishness, the most common fault of boyhood.” One of his classmates, Col. John S. I. Preston, late professor at the Virginia Military Institute, says that Edgar Poe was “a generous, free-hearted boy, kind to his companions, and always ready to assist them with hand and head.”

I quote these estimates of Poe because they show that he possessed the very qualities which have been denied him, namely kindness of heart, and an unusual freedom from selfishness.

The most malignant enemy of Poe accuses him of but one vice, and with Injustice unparaleled, makes what was an occasional fall, an habitual sin. Upon this subject we have the testimony of many witnesses of unimpeachable integrity.

T. W. Gibson, his room-mate at West Point, describes the class of 1830 as having many wild fellows in it, but [page 428:] he says that he does not think “Poe was intoxicated while at the Academy.” N. P. Willis, with whom he was associated for six months in editing the New York Mirror, testifies to his regular attendance at the office, and his perfect propriety of conduct; Lambert A. Wilmer, during an intimate friendship of twelve years, saw nothing of his alleged dissipated habits; George R. Graham, who was in daily intercourse with him for two years, saw nothing of it; S. D. Lewis, who knew him intimately, writes: “I never saw him drink a drop of liquor, wine or beer, in my life; and never saw him under the slightest influence of any stimulants whatever. He was, in truth, a most abstemious and exemplary man. He was always in my presence the polished gentleman, the profound scholar, the true critic, and the inspired oracular poet — dreamy and spiritual, lofty, but sad.”

George Gilfillan, an extravagant English writer, long since forgotten, who was nothing if not sensational, published, in the London Critic, a brutally unjust article on Poe, charging him with having ‘*no heart, no honorable feelings, not having even one virtue linked to his thousand crimes;” denounced him as a “combination of the friend, the brute and the genius;” declaring that “ his tongue was set afire of hell; “ that he “rushed into every excess of riot;” ending his monstrous tirade of lies by the assertion that Poe “caused the death of his wife that he might have a fitting theme for ‘The Raven,’” repeating what a more poetical, but not more truthful writer had already said — that the poet “deliberately sought his wife's death that he might embalm her memory in immortal dirges.” Gilfillan did not know or care that “The Raven” was written more than a year before the event happened which the poem was said to commemorate.

Boyd, the “Country Parson,” after calling Poe “a black sheep,” censuring him for his “drunken degradation” and ‘inveterate selfishness,” coolly adds that he “starved his wife and broke her heart.” Why these writers should malign the unoffending dead, is [page 454:] stranger than the fiction which they invented for their purpose. We can only account for it upon the supposition that slander loves a shining mark. The splendid and ever increasing fame of Poe make him a shining mark, and many, who would not have dared to attack him while he was alive, have since his death shot their poisoned arrows at him — “mortuo leont et lepores insultant,” which may be freely rendered “asses kicking at a dead lion.”

Poe's love for his child-wife, and his devotion to her in sickness, was one of the most beautiful traits in his character, remarked and admired by all who knew the poet and his little family. Kven Griswold, who seldom found anything to admire in Poe, speaks of calling upon the poet, once in Philadelphia, and finding him worn out from long attendance at the sick-bed of his wife.

There is nothing sadder in romance — nothing more pathetic in poetry, nothing more touching in real life, than the death-bed of Virginia Poe. She died in mid-winter, and her disease was consumption. ‘The weather was intensely cold, and the dying woman suffered terribly from the chills that followed the hectic fever of that insidious malady. She lay upon a straw bed, her only covering being a spread and sheets, no blankets. In this pitiable condition, dying by inches, the only warmth that relieved her almost freezing body was imparted by her husband's overcoat, in which she was wrapped, and a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. At her head stood the poet chafing her hands, while her mother rubbed her feet. Thus died, at the early age of twenty-five, the wife of the poet who has conferred such lustre upon American literature.

The lovely and gifted Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, who was a favorite visitor at the home of the poet, wrote a sketch of Poe, a few weeks before her own early death, in which she said : ‘Of the charming confidence that existed between Poe and his wife, I cannot speak too earnestly, too warmly. I believe she was the only woman he ever truly loved; and this is evidenced by the exquisite little poem, ‘ Annabel Lee,’ of which she was the subject, and which is by far the most tender and touchingly [column 2:] beautiful of all his songs. The most lovely of its verses describes in language of true poetical beauty, the death of the loved and unforgotten wife:

A more than sufficient answer to the cruel and reckless assertion that Poe treated his wife unkindly is found in the fact that Mrs. Clemm, Virginia's mother, loved her son-in-law with more than maternal devotion, and never deserted him in sickness, in poverty, in distress, that she fondly cherished his memory during her life, and in dying, asked to be buried by the side of her ‘darling Eddie.” I assert this of my own knowledge.

The defamers of Edgar Poe have made him a sort of Frankenstein monster — a man devoid of all human affection, of human sympathy, of human feeling. We have the assurance of John P. Kennedy, one of Poe's earliest and best friends, that he always remembered his kindness with gratitude. N. P. Willis declared that Poe possessed the very qualities which his enemies denied to him — humility, belief in another's kindness, and capability of cordial and grateful friendship. Willis remembered him with respect and admiration, saying that his “modesty and unaffected humility as to his own deservings were a constant charm to his character.” Mrs. Clemm assured me that “Eddie,” as she lovingly called him, was a devoted and most affectionate son to her — that he never went to bed without asking her blessing, and when he had done anything to displease her, he would kneel at her feet, place his head in her lap, and humbly ask her pardon. Thus was the man who, Griswold said, “had no faith in man or woman.” This was the man whom Griswold pronounced “naturally unamiable, irascible, envious, self-satisfied, self-confident.”

Poe not only had the greatest “faith in woman,” but women, the best, the most refined, the most cultivated women — had the greatest faith in him. Mrs. Osgood, speaking of her own “affectionate interest” in Poe, said: “No [page 455:] woman could know him personally without feeling the same interest- — he was so gentle, generous, well-bred, and refined. To a sensitive and delicately nurtured woman, there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric, graceful and almost tender reverence, with which he approached all women.” “So far from being selfish and heartless,” said Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, “his devotional fidelity to those he loved would, by the world, be regarded as fanatical.” He carried his chivalry for the fair sex so far that when women were the subjects of his criticism, his usually stern and severe opinions were greatly modified, and as he himself said, “I cannot point an arrow against any woman.”

After the death of his wife, Poe became acquainted with Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, whom he had previously seen and admired. — He first saw her, one moonlight night, when he was visiting Providence, where she lived. It was midnight; the poet was passing her home, when he saw her strolling in the garden, She was clad all in white. The place, the hour, the scene, made an immediate and indelible impression upon his poetical imagination, and he related the circumstance in one of his most beautiful poems, worthy of himself, of her, and of the most exalted passion, Some time after this, he met her, and after a short but ardent courtship, they became engaged, but the affair was broken off upon the eve of the marriage.

The breaking off of this memorable engagement gave rise to the most disgraceful story of all that Griswold invented. He said that Poe, in order to break the engagement, deliberately went to her house intoxicated, and while there [column 2:] created such a row that the police had to be called in to expel the drunken intruder. ‘This scandalous story did more to damage Poe's character than any of the many lies that have been told about him. Mrs. Whitman emphatically denied Griswold's story. “No such scene as that described by Dr. Griswold ever transpired in my presence. No one, certainly no woman, who had the slightest acquaintance with Edgar Poe, could have credited the story for an instant. He was essentially and instinctively a gentleman, utterly incapable, even in moments of excitement and delirium, of such an outrage as Dr. Griswold has ascribed to him. During one of his Visits, in the autumn of 1848, I once saw him after one of those nights of wild excitement, before reason had fully recovered its throne. Yet, even then, in those frenzied moments when the door of the mind's ‘Haunted Palace’ was left all unguarded, his words were those of a princely intellect overwrought, and of a heart only too sensible and too finely strung. I repeat that no one acquainted with Edgar Poe could have given Dr. Griswold's anecdote a moment's credence.”

Mrs. Whitman survived her poet-lover twenty-eight years. When they parted forever, not in sorrow, or in anger, her last words were, “I love you.” That she loved him truly, sincerely, faithfully, she proved during all the years that elapsed between his death and hers. She was his defender at all times, and under all circumstances. Perhaps the most passionate poems ever penned by any American poet were inspired by the memory of her dead but unforgotten lover.

EUGENE L. DIDIER.