Text: Anonymous, “Kit-Katicisms,” The Kit-Kat (Columbia, OH), vol. V, no. 1, April 1916, pp. 39-43

[page 39:]

KIT-KATICISMS

IN THIS year's numbers of the Kit-Kat, there is to be some study of Edgar Allan Poe, who has been characterized as “perhaps the finest and most original poetical genius produced by America. “ Beginning through the four in this number and continuing numbers, the editors have to offer a series of articles by Mr. Landon C. Bell, an ardent admirer of Poe, whose interest has brought to his library practically of importance that has been written everything about that intellectual genius who was so hampered in life and, as he and others believe, so maligned after his death. One of the main purposes of Mr. Bell's discussion is to show the falsity of the picture of Poe as given to the world by Griswold and to reveal him in his true light. This friendly task was in some measure by Ingram in 1874, by performed Stoddard in 1875 and by others later; but the Griswold estimate, given to print a quarter of a century before, had traveled fast and far, giving color to so much that was thought or written of Poe that the mischief is not easily undone.

However, it is not the purpose here to make Mr. Bell's argument or present his conclusions. He will do that for himself in this and succeeding numbers.

Poe Honored at University.

At the University of Virginia, there is the Edgar Allan Poe School of English, the head of which is Dr. C. Alphonso Smith. There Poe is memorialized, and his work in English composition is perpetuated. Professor Smith has written, and the Kit-Kat [page 40:] is privileged in this number to print, an estimate of Poe as a world influence in literature. While Poe was born in Boston and died in Baltimore, living and working in some of the intervening years in Philadelphia, New York and other places, he belongs in a peculiar sense to Richmond. It was there that he lived as the adopted son of John Allan, the rich tobacco merchant, who gave him a home of luxury and educated him; there his education was begun, there he married his cousin, the gentle Virginia Clemm, there he worked on the Southern Literary Messenger, and thence he went on the last journey that ended in his death. It is appropriate, therefore, that Poe should be memorialized as he is at the University of Virginia.

Poe's Working Years.

It may be profitable here to recall that Poe be- longs wholly to the first half of the Nineteenth century. He was born in 1809, the year that gave us Lincoln; he died in 1849, when the great army of gold-seekers was setting out for California. His productive years were scarcely more than a score, his first book, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” having appeared in 1827, a “poor, thin book” of 40 pages, which brought him neither money nor fame, but a copy of which was recently sold for $1,800. It was in 1845 that Poe wrote his famous poem, “The Raven, “ which was contributed to the February number of the American Whig Review and which traveled rapidly over the country on a wave of newspaper applause. “If the author,” says Donald G. Mitchell, “had been secured a couple of pennies for each issue of that bit of verse, all his pecuniary wants would have been relieved, and he secure of a comfortable home.” [page 41:]

“I remember well,” says Mr. Mitchell, “with what gusto and unction the poet-editor (George H. Colton) of that old Whig Review read over to me (who had been a younger college friend of his), in his ramshackle Nassau street office, that poem of ‘The Raven’ — before yet it had gone into type; and as he closed with oratorical effect the last refrain, declared with an emphasis that shook the whole mass of his flaxen locks — ‘That is amazing — amazing!’ It surely proved so; and how little did that clever and ambitious editor (who died only two years later) think that one of his largest titles to remembrance would lie in his purchase and issue of that best known poem of Edgar Poe!”

Poe's Marriage

While Poe was working on the Southern Literary Messenger — as one writer says, at $10 a week — he and Virginia Clemm were married, and he established her and her helpful mother in a home of his own. That was in 1836. Later when he went to New York, Mrs. Poe and her mother went with him. He earned a precarious living by a variety of literary work in one place and another, and Mrs. Clemm assisted by taking in boarders. “One would say, “ says Mr. Mitchell, “looking upon the long array of discarded literary partnerships, that it was easy for him to break all ties; yet he was never tired of the tie that bound him to the pretty child-wife and kinswoman who goes with him to a new home in New York — her frailties of health darkly shadowing him; and he shading her in all inapt ways from the piti- less burnings and vexations of their narrowed means.” [page 42:]

It was in 1846 that Poe took possession of a little story-and-a-half house at Fordham. There he and his frail wife lived and loved, she suffering and drooping, he sympathizing and dreaming and work- ing. “ I don’t think,” writes Mr. Mitchell, “the child- wife lamented the approach of death ( January, 1847); nor did the mother; but to the ‘ghost-haunted’ poet, who had lived in regions peopled by shadows, this vanishing of the best he had known of all selfsacrificing love, was desolating. He was never the same again.”

To the two years of life left to him after his wife's death belong the strange poem of “Ulalume” and that bit of word-music called “The Bells.” But, with her gone, there was not much for him at Fordham. He traveled fast and far, writing to the kindly Mrs. Clemm letters of hope that was never realized. At last to her, in October, 1849, came the message that her Edgar had been picked up unconscious in a Baltimore street and had subsequently died in a hospital.

A few days later began the Griswold calumnies which Mr. Bell seeks to refute.

Other American Writers.

It is the expectation of the editors of the Kit-Kat, in the other numbers of the year, to give brief con- sideration to the life and work of some other Amer- ican writers in whom there is interest, but who, for one reason or another, have missed the wider fame. We shall not venture now to name these writers, for one of the merits claimed for the Kit-Kat is that its contents are not machine-made, but spontaneous; not written for pay, but for the love of the theme. The only certainty is that the program has been outlined [page 43:] to a number of congenial persons, and that, some time in the course of the year, there will emerge on paper the pleasant thoughts of a certain number of students of American literature about certain writers, for the most of whom the books have closed, who embellished it in one way or another.