Text: Eugene L. Didier, “Poe as Seen by Stoddard, Stedman, and Harrison,” The Poe Cult and Other Poe Papers (1909), pp. 261-271

[page 261:]

Of the many biographies of Edgar A. Poe, I cannot say that Richard Henry Stoddard's is the best. In his preface, he makes the bold claim that his “is the only life of Poe written with no intention but that of telling the truth . . . the only life in which the poet's career from beginning to end is clearly and intelligently traced —— ” that “it deals with facts, and not with fancies,” etc. Yet he accepts with childish confidence, and repeats the substance of Dr. Moran's so-called account of Poe's last hours, which was contradicted by the relative of Poe who was present at the deathbed. It is now known that Dr. Moran's statement was purely imaginary. He says that “Poe was taken to the hospital on the morning of the 7th of October, and died about midnight of the same day,” that he “was found lying on a bench on Pratt Street Wharf.” The facts are that Poe was taken to the hospital on the 3d of October, 1849, where he lingered in an unconscious state until the 7th, [page 262:] when he died — that he was found at a polling place on Lombard Street. Dr. Moran gives a detailed account of “Poe's last words.” Here is a specimen: “The arched heavens encompass me, and God has his decrees legibly written upon the frontlets of every human being, and demons incarnate; their goal will be the seething waves of black despair. Where is the buoy, life-boat, ship of fire, sea of brass, shore no more.” Dr. Moran was the resident physician of the hospital, but Poe died in the arms of Dr. William M. Cullan [[Cullen]], the physician whose duty it was to attend to the patients; and we have his authority for saying that the wild and incoherent words attributed to the poet were never uttered by him on his deathbed. It is only justice to add that Mr. Stoddard rejects that part of Dr. Moran's “recollection.”

Mr. Stoddard scrupulously avoids mentioning by name any of the eight biographers of Poe; but he has not scrupled to appropriate their material and incorporate it in his memoir, without any credit whatever. The present writer has, perhaps, suffered more than any other in this respect, especially in the early portion of the memoir. Living in Baltimore, among the friends and relatives of Poe, I have been enabled to gather information not access- ible to persons at a distance. That portion [page 263:] of Mr, Stoddard's work relating to the poet's grandfather and to his father's early infatuation for the stage, as well as the whole account of Poe's schooldays in Richmond, is taken from my memoir which was published in 1876. The latter was given to me by Prof. Joseph H. Clarke, Poe's teacher, who was then living in Baltimore at the advanced age of ninety years.

Mr. Stoddard has surpassed the other biographers of Poe in one particular at least — he has invented a birthday for him. He says: “As it might have been on the 19th of February, I have fixed upon that day for his birthday.” Certainly an original reason for deciding a man's birthday — because “it might have been.” It might have been also on the 19th of May or June. The doctors will have to decide whether Mrs. Poe could have played on the stage on the 24th of February after the birth of her son on the 19th. Mrs. Clemm told me that he was born on the 19th of January, 1809.

Viewing Mr. Stoddard's biographic sketch in the most favorable light, we cannot discover that he has added anything to our knowledge of Poe which had not been made known by previous writers.

We deem it only justice to say that the present reaction in favor of Edgar A. Poe is [page 264:] greatly due to the intelligent appreciation of Mr. Widdleton, the American publisher of his works. He generously aided and encouraged every attempt to vindicate the poet's memory.

Mr. Stedman has written the most careful analysis of Poe's genius that has yet been given to the world. The students and scholars of this and other countries will be glad that he has taken his admirable essay from the soon forgotten pages of a magazine, and preserved it in the exquisitely dainty little volume before us. He has evidently studied Poe's works with conscientious diligence; and, though we do not wholly agree with his estimate of the poet, we frankly admit that nine-tenths of his readers will. He manifests a genuine feeling for the “sensitive feminine spirit,” whose life was darkened by sorrow and suffering. He says that Poe was “an apostle of the art that refuses to take its color from a given time or country, and of the revolt against commonplace, and his inventions partook of the romantic and the wonderful. He added to the Greek perception of form the Oriental passion for decoration. All the material of the wizard's craft were at his command. He was not a pupil of Beckford, Godwin, Maturin, Hoffmann, or Fouque; and yet if these writers were to be grouped we should [page 265:] think also of Poe, and give him no second place among them.”

Mr. Stedman pronounces the “Literati” a prose Dunciad; but he does not do full justice to Poe's powerful analytical criticism which drove the dunces from our literary temple. He also depreciates Poe's scholarship: “He easily threw a glamour of erudition about his work by the use of phrases from old authors he had read. It was his knack to cull sentences which, taken by themselves, produce a weird or impressive effect, and to reframe them skillfully. This plan was clever, but it partook of trickery, even in its art.” Poe was a consummate literary artist, whose writings are more carefully finished than any American writer of his time. As Kennedy said of him: “His taste was replete with classical flavor, and he wrote in the spirit of an old Greek Philosopher.” In conclusion let us say, with Mr. Stedman, that, “instead of recounting Poe's infirmities, and deriding them, we should hedge him round with our protection. We can find one man of sense among a thousand, but how rarely a poet with such a gift!”

Professor James A. Harrison, of the University of Virginia, has edited the most ambitious, the most voluminous, the most vexatious edition of Poe's works that has been vouchsafed [page 266:] to an eagerly expectant world. The first of the seventeen volumes of this edition contains a Biography by Professor Harrison. I have read this Life of Poe with the greatest care, page by page, several times, and I have found it a careless, rambling, disconnected, unscientific piece of work. It displays extraordinary industry in collecting the material, but it is put together with no literary skill: like the would-be magician in the Eastern tale, the writer wants the magic touch. The most interesting portions of the biography are in quotation marks. Professor Harrison writes like an ambitious schoolboy, using all the biggest words in his vocabulary. Here are several specimens:

“In ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ he (Poe) lifts the lid from the cauldron where glowed the constituent elements of his wonderful poem-philtre and reveals to us its mechanism: the poem was to be about one hundred lines long, made up of equal proportions of Beauty and Quaintness intermingled with Melancholy. A strange and thrilling refrain was to impress this combination on the reader by means of long sonorous o's and r's swelling on the ear and the memory in anthem-like undulations, reverberations of waves on the shore, clothed, the whole, in rhythms whose luxuriance of alliteration, susurrus of honeyed vowels and liquids, and rise and fall of Eolian cadences would attune the very soul to melody and make the poem as sweet as the dissolving notes of Apollo's lute.” (P. 215.) [page 267:]

In defending Longfellow from the charge of plagiarism brought against him by Poe, Professor Harrison writes thus:

“Longfellow had access to many languages . . he would have been more than mortal if assimilable particles of the foreign gold had not clung to his memory and inwrought themselves here and there with the filaments of a most malleable and plastic nature. The student of ‘The Golden Legion’ feels the Schiller background shimmering through the rich texture of woven gold as the bit of verbal Gobelins is being fingered,” &c.

Here is another specimen of Professor Harrison's “fine” writing.

“Poe's work was so strange, so extraordinary, so original as it towered and sparkled in columnar beauty amid the flat commonplace of the time, that it is no wonder if editors were startled and looked askance . . . as one might imagine the aborigines of Nubia gazing at the gorgeous bark of Cleopatra as it swept flashing down the Nile with all its oriental splendor and paraphernalia, a vision of light, perfume, and beauty.” (P. 271.)

But this is enough.

Professor Harrison takes a childish delight in airing his scraps of knowledge: he kindly tells us that Poe and the Allans sailed for England “in June, 1815, the day before the Battle of Waterloo.” Why not say on June 17, they sailed? He, also, kindly informs us [page 268:] that, in 1809, the year of Poe's birth, “Madison was President of the United States, Mettermich was Prime Minister of Austria, and the Battle of Wagram was fought.”

When he comes to speak of Poe at the University of Virginia, Professor Harrison treats us to a history of Albemarle County, in which the University is situated, and describes the surrounding country, not omitting Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, and mentions him, “from his own Parnassus, three miles away, looking down and beholding the spacious vale wherein the cunning magic of his persuasive tongue had evoked a scene of Grecian beauty that breathed the spirit of Old World enchantment”; not forgetting to embellish the picture with this “fine” touch: “The poetic mountain sprites exercise their ingenuity in carving out graceful vales, long undulating slopes, the winding labyrinths of silver rivers, and wooded dells thick with Vallambrosan shades.”

When Professor Harrison speaks of Poe in Richmond, he is good enough to remind us that Patrick Henry, “the Great Orator of the Revolution,” was buried in that city; also, that John Randolph, of Roanoke, “celebrated for his silvery voice and stinging sarcasm,” was “a familiar figure in Richmond streets,” etc. [page 269:]

Harrison is a man of note, or, rather, Notes, for his seventeen volumes are loaded down with all sorts of notes, and the most notable thing about them is that they are chiefly about things not worth noting. He quotes Poe as saying: “I am naturally anxious that what I have written should circulate as I wrote it, if it circulate at all.” Poe left corrected copies of his works, and, although he should be published as he wished, that does not mean that everything he wrote — the sweepings of his library and the scraps from his waste-basket — should be preserved. Nor did he want, or expect, that his works should be printed with every verbal change in different editions forced upon the reader's attention in a series of distracting “notes.” An editor should know what to omit and what to retain. Jove sometimes nodded, Shakespeare was not always sublime, Poe wrote many things which his own fastidious taste would not have preserved. Professor Harrison claims great merit for hunting up every little scrappy book notice that Poe wrote, and boasts that he has given to the world, “a new Poe in the realm of criticism.” In his eagerness to do something that had not been done before, he not only prints these trifling book notices, but “attributes” to Poe two volumes of criticism which should [page 270:] have been allowed to rest in the grave of dead magazines. In fact, he prints everything by, or supposed to be by, Poe, not even omitting “Big Abel and Little Manhattan,” and “Street Paving.”

Among the poems attributed to Poe, Professor Harrison includes “Alone,” which I happen to know is genuine, for I discovered it in the autograph album of Mrs. Balderston, the wife of Judge Balderston, formerly Chief Judge of the Orphans’ Court of Baltimore. I had it engraved and published in Scribner's Monthly. I gave the poem the name of “Alone,” and dated it, as it had neither name nor date, but the poem and signature as published in the magazine are an exact fac simile of the writing in the album.

Professor Harrison, Dr. Charles W. Kent, and Dr. R. A. Stewart have formed a Mutual Admiration Society, and have used the Virginia edition of Poe's Works to exploit themselves and show off their “learning,” much to their own satisfaction, no doubt, but not to the entertainment of their readers. It works beautifully from a narrow, provincial point of view, but thinking persons only laugh at such transparent folly. A man is written up, or written down by himself, and by himself alone. The thousands of verbal notes scattered [page 271:] through the seventeen volumes by these industrious gentlemen, are useless, annoying, and distracting.

In conclusion, I take pleasure in saying that Professor Harrison has my best wishes, but I respectfully advise him, in future, should he undertake to edit a literary work, to do the hunting himself, but to turn the material over to an experienced literary expert; because, with the most friendly feeling, I am compelled to say that, when he tries to be instructive, he becomes laughable; when he tries to be profound, he is silly; when he attempts to sketch Poe's wonderful stories, he is simply ridiculous; and when he attempts to be critical, he is enough to make a stuffed owl die of laughter.