Text: John E. Reilly, “Man and Image (1827-1849),” Poe in Imaginative Literature, dissertation, 1965, pp. 16-60 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 16:]

The Elmira Episode

The distinction of being the earliest imaginative treatments of Poe by anyone save himself belongs to two items carried in the pages of the North American, an obscure Baltimore publication, in the latter half of 1827. They are Merlin, a three-act verse drama by Lambert A Wilmer, and “The Pirate,” a prose tale by William Henry Leonard Poe, Edgar's older brother. The drama was punlished in installments on August 18 and 25 and on September 1, and the story appeared in the issue of the North American for November 27, 1827.(1)

Both Merlin and “The Pirate” are based upon what might be called the Elmira episode. When Poe left Richmond in February of 1826 to attend the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he was engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster, daughter of a Richmond merchant. Perhaps warned by John Allan, Poe's foster-father, or at least prompted by the rumor that Allen had no intention of leaving his wealth to his foster-son, Elmira's father made his own plans for her, plans which would assure her of better Prospects than.the penniless, orphan of player folk could offer. Accordingly, he set about displacing Poe in the heart of his daughter. first by intercepting correspondence between the young lovers and then by introducing A. Barrett Shelton, a substantial Richmond merchant, in Poe's stead. When Poe returned to [page 17:] Richmond in December of 1826, disgraced and humiliated by Allan's discovery of the debts Poe had incurred at Charlottesville, Mr. Royster had already achieved eminent success in altering Elmira's affections. She subsequently married Shelton; and in March of 1827, Poe fled from Richmond to Boston, where, perhaps out of desperation and bravado, he enlisted in the United States Army under the assumed name of Edgar Perry.

Lambert Wilmer's knowledge of the episode must have been second hand. A resident of Baltimore, Wilmer was to become a close fliend of Poe in the early 1830's, but it is unlikely that the two young men met before 1829, when Poe passed several months in Baltimore while awaiting entrance to West Point. More likely, W. H. Poe, then living with paternal relatives in Baltimore, related the Elmira episode to Wilmer. W. H. Poe, in turn, probably had the story directly from Edgar, who must have kept his brother abreast of his agonies by mail. It is even possible that Edgar visited his brother. in the course of his flight from Richmond to Boston. One thing seems fairly certain. Poe's own fanciful account of the Elmira episode in “Tamerlane” was published too late (June or even July of 1827) for Wilmer to have read it before he wrote his little drama. Moreover, both Merlin and “The Pirate” include information about the Elmira episode not mentioned in “Tamerlane,” e.g., Mr. Royster's objections to the engagement, the second and successful suitor, Edgar's penury, [page 18:] and Edgar's flight subsequent to his return after his initial absence.

Although Tamerlane and Other Poems was published too late to have influenced Merlin, Wilmer's play is at least as liberal with the facts of the Elmira episode as Edgar Poe's heroic poem. Wilmer made changes consistently aimed at rendering the story more conventionally romantic. Perhaps because it already suggests the sentimental sisterhood of Clarissa, Pamela, and Eveline-, Wilmer retained the name of Elmira for his heroine. For prosaic Edgar, however, he substituted the conventionally romantic name of Alphonso. The remainder of WIIraer's dramatis persociae ale imayinaty: ivicircus (the leveiheaaea companion of Alphonso), three Furies, and a band of Spirits led by Merlin, the beneficent magician of Arthurian legend. For his setting Wilmer shifted the action from the banks of the James River to tne banks of the Hudson — at that time thoroughly romanticized by the pen of Washington Irving and the brush of Thomas Cole. Only a suggestion of the original episode remains in Wilmer's plot. Elmira anxiously awaits the return of Alphonso from “India's burning shores,” where for a year he has been in search of the wealth that Elmira's father insists Alphonso must have if he is to marry her. Before it can reach the banks of the Hudson, however, Alphonso's ship-sinks in a storm created by the Furies. Only the young hero and Marcus survive; their companions and Alphonso's gold go to the bottom. Desperate with the thought that he will now be unable to marry Elmira, Alphonso is about to throw himself from a cliff when Merlin intervenes. The kindly [page 19:] magician abolishes the power of the Furies, rescues Alphonso's gold, and reunites the young lovers, who can now look forward to wedded bliss.

W. H. Poe's “The Pirate” is a little more faithful to the details of the original episode.(2) For the names of his characters, the author drew upon the Poe children, including himself: Edgar Leonard is the hero and Rosalie is the heroine. The narrator of the tale recalls how he was a passenaer on a ship captured by pirates. Suffering from malaria, he was nursed back to health by a solicitous young man who proved to be the pirate captain. When sufficiently recovered to travel, the narrator was set free, richer by a bag of gold, a gift of his generous young pirate friend. The Elmira episode belongs to the history of the captain's “ill-fated life” related to the narrator while the latter lay convalescing. Edgar Leonard, the captain, lost his “parents at an early age, and was left to the care of a relation,” who gave him “a good education.” At eighteen he fell in love with Rosalie and received her pledge to marry him. Being at the time “too much restricted by poverty to marry, ‘ he joined a trading venture to the West Indies which took him from Rosalie for a year, during which period she failed to respond to his letters. When Edgar Leonard finally returned to claim his love, he discovered that she was to be married in a half hour to “a wealthy suitor” who in the hero's absence “had been proposed and was accepted.” Outraged, by Rosalie's infidelity, Edgar Leonard stabbed [page 20:] her, fled his native land, and became a pirate.

There are more similarities than differences between Wilmer's Alphonso and W. H. Poe's Edgar Leonard. Both depict Poe in terms of the stock sentimental hero typified by the Byronic figure then in vogue. Alphonso is a melancholy, cynical young misanthrope contemptuous of life and convinced that fate has singled him out for persecution:

Edgar Leonard is a wildly desperate and remorseful outlaw burdened with the knowledge that he has destroyed the thing he loves most in life:

If there is any doubt that these pathetic young men resemble the Byronic hero, Edgar Leonard puts it to rest when he cites a passage from the fourth canto (stanza xi) of Don Juan as an expression of his own [page 21:] Weltschmerz:

Alphonso and Edgar Leonard stand at the head of a long fine of fate-stricken and melancholy characterizations of Poe. After the publication of Merlin and “The Pirate,” however, more than a decade was to elapse before Poe again appeared in imaginative literature.

The Philadelphia Period

Sometime during the summer of 1838, Poe, his wife Virginia, and her mother Mrs. Clemm moved from New York to Philadelphia. At twenty-nine more than two thirds of Poe's life lay behind him. His two years as an enlisted man in the army and a brief career as a cadet at West Point belonged to the past. Both John and Frances Allan were in their graves, and the Galt fortune, some portion of which Poe once hoped to inherit, was secure from him in the sole possession of Allan's second wife. Elmira had long since become Mrs. A. Barrett Shelton, and Poe himself had married his own first cousin. Although well under way, his literary career had taken unexpected turns. His original intention of becoming a poet was all but abandoned after three editions of poems met with critical derision and public indifference. An age conditioned to didactic and saccharine verse was not receptive to [page 22:] Poe's Nesaces and Israfels. He had turned to writing fiction as a means of earning a living, but the journals paid little for his tales, and it was not until 1840 that a publisher would risk a collected edition of them. It was as a caustic critic and competent editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in 1835-1836 that Poe had established what small renown he could claim, but even in this capacity he had not enjoyed the comfort of steady employment since he left the editorship of the Messenger in January of 1837. The ensuing eighteen months in New York were so utterly fruitless that he and his family were virtually destitute hen they decided io establish themselves in the City of Brotherly Love.

Evidently calculated to coincide with this move, Atkinson's Saturday Evening Post for August 11, 1838, printed “Ode XXX — To Edgar A. Poe,” a friendly gesture on the part of Lambert A. Wilmer.(6) One of a series of imitations to which Wilmer signed himself “Horace in Philadelphia,” “Ode XXX” had the effect of announcing to the readers of the Post that a neglected genius was about to become a fellow-Philadelphian.(7) “What object has the poet's prayer?” Wilmer asks rhetorically. Is it “gold,” ‘’garments rich and rare,” “houses or extended lands,” “rich harvests,” “or credit that commands / Another's purse?”

“And yet,” Wilmer continues, neglect is the lot of “true genius” while “dull mediocrity” thrives upon undeserved recognition. There is hope, however:

It is this consolation of Time that Wilmer offers to Poe:

Poe might expedite justice, Wilmer suggests in conclusion, if he would resume the slashing criticism for which he became notorious while editor of the Messenger. The idea is embodied in two allusions, one Classical and one Biblical: [page 24:]

With the publication of “Ode XXX,” Wilmer added to his distinction of being the first to dramatize Poe's life the distinction of being the first to celebrate him in poetry. “Ode XXX is, however, something more than the first poem about Poe. Just as Merlin and “The Pirate” stand at the head of a long line of characterizations of Poe as melancholy and lugubrious victim of a cruel fate, so “Ode XXX” is the earliest of many characterizations of him as a neglected genius who sacrificed material well-being for the sake of his art. Although it made its first appearance in Wilmer's poem, this characterization was not prominent until after 1875, at which time it became the dominant image of Poe. With ‘’Ode XXX,” then, we have an unmistakable anticipation of the future course of Poe's reputation.

“Ode XXX” marked an auspicious beginning to Poe's residence in Philadelphia. The six years he passed in that city saw some of the most successful and stable moments in his career. First as editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (1839-1840) and then as editor of Graham's Magazine (1841-1842), he proved himself to be a competent critic and journalist. He published the first collected edition of his prose tales (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, December of 1839). He laid plans for his own literary journal — the Penn Magazine, later called the Stylus. And he made contact with such eminent contemporaries [page 25:] as Irving, Cooper, Longfellow, and Lowell. In 1842 he even had a personal interview with Charles Dickens. In spite of these memorable events, success and stability did not long attend Poe. Within a year he quarreled and broke off with the publisher of Burton's. He left Graham's after less than eighteen months. And for want of sound financing, his projected literary journal never got beyond its prospectus. Reverses such as these were compounded in January of 1842 by the sudden illness of Poe's wife, the bursting of a blood vessel that heralded her death five years later.(9) Evidently Poe had drunk at least sporadically before Virginia fell ill. With the prospect of losing her, however, his intemperance became more regular. During the last two years of his residence in Philadelphia (1842-1844), Poe was once more without steady employment, and his little family was again reduced to penury.

While in Philadelphia, Poe exercised not only his critical and editorial genius but his genius for cultivating enemies. He had already generated some hostility toward himself as the upstart editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, but this hostility was as yet more professional than personal in character. It was in Philadelphia that he began to cultivate bitter personal enemies. One of them was Rufus W. Griswold, the sometime preacher who sniped at Poe while Poe lived but withheld a frontal attack until his enemy was securely in his grave. Another bitter personal enemy was Thomas Dunn English, a [page 26:] young Philadelphia physician with literary and journalistic ambitions.(10) Poe and English were friends for several years after they first met in 1839. By 1843, however, considerable animosity had developed between them. Alcohol seems to have played a role in this. An advocate of temperance, English evidently considered Poe's drinking a distasteful weakness. There is evidence, too, that English suffered abuse at the hands of Poe while the latter was intoxicated.(11) With the exception of a cordial interlude when both men later moved to New York, hostility between them continued until Poe's death. Thereafter English joined Griswold in the notorious defamation of their former friend.

On two occasions while Poe lived in Philadelphia, English vented his hostility toward him in fiction. The first was a portrait of Poe in The Doom of the Drinker, a temperance novel written by English and published serially in the (Philadelphia) Cold Water Magazine from October to December of 1843.(12) The Doom of the Drinker is the story of Walter Woolfe, a man whose life is destroyed by intemperance. Introduced to alcohol while at college, Walter follows a classic course through wife-beating, child-cruelty, and homicide before he finally joins a temperance society and reforms. Poe appears in The Doom of the Drinker as an unnamed winebibber. On his way home after being expelled from college, Walter drops in upon a party in progress at the house of a friend where one of the guests described at length is unmistakably a caricature of Poe: [page 27:]

This portrait is almost wholly derogatory. Poe is charged with intemperance, with keeping coarse company, with plagiarism, cunning (has more “tact” than “genius”), equivocation (his style is “apparently candid”), and with treachery and mendacity. With faults as numerous as these, “brilliant jests” and “fine analytical powers” are scarcely sufficient to redeem him.

Early in 1844 English made another attack upon Poe through the medium of fiction. This time it was “The Ghost of a Grey Tadpole,” a short story published under Poe's name in the Philadelphia Irish Citizen probably at the close of January.(14) “The Ghost of a Grey Tadpole” is a parody of “The Black Cat” and a very clever burlesque of Poe's style in general. The narrator, who is supposed to be Poe, confesses to destroying a tadpole that mocked him from the depths of a rain barrel. [page 28:] No sooner had he killed his tormentor than a strange design began to appear on a nearby fence:

The elements of parody in “The Ghost of a Grey Tadpole” are playful and harmless, unless the reader is to assume that the narrator peers into the rain barrel in the course of slaking a thirst brought on by alcohol. It is in some prefatory remarks made by the narrator in the opening paragraph to the story that English attacks Poe personally:

Professor Mabbott has pointed out some of the “amusing hits” this paragraph makes at Poe's literary idiosyncrasies: the allusions to “calculus [page 29:] of probabilities” and to cryptography, the use of “cui bono,” a cliche with Poe, and the denunciation of Carlyle, one of Poe's favorite targets.(15) Long before Thomas Dunn English was identified as the author of “The Ghost of a Grey Tadpole,” however, Killis Campbell suspected that the story was by someone “willing to make capital out of the poet's unhappy fondness for drink, “(16) and it is William Henry Gravely who has explained the allusions to Poe's tippling:

It should be noted that although “The Ghost of a Grey Tadpole” first appeared in the Philadelphia Irish Citizen, it was reprinted in the Baltimore Republican and Daily Argus on February 1, 1844, the day after Poe lectured at the Odd Fellows’ Hall in that city.(18) Evidently English meant to plague Poe with his tadpole.(19)

Another unfriendly treatment of Poe in imaginative literature during the Philadelphia period occurs in the first version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Hall of Fantasy,” published in Lowell's short-lived Pioneer in February of 1843:

Hawthorne's opinion of Poe evidently mellowed thereafter. This passage was deleted from subsequent publications of the story, and in [page 31:] 1846 Hawthorne wrote a letter to Poe which is formal in tone but not uncordial or uncomplimentary.(21)

The New York Years

When Poe and his family retraced their steps to New York early in 1844, they were about as destitute as they had been when they had left there for Philadelphia six years before. By the close of the year, however, Poe had begun to establish himself in Manhattan, rising from a free-lance writer to a position on the editorial staff of N. P. Willis's Mirror. The first two months of 1845 marked the high point in his career: 1) he opened his attack upon Longfellow, already an American literary institution; 2) he published “The Raven”; and 3) he left the Mirror to become associated with the Broadway Journal, a publication of which he was to become sole owner and editor within eight months.(22) Either immediately cr remotely, these three events, more than anything else, determined the course of the last years of Poe's life. By attacking Longfellow, Poe exercised his slashing criticism on a grand scale, one destined to spread his notoriety as a critic farther and wider than it had ever reached in the past. By joining the Broadway Journal and subsequently assuming control, he became master over the publication of his own words, enlarging his voice in American literary affairs and thereby posing a formidable threat to his enemies. And by publishing “The Raven,” he became a celebrity overnight, a poet whom the literary [page 32:] world could not, at least at the moment, ignore. The stature and notoriety these events obtained for Poe gained him access to the elite circles of New York literary personalities. He was feted in a manner he had never known before.

The fame Poe achieved so suddenly early in 1845 almost as suddenly turned to infamy as he became embroiled in bitter quarrels with literary factions and personalities both in New England and New York. New England had reason to quarrel with him. His attack upon Longfellow was the abuse of a favorite son, and later in the year he bearded literary Boston by reading “Al Aaraaf” before a distinguished lyceum audience and subsequently dismissing the performance as a mere hoax. In the meantime, he seized every opportunity to take potshots at Boston, which he called “Frogpondia.” New York had its own reasons to quarrel with him. Once he gained control over the Broadway Journal, Poe proved to be a formidable threat to the literary status quo. Furthermore, he courted trouble and scandal by flirting with literary ladies, notably with the sentimental Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood and with Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet, a venomous and vindictive woman who became his mortal enemy once she realized that Poe was only trifling with her. Poe could intimidate his enemies so long as he had his own editorial chair from which to defend himself, but with the demise of his Broadway Journal in January of 1846, he was at the mercy of merciless persecutors. Instead of capitulating or even of [page 33:] maintaining a prudent silence, he precipitated a crescendo of wrath by publishing his The Literati of New York City, begun in Godey's for May of 1846. Although most of the vignettes in this series are harmless, some of them (such as the portraits of C. F. Briggs, Thomas Dunn English, and Lewis Gaylord Clark) were spiteful, and the whole project must have struck his victims as a treacherous undertaking by one who had Crept into their society only to ridicule them. By late spring of 1846 he was persona non grata in Manhattan. Destitute once again, the family withdrew to a cottage in Fordham. There Poe began legal action against Hiram Fuller's Mirror for printing libelous remarks aimed at him by Thomas Dunn English. The damage suit was decided in Poe's favor in February of 1847, but victory was tasteless, for Virginia was already dead and Poe had reached the nadir of his career.

The last two and one half years of Poe's life can be summarized briefly. After the death of Virginia, he passed the remainder of 1847 in the remote village of Fordham dreaming of the Stylus magazine and laboring over Eureka. George P. Putnam published this philosophical prose-poem in June 1848. In the summer of that year, Poe traveled to Richmond to develop interest in the Stylus. September through December saw his courtship of Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence, Rhode Island. Their marital plans collapsed only hours before the [page 34:] wedding ceremony was to take place on December 23. In 1849 he lectured and continued to promote his Stylus. The period from July through September was passed in Richmond, where he courted Sarah Elmira Royster, now the widow Shelton. It was in the course of his return to New York that he met his strange death in Baltimore on October 7. Although he composed poetry (“Ulalume,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells”), published Eureka, laid plans for his journal, and lectured on literature and philosophy, these closing years of Poe's life were passed out of the limelight of American literary activity. Had he lived on, he might have made a comeback, perhaps soaring to new heights of prominence on the wings of his Stylus, but fate had not ordained this to be.

New York and Boston were America's literary centers in the 1840's. Hence it was only fitting that the strong feelings Poe provoked there would often find expression in imaginative statement by persons of literary inclination. Some of this statement was complimentary, more of it was hostile, and still another portion was amorous in nature.

Imaginative literature complimenting Poe during the New York years consists of only two poems. One was an anonymous and very clever parody of “The Raven” characterizing the editor of the Broadway Journal as a scourge among critics. The parody was carried in the columns of the New World sometime before the last week in April of 1845: [page 35:]

With this picture of a proud and stately champion of truth, undaunted by countless enemies and resisting error regardless of rank or station, the parodist identifies himself as a friend. Poe's enemies depicted him otherwise. Ever since his tenure as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, they had dwelled upon his supercilious and faultfinding [page 36:] criticism and had characterized him not as a knight wielding a claymore but as a savage with tomahawk or scalping knife in hand. That the anonymous parodist of the New World captured Poe's image of himself is attested to by the issue of the Broadway Journal for April 26, 1845. Here Poe reprinted the three stanzas quoted above with a brief head-note under the caption “A Gentle Puff”:

The only other compliment was a tribute in verse to the author of “The Raven” by Alonzo Lewis, “The Lynn Bard” of Lynn, Massachusetts. Entitled “To Edgar A. Poe,” Lewis's poem appeared in Godey's for April of 1847.(25) It is a clumsy performance:

Lewis rehearses his thrilled response to the “magic flow” of “that wondrous song” and assures Poe that both he and his “bird” have earned immortality:

Pedestrian though this is, it enjoys the distinction of being one of the few poems written during Poe's lifetime that can be classified as literary criticism rather than as commentary upon Poe's personal life and character.

The small number of poems complimenting Poe during the New York years probably bears witness to an element of truth in Griswold's later assertion that Poe “had few or no friends.” He certainly had many more enemies, enemies who ridiculed his weaknesses, celebrated his failures, and belittled his accomplishments.(26) They did a good deal of this through the media of poetry and fiction.

Poe's disrespectful treatment of literary New England provoked a barrage of invectives.(27) Two attacks upon him took the form of verse, and Cornelia Wells Walter, editress of the Boston Evening Transcript, was presponsible for both. The first appeared in the Transcript on March 5, 1845, and was prompted by Poe's criticism of Longfellow. Miss Walter took no credit, insisting instead that “somebody” had sent the lines to her paper: [page 38:]

Miss Walter aimed a steady stream of epithets at Poe throughout the remainder of the year , and when the Broadway Journal floundered in December for want of funds, she burst into doggerel to celebrate the occasion:

It was publication of his Literati papers that brought down upon Poe the wrath of formidable opponents in New York. Their attacks were aimed at his private as well as his professional life, but the former variety were more damaging because the destitution of the Poe family in the summer of 1846 made them vulnerable to the insidious equation of poverty with evil. An anonymous “Epigram. On an Indigent Poet,” published in Hiram Fuller's New-York Mirror for September 19, 1846, illustrates the lengths to which Poe's persecutors pursued him:

If the phrase “‘buy a bed’” is a genuine quotation, its source is neither Willis's famous appeal for assistance on Poe's behalf in [page 39:] the Home Journal nor “the recent paragraph in Express” which prompted Willis to act. Both appeals were written after September. It would do no violence to the memory of Thomas Dunn English to assign authorship of the “Epigram” to him. The July installment of The Literati in Godey's had charged English with plagiarizing from Henry B. Hirst, accused English of being “without the commonest school education,” and assured him that “no one of any generosity would think the worse of him for getting private instruction.”(31) Hiram Fuller was about to lose a law suit levied by Poe for English's libelous remarks published in the Mirror. And pages 371 to 372 of the sarn. number of the Mirror in which the “Epigram” appears carry the ninth installment of English's 1844, or the Power of the ‘’S.F.,” a serialized novel in which Poe is made to appear as a lunatic.

1844 is a political novel purporting to expose election chicanery in New York City in that year.(32) The initials “S.F.,” by the way, stand for “StartledFalcon,” a powerful and secret political organization. Although the novel is disjointed and fails to confine itself to politics alone, English clearly went out of his way to drag Poe into the narrative at several points. Poe is caricatured in the person of Marmaduke Hammerhead. Marmaduke first appears in Chapter II of Book IV, the installment for September 5, where the setting is a conversazonie at the fashionable home of the four Misses Veryblue.(33) One of the party identifies Marmaduke as the fellow “with the broad, low, receding, and deformed forehead, and a peculiar expression of conceit on his face.” Marmaduke is “a very well known writer for the sixpenny periodicals, who aspires to be a critic, but never presumes himself a gentleman. He is the author of a poem, called the ‘Black Crow,’ now making some stir, in the literary circles.” He “never gets drunk more than five days out of seven; tells the truth sometimes by mistake; has moral courage sufficient to flog his wife, when he thinks she deserves it, and occationally without any thought upon the subject merely to keep his hand in; and has never, that I know of, been convicted of petit larceny.” The character who has been describing Marmaduke then relates an anecdote: “Some years since,” Marmaduke repeatedly sought the hand of a Miss Gloomy and repeatedly was refused. When he finally realized that his suite was in vain, he asked the lady for a loan of “ten dollars.” English goes on to charge Marmaduke with violating his integrity when criticizing works of the fair sex, of failing to grasp the ideas he pretends to handle, of mistaking “scurrility” for “sarcasm,” and of being a charlatan who “interlards his works with an abundance of quotations, obtained from the works of other authors. — As he does not understand the meaning of these, he occasionally commits some rather ludicrous errors.” Throughout the scene, Maimaduke is in conversation with two literary ladies. One is Mrs. Grodenap, a favorable portrait of Poe's enemy Mrs. Ellet: “She belongs to South Carolina — and is merely here on a visit. She possesses much ability, and is. quite a linguist withal.” The other woman is Mrs. Flighty, a [page 41:] “would-be-juvenile lady” “with a laughable affection of manner.” She is a poetess whose work “is remarkable for its simplicity.” Mrs. Flighty is Poe's friend Mrs. Osgood.

Poe, as Marmaduke Hammerhead, appears in three subsequent chapters of 1844. In Chapter IV of Book V, he makes his drunken way along Broadway, insulting passersby and threatening to fight them “six at a time. “(34) All the while he harps upon his recent Longfellow review and mumbles snatches from his “Black Crow,” i.e., “The Raven.” In Chapter II of Book VI, English twits Horace Greeley for complaining that Poe railed to return money Greeiey had loaned him.(35) Marmaduke is made to ask Greeley (in the character of a newspaper editor and faddist named Satisfaction Sawdust) for another loan. When Sawdust refuses, the drunken poet berates him bitterly. In Chapter II of Book VIII, English makes his most brutal and malicious attack upon Poe by exploiting rumors then current that Poe had been committed to an insane asylum in Utica, New York.(36) The chapter opens with a description of Marmaduke's physical and mental deterioration under the effects of what English calls “mania-a-potu” and goes on to attribute the Literati papers to the author's paranoia:

As the chapter proceeds, two characters in the story find occasion to visit an insane asylum in Utica.(37) There they discover Marmaduke among the inmates. An interview ensues in Marmaduke's cell, where, “in a sing-song tone of voice,” the madman reads a “critique” on three of Poe's favorite targets: Carlyle, Emerson, and Transcendentalism. It is an abusive-and incoherent document larded with phony learning and interspersed with allusions to Marmaduke's friend Dupin [page 43:] and to his own poem “The Black Crow.” When he has finished reading his critique, Marmaduke reveals the source of his hostility towards Carlyle:

With this, Marmaduke's visitors depart, and we hear no more of him until we ‘Learn in the closing chapter of 1844 that “Hammerhead is still in the mad house, writing as vigorously as ever.”(38)

The New York Knickerbocker for November of 1846 carried another and scarcely less scurrilous attack upon Poe in the form of an announcement of his death as a critic. He is again accused of lying and drunkenness, and he is equated with Aristarchus, the Greek critic and grammarian who is said to have deliberately starved himself to death. Entitled “Epitaph on a Modern ‘Critic,’” the poem bears the subtitle ‘”P’oh’ Pudor!’” — evidently a pun upon pro pudor, for shame:

There can be little doubt that Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker, wrote these lines. Poe and Clark had been bitter enemies for years, enemies even to the point that Poe had attempted to assault him physically.(40) However, the immediate motive of Clark's attack in November of 1846 probably was revenge for the installment of Poe's Literati which appeared in October. There Poe praised Charles Fenno Hoffman as founder of the Knickerbocker, noting that the journal continued to exist in spite of its current leadership.(41) As current editor, Clark must have been furious.

Poe was attacked once again through the medium of fiction in February of 1847. This time his assailant was Charles Frederick Briggs. One of the original owners of the Broadway Journal, Briggs was introduced to Poe through the efforts of James Russell Lowell late in 1844 or early in 1845. When he first met Poe, Briggs liked him ‘’exceedingly well” and dismissed the “shocking bad stories about him” that Griswold was circulating; but their relationship deteriorated after Poe joined the staff of the Broadway Journal. By June of 1845, Briggs was planning to rid the Journal of Poe.(42) Events proved otherwise; Poe got rid of Briggs and made a firm enemy of him. In his Literati sketch of Briggs, published in May of 1846, Poe treated him with contempt, dismissing his fiction as imitative of Smollett, reducing his criticism to a “farce,” and accusing him of being “grossly uneducated.”(43) Briggs retaliated with a caricature of Poe in his novel The [page 45:] Trippings of Tom Pepper, published serially in the New York Mirror beginning in November of 1846.

As Perry Miller has pointed out, Tom Pepper is in part a satire upon the Young America group of literary nationalists who opposed Lewis Gaylord Clark's Knickerbocker circle.(44) Among the caricatures created by Briggs are “Mr. Myrtle Pipps” as William Gilmore Simms, “Mr. Woolish” as Henry T. Tuckerman, “Mr. Wilton” as Hiram Fuller, “Mr. Ferocious” as Cornelius Mathews, and “Tibbings” as Evert Duyckinck. Poe appears as “Mr. Austin Wicks” in Chapter Sixteen, the installment carried in the Mirror on February 27, 1847.(45) The setting is a soiree at the home of “Lizzy Gil,” a composite character representing Anne Charlotte Lynch and Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet. Austin Wicks, “author of the ‘Castle of Duntriewell,’ a metaphysical romance and psychological essay on the sensations of shadows,” is described as follows:

The soiree proceeds smoothly until the refreshments are served, “when Wicks, having drank a glass full of wine, the little sipirit that it contained flew into his weak head, and he began to abuse all present in such profane and scurrilous terms, that all the ladies went into hysterics.” The gathering breaks up abruptly after the “drunken critic” provokes Ferocious and Tibbings into assaulting him physically. Rescued from his assailants, Wicks is carried home to his boarding-house.

Briggs is not yet through with Poe. In a sequel to the soiree, Wicks becomes involved with Lizzy Gil in a manner so similar to Poe's entanglement with Mrs. Ellet in 1846 that no one even faintly familiar with the real episode could possibly have missed the allusion. As Austin Wicks, Poe comes off a coward and something worse than an ingrate; Mrs. Ellet, as Lizzy, is a veritable saint:

The last we hear of Wicks is that he died a pauper, the victim of his own dishonesty: [page 48:]

No other new hostile treatments of Poe in imaginative literature appeared during 1847. Sometime in the course of the year, Thomas Dunn English republished his termperance novel which had originally appeared four years earlier in the pages of the Cold Water Magazine in Philadelphia. He altered the title from The Doom of the Drinker to Walter Woolfe; or, The Doom of the Drinker but left the, passage on Poe depicting him as an unnamed member of a drinking party essentially unchanged.(46) There is no reason to believe, however, that English republished the whole novel in 1847 merely for the sake of his sketch of Poe.

Secluded and virtually silent at Fordham during most of 1847, Poe offered no target for his enemies. He began to stir again early in 1848, lecturing on literature and philosophy and promoting his Stylus project. In June George P. Putnam published Eureka, and that summer Poe travelled to Richmond, the first of several modest trips he was to make during the year of life that remained to him. Although circulating again, he was neither well enough nor did he have the opportunity to challenge his enemies as he had several years before. [page 49:]

About the time Poe began to stir after his year of seclusion at Fordham, Thomas Dunn English assumed editorship (along with George G. Foster) of a humorous magazine entitled the John-Donkey.(47) Throughout its brief existence (beginning with the very first issue, January 1, 1848), the John-Donkey was hostile to Poe, taunting him, smearing him, and holding him up to ridicule. On June 3, 1848, it printed the “Tale of a Gray Tadpole,” an only slightly altered version of English's “The Ghost of a Grey Tadpole,” discussed above in connection with imaginative treatments of Poe in Philadelphia.(48) Before reprinting this tale however the John-Donkey carried The Untranslated Don Quixote: The Adventures of Don Key Haughty, another novel by English in which Poe puts in an appearance. The hero of this travesty of Cervantes’ masterpiece is Horace Greeley in the character of “Donkey haughty ho Ratio Greele.” Consistently a victim of his own zeal and distorted sense of social justice, Greeley is committed to the Tombs at one point in the narrative (Chapter Ten, published on February 12, 1848).(49) Among his fellow inmates is “a melancholy-looking little man, in a rusty suit of black — whose spade-shaped countenance seemed as though soap and razors had been lost to the world, to say nothing of an entire out-rooting of the whole race of barbers.” The little man, representing Poe, lectures Don Key Haughty on two of Poe's favorite topics: the heresy of the didactic and the concept of poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty: [page 50:]

The poet then recites “Rosaline” over the protestations of Key Haughty. It is a “dactylo-spondaic” ballad about two ridiculous lovers named Bob and Sal and is in no way a burlesque of anything Poe ever wrote. “ ‘That is a true poem,’ ” the author comments when he has completed his recital. “‘If any body can find any sense in that, I am much mistaken.’” When Key Haughty suggests that the poem “ ‘might be improved by a moral,’ ” the poet walks away “in a passion” and is heard of no more in the novel.

English was whipping an indisposed if not quite dead horse when he attacked Poe in the John-Donkey. With the collapse of the Broadway Journal early in 1846, Poe had lost his own editorial chair and thereafter found it increasingly difficult to make his way into print. [page 51:] During the last year of his life, for example, he was obliged to resort to the pages of even the obscure Flag of Our Union as an outlet for his poems. Attacks upon him did continue, however, in spite of the fact that he was hardly sporting game. One of these attacks was the caricature of him in James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics, issued by Putnam's in October of 1848. Lowell's quantitative analysis of the author of “The Raven” has become notorious:

Lowell proceeds to chastise Poe and Cornelius Mathews for flinging “mud-balls at Longfellow,” whom Lowell insists they have misunderstood. Poe's review of A Fable in the Southern Literary Messenger for March of 1849 serves as a possible index to the accuracy of Lowell's picture of him:

Perhaps had Lowell's aim been a little less accurate, Poe might not have damned A Fable so thoroughly.

Even before the Southern Literary Messenger published the review of Lowell's A Fable for Critics; Holden's Dollar Magazine for [page 52:] January of 1849 carried “A Mirror for Authors,” another critical satire containing a caricature of Poe. Illustrated with cartoons by F. O. C. Darley, “A Mirror” is signed with the pseudonym “Motley Manners, Esq.” Very likely the author was Augustine J. H. Duganne, a contemporary literary light of small magnitude.(52) Much shorter, much less witty, and much more abusive than Lowell's satire, “A Mirror” ridicules not only Poe but Bryant, Halleck, Longfellow, Whittier, and Willis. Darley provided an appropriate cartoon to accompany Duganne's description of Poe as a slashing critic:

The satirist charges Poe with tyranny over fledgling authors, accuses him of the plagiarism he often laid to others, and scores his reputation for analytical criticism:

The concluding couplet on Poe either belittles his poetry for want of variety or alludes to his practice of re-selling his poems:

Duganne's satire was the last hostile treatment of Poe in imaginative literature during his lifetime. While his enemies were berating him in verse and prose, however, Poe became involved in several romantic entanglements which gave rise to a substantial body of poetry and to one short story. This amorous literature was the work of four women: Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood, Mrs. Elizabeth diet, Virginia Poe, and Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman.

Poetess and wife of a New York portrait artist, Mrs. Osgood met Poe for the first time in March of 1845. He had accepted some of her verses for publication in Graham's several years earlier; on February 28, 1845, he publicly praised her poetry in his lecture on American literature; and in March N. P. Willis arranged a meeting between the poetess and the suddenly popular author of “The Raven.” Evidently with the blessing of Virginia, the two poets formed a sentimental attachment and exchanged, verses in the pages of magazines, most of them in Poe's Broadway Journal. Mrs. Osgood even based a short story upon what has become known as the Poe-Osgood literary courtship. [page 54:]

Whether the courtship, which persisted into the early part of 1846, was no more than a flirtation or whether it became an affair of serious proportions is a matter of speculation. If the poetry Poe and Mrs. Osgood exchanged is a genuine record of their feelings, then Arthur Hobson Quinn's conclusion that their relationship was “innocuous” is very near the truth.(54) Poe contributed three poems: “To F—” and ‘’To F—s S. O—d” appeared in the Broadway Journal, and “A Valentine” was published in the Evening Mirror. The first two of these were resurrected from earlier flirtations, and the third is little more than a clever poetic exercise. After March of 1845, Mrs. Osgood contributed eleven poems to the Broadway Journal and a short story to Graham's Magazine.(55) Estimates as to how many of the poems were addressed to Poe vary considerably. James H. Whitty, for example, identifies eight;(56) Quinn recognizes only two but acknowledges that others “may belong to the series.”(57) Estimates vary because it is very difficult to ascertain precisely whom Mrs. Osgood is addressing in her poems. The center of focus in all but one of them (“To —,” a tribute to Poe as a poet published in the Broadway Journal on November 22) is not upon the person addressed but upon the series of personae Mrs. Osgood assumes with a facility that precludes genuine feeling. She is now the “other woman” in a triangle, now the bashful virgin, now the coy flirt, and now the faithful woman,ruined and scorned. In each case, the person addressed remains [page 55:] a shadowy figure, the conventional lover who provides Mrs. Osgood with an opportunity to exercise her considerable talent for the kind of sentimentalizing that characterizes most of her poetry. When the poems she contributed to the Broadway Journal were reprinted in the 1850 edition of her poetry, most of them dissolved like lumps of sugar to become indistinguishably a part of the saccharine whole.

Since Mrs. Osgood's poetry offers no distinct image of Poe, consideration of her contributions to the Broadway Journal is relegated to an appendix in this study. There an effort is made to identify those poems which seem to belong to the courtship series.(58)

Mrs. Osgood was not the only woman to flirt with Poe in verse in 1845. Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet addressed a coy missive to him which he published in his Broadway Journal on December 13. Entitled “Coquette's Song,” it is as conventional and innocuous as anything Mrs. Osgood ever wrote:

An unscrupulous and vindictive interloper, Mrs. F,Ilet evidently sought to usurp Mrs. Osgood's role in the literary courtship. According to Professor Sidney P. Moss, she undermined Mrs. Osguod's position by spreading malicious gossip, perhaps even sending scurrilous letters anonymously to Virginia.(60) That Mrs. Osgood became alarmed by Mrs. Ellet's machinations is recorded in “To ‘The Lady Geraldine,’” a poem by Mrs. Osgood printed in the Broadway Journal for December 20. As Professor Moss points out, the title is an allusion to the diabolic lady in Coleridge's “Christabel” who treacherously presents herself as a friend to the innocent heroine. The Broadway Journal for the following week, December 27, carried a poem by Mrs. Ellet sanctimoniously defending herself against Mrs. Osgood's charge of treachery on the grounds that she acted only to save Mrs. Osgood's reputation, “To keep thee safe for heaven.” Safe or not, Mrs. Osgood addressed no [page 57:] further poems to Poe and her relationship with him seems to have terminated early in 1846.

The Poe-Osgood-Ellet entanglement provided delicious fare for gossips in the literary and journalistic circles of New York. That Mrs. Osgood's concern for her reputation reached considerable proportions is witnessed by her authorizing the famous committee headed by Margaret Fuller to retrieve her letters from Poe. That Virginia Poe also became concerned even though she apparently had encouraged Mrs. Osgood is recorded in a poem she addressed to her husband on February 14, 1846. Ironically, this is the date upon which an acrostic valentine addressed to Mrs. Osgood by Poe was read at Anne Lynch's soiree on Waverly Place. Virginia's poem is also an acrostic, the first letters in each line combining to spell her husband's name:

Although clearly intended for her husband's eyes alone, Virginia's poem was published in 1909 by Josephine Poe January. Miss January laments the fact that E-D-G-A-R-A-L-L-A-N-P-O-E consists of only [page 58:] thirteen letters, thereby “marring the possibility of a sonnet, if the still childlike heart ever sought such poetic attainment.”(62) The valentine is noteworthy, however, not for its poetic attainment but for its biographical value. The theme of withdrawal, to the kind of cottage the Poes were to occupy in Fordham several months later, suggests that Virginia was feeling the pressure of gossip, “the tattling of many tongues.” Her allusion to her “weakened lungs” is too obvious to warrant comment. On the whole, the valentine expresses what appears to be genuine affection and concern by a woman less childlike than Miss January and others conceive Virginia to have been.

No one devoted more poetry to Poe than Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the widow from Providence, Rhode Island, whose engagement to marry him in December of 1848 was broken off only hours before the wedding ceremony was to have taken place. Altogether Mrs. Whitman addressed eighteen poems to Poe between 1848 and 1870. Six of these were written during his lifetime and twelve after his death. Like Mrs. Osgood's contributions to the Broadway Journal, Mrs. Whitman's poems to Poe are treated in an appendix to this study.(63) They are treated there not, however, because they fail to present a clear image of Poe but because they deserve special consideration as a unit independent of the chapters into which this study is divided. Suffice it to say here that Mrs. Whitman's poems constitute a series of messages recording the progress of her relationship to Poe from a point in time before their [page 59:] first meeting, through and beyond their courtship, and into a period after his death when her feelings became deeply colored by her developing interest in Spiritualism. Although her relationship with Poe changed, the image of him recorded in her poetry remained essentially the same from the first lines she addressed to him, even before they met, to the very last poem in 1870. He was to her an independent soul, a dissenter who in his vision of something more sublime, resisted the growth of materialism as the spirit of the age. In her words,

The imaginative literature devoted to Poe during his lifetime has been examined in detail in this chapter because it has a twofold significance. 1) It offers a unique opportunity to witness the germination of a legend. Far more than any other contemporary documents, this drama, fiction, and poetry illustrates that the immediate response to Poe war: in no small part an imaginative one in which the real man was converted into a protean figure of such various appearances as a friend, a lover, an enemy, and a derelict, as a dedicated and courageous genius misunderstood and neglected, and as a charlatan and an unprincipled interloper who presumed to disturb the complacency of the [page 60:] American literary establishment. Although there is some element of truth in each of these facets of the total image of Poe, the larger element is not what Poe really was but the kind of man his contemporaries wished him to be, the kind of man they conjured. Herein, then, is not only the origin of the Poe legend but a type of the origin of every other legend man has created. 2) The imaginative literature devoted to Poe during his lifetime also serves to remind us of the significance of the last four and a half years of his life and the major role they assumed in the shaping of his posthumous reputation. For it should be noted that the vast majority of material examined that chapter date from the first two months of 1845, when Poe opened his attack upon Longfellow, published “The Raven,” and joined the staff of the Broadway Journal. They not only date from these events but either immediately or remotely can be traced to the notoriety these events earned for Poe. Had these events not made him a conspicuous public figure, Mrs. Osgood and Mrs. Ellet might have overlooked him, Mrs. Whitman might scarcely have heard of him, and Virginia would have had no reason to compose her little valentine longing for withdrawal from public life. Without the fame derived from these three events, Poe would have been beneath the notice of those who satirized him and the contempt of those who villified him, and he probably would have slipped quietly out of life having caused scarcely more than a ripple, of praise or condemnation. To lay this much emphasis upon [page 61:] the significance of those events is not to distort the pattern of Poe's life but to bring it back into a perspective effaced by his biographers whose unflagging efforts to leave nothing obscure have tended to destroy the chiaroscuro, as Poe would have put it, of his career.