Text: John E. Reilly, “Devil and Angel (1849-1870),” Poe in Imaginative Literature, dissertation, 1965, pp. 62-86 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 62:]

The shadow of Rufus Griswold's denunciation of Poe falls across the entire length of the poet's posthumous reputation. At no period, however, were its hues deeper, its effects more pervasive, than during the two decades immediately following his death. Griswold launched his attack with the “Ludwig” obituary, published on October 9, 1849, the very day upon which Poe was buried in Baltimore, and he follwed [[followed]] it up in less than a year with his “Memoir,” a malicious ciocument bearing the authority and impregnability of literary executor. Other enemies of Poe did not hesitate to follow Griswold's lead, and a peculiarly moralistic age accepted, if it did not frankly welcome, Griswold's image of a notorious derelict whose “career is full of instruction and warning.”

Friends of Poe

Griswold's charge notwithstanding, the dead poet was not entirely without friends, several of whom offered poetic tributes to his memory. The first to do so was E. H. N. Patterson, the young editor of the Oquawka (Illinois) Spectator who not long before. Poe's death had made tentative arrangements to collaborate with him on the publication of the Stylus. On October 31, 1849, Patterson printed [page 63:] “Edgar A. Poe,” eight lines of verse praising him as a mystic whose poetry was a kind of revelation:

Another friend who paid tribute to Poe in verse before the close of 1849 was Mrs. Osgood. Her poem, “The Hand That Swept the Sounding Lyre,” depicts him as an Israfel whose life was one of “wo,” “despair,” and “grief”:

This poem made its appearance in an edition of-Mrs. Osgood's poetry selected by Griswold and issued by Carey and Hart of Philadelphia in December of 1849. Ironically, the volume opens with Mrs. Osgood's warm dedication to Griswold and closes with her poetic tribute to the man he maligned.

Thomas Holley Chivers, the Georgia transcendentalist and Swedenborgian, addressed three poetic tributes to Poe between 1849 and 1853.(3) The Poe-Chivers relationship began as a correspondence in 1840 and developed into a personal acquaintance in 1845. Poe once described Chivers’ poetry as “strange, incongruous, full of images of more than arabesque monstrosity, and snatches of sweet unsustained song,” and this estimate could apply to the three poems he devoted to Poe.(4) “Immediately after Poe's death,” Chivers wrote an epitaph which he intended “to have engraved upon his Tomb Stone.” The epitaph pictures the dead poet as a prophet and a scourge now lying beyond the reach of those who had scorned him:

Peterson [[Peterson's]] Magazine for February of 1850 printed Chivers’ “Caelicola: An Elegy-Paean on the Death of Edgar A. Poe.”(6) The title means variously “poet,” “god,” or “one who dwells in heaven.” Evidently with Keats’ description of the nightingale in mind, Chivers addresses Poe as one who “Like that sweet bird of night ... did'st flood the world with melody,” and now that he is dead, Poe is his own Israfel leading the immortal hosts in singing God's praises. “The Fail of Usher,” Chivers’ last poem on Poe, is included in his Virginalia; or, Songs of My Summer Nights, 1853.(7) In anapestic tetrameters echoing the opening of “The Bride of Abydos,” he unabashedly casts himself in the role of a Shelley mourning the passing of an American Adonais:

Sarah Helen Whitman, the widow who came literally within hours of marrying Poe in December of 1848, devoted twelve poems to him after his death. With the possible exception of Mrs. Clemm, no one was more faithful to his memory. In 1860 Mrs. Whitman published Edgar Poe and His Critics, the only thing approching a serious threat [page 66:] to the maligned image of the dead poet that prevailed for the two decades immediately following his death; thereafter she offered encourager ment and assistance wherever she thought his life and character might be vindicated. Of the twelve poems she devoted to him after his death, eleven were written by 1853 and one in 1870. Although all twelve are unmixed tributes to Poe's memory, they have greater significance in terms of Mrs. Whitman's peculiar attitude toward him that resulted from an interest in Spiritualism. These poems express her feeling that Poe was closer to her in death than in life. They belong, therefore, to the total record of her personal relationship with him and are examined in an appendix to this study along with the poems she addressed to him before October of 1849.(8)

Several persons not only paid tribute to Poe in imaginative literature but defended him against his defamers. On November 13, 1849, the semi-weekly Supplement to the New York Tribune ran an anonymous poem replying to the “Ludwig” obituary, which had appeared in the Tribune less than six weeks earlier.(9) Entitled “Edgar A. Poe” and dated “Chicago, October, 1849,” the poem challenges Griswold's charge that Poe “had few or no friends” by insisting “It is not true, ‘the Poet had no friends.’” After paying tribute to Poe as the spokesman for every “spirit crushed by time and grief,” the anonymous partisan prophesies, quite inaccurately, that [page 67:]

Another reply to Poe's defamers was made by Mary Gove Nichols, one of the women who charitably contributed to Virginia Poe's physical comfort during her last days at Fordham cottage. Mrs. Nichols included a highly sympathetic portrait of Poe in Mary Lyndon, her fictionalized autobiography published in 1855.(10) Like several of the satirical portraits of him in novels written during his lifetime, Mrs. Nichols’ description of Poe is set in a New York literary soiree. Poor Poe,” she reflects, “his image rises in memory, with those of common men, like a marble shaft among wooden pillars. He was very beautiful, though it was a pale, cold beauty, that was the correspondence of his intellect.” Mrs. Nichols then attempts to exonerate Poe for what appear to have been derelictions in his life, especially lapses in his artistic and critical integrity, on the grounds that he must be judged not as a man but as an artist who was the victim of cruel circumstances:

Mrs. Nichols goes on to describe the suffering and poverty she Witnessed at Fordham cottage and the role she, among others, played in providing some reiief. She also has a word to say in defence of Poe's relations with his wife and with other women, perhaps including herself:

Finally, she offers two observations upon those who would attack the memory of Poe:

Mrs. Nichols returned to Poe's defence with the publication of her “Reminiscences of Edgar Allan Poe” in 1863, an essay that has proved to be one of the primary sources for description of Poe's domestic life at Fordham cottage.(11) [page 69:]

Griswold's Venom

Inevitably the stain of Griswold's venom infected some of the literature devoted to Poe during the two decades immediately following his death. It is remarkable, however, how little of this literature is openly hostile or wholly denunciatory. Most of it assumes some sort of middle position, subscribing to Griswold's dark picture of the man but paying tribute to his genius or finding in Poe some personal virtues which tend to mitigate the darker image or seeking extenuating circumstances which render him more a victim than a villain. There are even a few poems by acknowledged partisans of Poe that express unqualified sympathy for him in spite of the fact that they show the effects of Griswold's machinations. By and large, the literature infected by Griswold's vernom consists of mixed tributes apparently born of a fascination for the figure of one man, as N. P. Willis described the prevailing image of Poe, “inhabited by both a devil and an angel.”(12)

Two poems published in the New York Tribune during October of 1849 illustrate how various were the effects of Griswold's denunciation of Poe. On October 16, the Tribune printed “Edgar A. Poe,” a poem written “for the Tribune” by Carlos D. Stuart, co-editor of the New York Sun.(13) Stuart evidently accepted the “Ludwig” account of Poe's life and character, but he was able to distinguish between the man and his art. The poem begins with the thought that perhaps [page 70:] death was for Poe not untimely, but it quickly shifts to an expression of grief:

The poem goes on for two more stanzas to celebrate Poe as “A bright and ever-burning star” which, like Shelley's Adonais, now “livest in eternal light,” “fixed” and “immortal.” Although this poem makes no explicit allusion to the “Ludwig” obituary, the fact that a co-editor of the Sun submitted his tribute to Poe to the rival newspaper which had carried the malicious attack upon him just one week earlier suggests that Stuart might have been censuring Griswold for dwelling upon Poe's personal life at the expense of his artistic accomplishments. The other poem published in the Tribune is in no way a censure of Griswold. It is “Miserrimus,” the first of a number of attacks upon the dead poet by R. H. Stoddard, a man who, although he had had only a slight personal acquaintance with Poe; took it upon himself to become an advocate of Griswold's dark image. Dated October 17 and printed by the Tribune on October 27, “Miserrimus” follows the “Ludwig” line of attack by labeling Poe a man whose “faults were many” and whose “virtues few,” [page 71:]

Stoddard depicts Poe as a kind of Faust-like conjurer of evil things:

“Miserrimus” closes on a note of sanctimonius exhortation:

Nathaniel Parker Willis's Home Journal printed two mixed tributes to Poe before the close of 1849. The first, entitled “Requiem” and published on October 27, appeared over the initials “E. S.”(15) These initials are drawn from the two middle names of Mrs. Jane Ermine Starkweather Locke of Lowell, Massachusetts, a woman who had had a firsthand acquaintance with Poe.(16) She had alternately sought and slandered him as he had alternately encouraged and scorned her. Although the editor of the Home Journal identified “E. S.” to be “one of the good and pure who had an unvarying sympathy and admiration for our friend Edgar Poe,” “Requiem” distinguishes between the bard whose harp was “of mightiest tone” and the man whose “errors” should now be forgotten. The most interesting passage in the poem is [page 72:] Mrs. Locke's lament that friends of Poe, no doubt including herself, tried in vain to redeem him:

On November 17, the Home Journal printed another mixed tribute, “On the Death of Edgar A. Poe” by Sarah Tittle Bolton, a poetess of Indianapolis now remembered as the author of “Paddle Your Own Canoe. ‘’(17) In eleven stanzas imitating the meter and style of “The Raven,” Mrs. Bolton offers a sentimental but sympathetic portrait of Poe as the “lost one” whose “wild and wayward heart” is now “Safely moored from sorrow's tempest”:

After dipping into “The Haunted Palace” and “Ulalume” for more autobiography, Mrs. Bolton returns to “The Raven” for her conclusion:

Mrs. Bolton's poem is a good illustration of how persons who had no firsthand knowledge of Poe helped to shape the Poe legend out of hearsay and especially out of reading his work as autobiography.

Mixed tributes continued to appear after the close of 1849. Under the pseudonym the “Bard of Baltimore,” Henry Clay Preuss, better known as a political writer than as a poet, contributed four stanzas entitled “Edgar A. Poe” to the Richmond (Virginia) Enquirer for January 29, 1850.(18) Preuss was one of the first of many to consider Poe the victim of his own “traitor Genius”:

Godey's for February carried “The Lost-Pleiad — Edgar A. Poe” by Harriet Marion Stephens, author, editor, and actress.(19) Mrs. Stephens urges that all Poe's faults be forgiven because his soul, like the truant star Merope, was love. Still another mixed tribute was written by Rebecca S. Nichols of Cincinnati. Poe had mentioned her work on two occasions. In 1842 he noted her “excellent contributions to the Magazines and Annuals ,” and in 1845 he found her to be “one of our most imaginative and vigorous poets.”(20) Her verses on Poe occur in ‘’The Dead Year,” a poem rehearsing lugubrious events that took place in 1849.(21) The passage clearly reflects the influence [page 74:] of Griswold's denunciation; yet Mrs. Nichols is able to distinguish between the poet whom she damns to “hopeless slumber” and his poetry which she finds unsurpassed in glory:

In a note to this passage identifying Poe to her readers, Mrs. Nichols reemphasizes her respect for his poetry:

Although the flurry of interest in Poe prompted by the event of his death subsided within several years, the effects of Griswold's denunciation continued to be felt in the literature which appeared sporadically thereafter. One of the least sympathetic treatments of Poe [page 75:] written after his death is “A Great Man Self-Wrecked,” an unsigned prose item published in the National Magazine in October of 1852.(23) Following Griswold's suggestion that Poe's “career is full of instruction and warning,” this piece of slander is a typical temperance tale tracing the decline of an unnamed young man who drowned his gifts in alcohol. For the most part, the narrative adheres to the “facts” of Griswold's account of Poe's life in the “Memoir,” reproducing such errors committed by Griswold as Poe's expulsion from the University of Virginia for dissipation, his desertion from the army as the termination of an enlistment following his dismissal from West Point, and his death at the age of thirty-eight. Curiously, though, the tale departs from Griswold in several particulars. It identifies the young man's guardian to have been “a wealthy merchant of New-York,” makes the drunken hero the eldest of three children, and establishes the date of his birth as 1809 (the tale states that he was adopted in 1815 at the age of six; Griswold gives Poe's birth date as 1811). It is not until the reader arrives at a postscript that the real identity of the young man is revealed, and it is at this point that some of the edge is taken off the criticism of Poe:

Of special interest for their author's connection with Poe are verses by John Reuben Thompson published in 1856. Editor of the [page 76:] Southern Literary Messenger from 1847 to 1860, Thompson met Poe in 1848. He admired Poe's genius, but he had reservations about his personal life. In a tribute to the dead poet published in the Messenger for November of 1849, Thompson declared that he would throw “the mantle of forgetfulness” over Poe's infirmities; yet it was Thompson who broadcast exaggerated accounts of Poe's drinking during his visit to Richmond in. the summer of 1848. In July of 1856, Thompson delivered a poem entitled “Virginia” before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of William and Mary College.(24) “Virginia” is a paean to the accomplishments of the Commonwealth, among which Thompson numbers the rearing of such illustrious literary sons as Philip Pendleton Cooke, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and Edgar Allan Poe. Like Henry Clay Preuss's poem, quoted above, Thompson's stanza on Poe presents him as the victim of his own great gift:

Thomas Bailey Aldrich included a poem on Poe in his The Ballad of Babie Bell and Other Poems, 1859. A member of the generation of writers whose careers were just getting under way when Poe's came to an abrupt close, Aldrich had no personal acquaintance with the author of “The Raven.” Nevertheless, his poem, entitled ‘’A Poet's Grave,” shares Stoddard's sentiments in “Miserrimus” that Poe “built his nest / With the birds of Night”:

Evidently Aldrich's opinion did not mellow. When he revised the poem for publication in 1865 as “The Poet ,” he added the accusation that Poe had “wasted richest gifts of God.”(26)

In November of 1860, the Southern Literary Messenger carried James Wood Davidson's “To Mrs. M. C., The ‘More than Mother’ of Edgar Poe,” a poem honoring Poe through a tribute to Mrs. Clemm.(27) Although Davidson had risen to the dead poet's defence,(28) his poem reveals a trace of the defamation in an allusion to Poe's “erring”:

One would assume “his own, his darling, life, and bride — / Lenore, his soul's Lenore” to be Virginia Poe, but this probably is not the case. The passage quoted by Davidson is taken from a poem entitled “Arcturus” that Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman addressed to Poe while he was courting her in November of 1848.(29) A friend of the Providence widow, Davidson evidently considered her to be Poe's bride “in spirit faith” if not in fact.(30)

Although the advent of the Civil War probably accounts in part for the dearth of literature devoted to Poe during the 1860's, the conflict did give rise to one poem that reflects the sectionalism of the period as well as the prevailing dark image of Poe. The poem is “The Southern Lyre” by Paul Hamilton Hayne of Charleston. A protégé of William Gilmore Simms and co-editor of Russell's Magazine from 1857 to 1860, Hayne defended the Confederacy on the fields of literature and journalism. “The Southern Lyre,” appearing in the Southern Illustrated News for July 4, 1863, heralds the end of alleged Northern muffling of Southern voices:

Among the members of this “glorious Band” celebrated by Hayne are Edward Coote Pinkney, William Gilmore Simms, Albert Pike, Philip Pendleton Cooke, John Esten Cooke, Henry Timrod, James Ryder Randall, John Reuben Thompson, and Severn Teackle Wallis. But it is Poe who enjoys the honor of first to be cited. Sectionalism does not prevent Hayne from seeing the darkness that hung about the image of Poe; he interprets it, however, as the profundity of a courageous spirit:

Still another poem showing the effects of Griswold's denunciation is “Poe,” 1870, by George Alfred Townsend, journalist, war correspondent, poet, and novelist.(32) He pleads that we set not Poe's frailties “up for fame”; at the same time, Townsend makes no efforts to conceal or to minimize them: [page 80:]

On the other hand, Townsend is unstinting in his admiration for Poe's poetry, which he characterizes as the song of an Israfel in hell:

In keeping with his reservations about the poet's personal life, Townsend expresses wonder at the fidelity of women who loved Poe in spite of his derelictions:

Posthumous Utterances

The Spiritualist movement provided a curious episode in the literature devoted to Poe during the two decades immediately following [page 81:] his death. Spiritualism seems always to have been in the air, perhaps more accurately the ether, but when the Fox sisters of Rochester, New York, heard the famous rappings in 1848, they opened the door to a vogue which persisted for over two decades. Some Spiritualists were attracted to Poe. The attraction was explained in 1863 by Lizzie Doten, one of the best known trance-speakers of the day:

Poe was a kind of medium at large, Miss Doten continues:

Evidently the Spiritualists accepted such works as “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” “Ulalume,” “The Sleeper,” and ‘’The Raven” as genuine records of Spiritualist experiences, records identifying Poe literally as a spirit akin to theirs.

A number of poems grew out of the attraction Poe held for the Spiritualists. All of them are improvisations alleged to be posthumous messages from Poe delivered through the agency of entranced mediums. Most of them are little more than parodies of Poe's work or style cast 82 in frantic and obscure language. And most of them show the influence of Griswold's denunciation of Poe, although they often try to interpret his reputed weaknesses in terms of spiritual advantages.

One of the earliest of these poems is “The Serpent Horror” by Sarah Gould, a Spiritualist associate of Mrs. Whitman and later the wife of Horace Day. Published in Miss Gould's Asphodels in 1856, “The Serpent Horror” represents Spiritualist improvisation at its most obscure. It tells the story of a dream vision in which the narrator is overwhelmed by snakes:

The poem concludes with the advice that horrors such as this can be avoided by calling upon “thy guardian angel bright” to keep watch. There is nothing about the poem to suggest a connection with Poe, not even an effort to imitate his style. Nevertheless, in a letter to James Wood Davidson, Mrs. Whitman revealed that “The Serpent Horror” was a message to her from Poe delivered through the entranced [page 83:] Miss Gould while the two ladies were en route by boat from Providence to New York.(36) Mrs. Whitman interpreted the poem to be a scolding by Poe for her neglect of his memory. Just how she deciphered the message remains unexplained.

A little less obscure than Miss Gould's improvisation are four poems carried in the July, 1857, number of the Herald of Light, a journal edited by Thomas Lake Harris, one of the leaders of the Spiritualist movement. All four poems appear in an article entitled “Edgar Poe in the Spirit World.”(37) The article purports to record a series of occasions between August of 1851 and June of 1855 when the spirit of Poe put in appearances before a select company of believers and dictated the poetry. The author of the article, probably R. Allston Lavender, Jr., a trance-speaker who is reported to have passed at least a part of his career in an insane asylum in North Carolina, seems to have been responsible for three of the four poems; the remaining poem was delivered through the agency of the Reverend Mr. Harris.(38) On his first visit, in August of 1853, “the lamented and unfortunate Poet” dictated “The Departure” through Mr. Lavender.(39) An uninspired imitation of “The Haunted Palace,” “The Departure” is said to have been Poe's attempt “to embody in external language a poetic description of his spiritual state,” which was currently one of agony and doubt. On his second appearance, November 30, 1854, Poe chose to speak through the Reverend Mr. Harris. The result was an [page 84:] imitation of “The Raven,” an imitation wherein Poe's freed spirit is made to plead its own case as one who had in life been “crushed as never man before” by “All Earth's undivided sorrows.”(40) When he delivered his third poem, Poe was “accompanied by a Spirit dressed in the costume of the Elizabethan Age.’” Although Poe failed to introduce him, there can be little question that his quaintly attired spirit companion was Shakespeare. On this occasion Poe chose Mr. Lavender as the medium for delivering a poem entitled “The Raven.”(41) This imitation is a curiosity because it attempts to offer a Spiritualist sequel wherein the melancholy conclusion of the original poem converted to a cheerful denouement in the Spirit World: upon confronting the spirit of his raven, Poe discovers that it was no demon after all; in fact it was not even a bird:

There is no title to Poe's last message, four verses spoken through Mr. Lavender on June 11, 1856. Here Poe assures us that although in life he “hated like a devil,” God has forgiven him:

Lizzie Doten has earned at least mention in any discussion of Spiritualist poetry devoted to Poe. Her Poems from the Inner Life, 1864, contains six alleged posthumous Poe poems and several essays on the relationship between Poe and Spiritualism. Two of the six poems, “The Cradle or Coffin”(44) and “The Prophecy of Vala,”(45) have nothing to do with Poe beyond the claim that they were given under his “inspiration.” “Farewell to Earth,” a loose imitation of “The Bells,” traces the progress of Poe's spirit from woe to joy as it is “Drawn by Love's celestial magnet” to ‘’the land of Light and Beauty, where no bud of promise dies.”(46) The some journey to bliss is treated in “The Kingdom,” a very clever imitation of “Ulalume.”(47) In “Resurrexi,” Poe returns to tell us mortals in the meter of “The Raven” “of the glory that is mine forevermore.”(48) The last of Miss Doten's Poe poems, “The Streets of Baltimore,” purports to be Poe's own account of those obscure last days of his life.(49) The idea certainly has possibilities, but Miss Doten failed to realize them. She preferred Spiritualist delirium tremens to straightforward reportage.(50)

In 1885, ten years after the movement had subsided, Walter Hamilton, the English collector of parodies, offered some acid comments upon the Spiritualist effusions attributed to Poe. “Those who are incredulous in regard to these Spiritual manifestations,” Hamilton said by way of definition, [page 86:]

And he observed with irony “that Poe's Spirit has not produced anything at all equal in quality to the poems written by Poe whilst he was still in the flesh.” Although Hamilton's sarcasm is justified, the significance of the Spiritualist improvisations should not be overlooked. They serve to illustrate, perhaps better than anything else, how imaginative literature devoted to Poe exproccoc the spirit of the time in which it is written. Or to put it another way, the Spiritualist movement is similar to Freudianism, Jungianism, Existentialism, and Neo-Thomism to the extent that each has converted Poe into its own image.