Text: John E. Reilly, “A Cause Célèbre (1870-1909),” Poe in Imaginative Literature, dissertation, 1965, pp. 87-128 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 87:]

Rufus Griswold died of tuberculosis in 1857 at the age of forty-two. Had he lived another two decades, he would have witnessed the ironic outcome of the defamation of Poe that he had set in motion. The ironic outcome was an era of intense sympathy largely a reaction against the hostility Poe had suffered during the two decades immediately following his death. As it was noted in the introductory chapter to this study, it was not the image of Poe so much as the attitude toward it that changed. An age which congratulated itself upon being more tolerant of Poe's weaknesses now honored a native genius thought to have been scandalously neglected by his contemporaries and treacherously maligned by his literary executor. Denunciation gave way to a sense of atonement. Blame for Poe's faults rested not with him but with the society that had misunderstood and mistreated him. That society would now atone for its scorn and its neglect by lamenting his fate and belatedly recognizing his genius in a series of public testimonials beginning in 1875 with the erection of a monument at his grave in Baltimore and culminating in 1909 with the centennial celebration of his birth.

The shift in Poe's public posture from villain to victim marked no decline in the feeling he was able to evoke. Indeed his image [page 88:] assumed even more emotional potential. Now the fascination of his romantic figure was enhanced by the charm of pity and the spirit of a cause célèbre. Literature devoted to him increased accordingly, celebrating a figure no less unreal, no less legendary than his defamers had denounced but several years before.

Poetry

Poetry heralded the revival of interest in Poe, participated in each of the public testimonials, and reached a veritable crescendo during the celebration of his birth. Most of this poetry consists of undistinguished performances by authors of little or no prominence, authors who wax maudlin at the thought of Poe's hard fate and raise a chorus of hosannas to welcome the triumph of immortal genius over defamaticn and neglect. Some of the poems, however, stand apart either for the prominence of their authorship or for the uniqueness of their statement.about Poe.

Certainly unique for their statement are some of the twelve poems in Pot-Pourri, a pamphlet published in 1875 under the pseudonym “Abel Reid.”(1) Five of the poems (“Israfiddlestrings,” “Hullaloo,” “To Any,” “Hannibal Leigh,” and “Part of an Unfinished Ghoul-Poem”) are parodies riducling Poe's poetry but making no explicit reference to him or to his works. Five other parodies (“The Haunted Palace,” “Dream-Mere,” “The Ghouls in the Belfry,” “Raving,” and “The Monster Maggot”) and a six-line verse entitled [page 89:] “Pot-Pourri” criticize him explicitly as a sick soul, as a poet who

“On a Poet's Tomb,” the last poem in the pamphlet, offers Abel Reid's explanation for his abuse of Poe:

Although the poems in Pot-Pourri resurrect the spirit of Griswold, they do reflect the current reaction against it to the extent that they represent a counter-reaction.

More in keeping with the spirit of the revival is William Winter's “At Poe's Grave,” the poem delivered as a part of the ceremonies marking the dedication of the monument in Westminster Churchyard, Baltimore, on November 17, 1875.(4) The thought of Poe carried Winter beyond the edge of tears: [page 90:]

His picture of Poe is as legendary as any concocted by his defamers:

Most characteristic of the new attitude, however, is Winter's belief that atonement is now being made for the shabby treatment Poe received in the past:

Although Poe might have had Winter's affection, there is reason to doubt that the eulogist had come to terms with the dead poet's life. Miss Sara Sigourney Rice was obliged to deliver Winter's poem because he was among the conspicuous host of American literary figures who found excuses to avoid Baltimore that November day.(5)

When a record of the exercises at Westminster Churchyard was published in 1877, several poems not a part of the original [page 91:] ceremonies were appended.(6) One of them is “Poe” by Paul Hamilton Hayne,(7) whose “Southern Lyre” was examined in the preceding chapter. Hayne's poem is noteworthy not only because its author was a prominent poet of the South but because it illustrates how the new attitude toward Poe could convert even the darkest shadows of the legend into a sympathetic picture. Hayne reasserts the Manichean interpretation of Poe's psyche that had been offered many years earlier by his defamers:

According to Hayne, Poe gave himself over in turn to each of these spirits until the “wild demon” reigned unchallenged. The rout of the “fair angel” was not, as his defamers had insisted, the fault of Poe. He was the victim, not-the villain, the victim “sapped by want, and riven by wrong.” Poe's immortal poetry, Hayne continues, is an impassioned response to this want and wrong, an impassioned response “In concords far too sweet to die, / Wedding despair to harmony.” Hayne's closing stanza clearly indicates the new role Poe was assuming: he is the ‘type” or symbol of the innocent victim of a “fate remorseless”: [page 92:]

Still another poem appended to the record of the Westminster Churchyard exercises is a sonnet entitled “Edgar A. Poe” by Edgar Fawcett:

It is inconceivable that Sara Sigourney Rice, the guiding spirit behind the movement to erect the monument in Baltimore and editor of the published record of the exercises, would have wittingly permitted anything critical of Poe to appear in the little volume. Doubtless she felt that Fawcett was not expressing disapproval of Poe but was merely dwelling upon his penchant for the macabre. That Fawcett did disapprove of Poe is spelled out in a letter he submitted to the editor of the Literary World in 1882.(9) “That Mr. Bryant, Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes or Mr. Lowell have not lifted themselves far above the trifling [page 93:] jingle of Poe's verse,” Fawcett observes,

Regardless of the spirit in which Miss Rice accepted Fawcett's sonnet for publication, there is little doubt that it should be numbered among the handful of poems denouncing Poe between 1875 and 1909.

In 1877 John H. Hewitt published “At the Grave of Edgar A. Poe,” a poem of four stanzas more in keeping with the dominant [page 94:] attitude of the revival.(10) Hewitt had known Poe as early as 1833, when they shared the honors in a literary contest offered by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Hewitt's poem on Poe, appearing in his Shadows on the Wall; or Glimpses of the Past, pictures him as a haunted poet alienated in life and honored only in death:

Judging by this last stanza, one would imagine that Hewitt had fallen under the spell of Thomas Holley Chivers, whose verse Poe once described as “full of images of more than arabesque monstrosity.”

The closing years of the 1870's saw a confluence of poems associated with women who knew Poe. In 1877 B. W. Ball published a sonnet attesting to the abiding charms of Mrs. Nancy Locke Heywood Richmond (Poe's “Annie”) and recalling ‘’the spell they wove / Around thy glorious minstrel's lonely heart.”(11) Mrs. Whitman's death in May of the following year prompted another sonnet, one [page 95:] signed “G.W.P.”(12) The author praises her for rising to the defence of Poe against his defamers:

Mrs. Whitman's last poem on Poe, “The Portrait,” was first published in the collected edition of her poetry which appeared the year after her death. “The Portrait” is discussed in an appendix to this study along with the remainder of Mrs. Whitman's poetry devoted to Poe.(13) In that same year, 1879, Estelle Anna Lewis, then residing in England, composed “First Meeting” and “Beneath the Elm,” two sonnets offering a romanticized account of her visits with Poe at the Fordham cottage more than thirty years earlier.(14) She depicts herself as a youthful woman, the “chalice” of whose poetic “soul o’erflow’d with melody” under the influence of Poe, who seemed to her to have been “some lone spirit sent from heaven.” These two sonnets, printed in the New York Home Journal in February of 1880, are the last poems about Poe from the hand of any one who knew him well. Mrs. Lewis died the following month.(15)

The decade of the 1880's was marked by the second public testimonial to Poe's stature as a great American poet. The event was the dedication of the Actors’ Monument to Edgar Allan Poe in New York in 1885. Once again William Winter was invited to contribute a poem to the exercises, and he responded with nineteen Spenserian stanzas under the title “Poe.”(16) Although Winter waxed [page 96:] as maudlin about his subject in 1885 as he had a decade earlier, he seems still to have found it difficult to come to terms with Poe's life. For the ceremonies at Westminster Churchyard in 1875, he had labelled Poe heaven's “wayward child.” In 1885 he prefaced his poem with a brief “speech” disavowing any effort to justify Poe's “outward and visible life”:

In spite of this disavowal, Winter did not entirely avoid what he considered the darker side of Poe. He tried instead to exonerate him as one who must not be judged by conventional moral standards:

That Winter was making some progress in coming to terms with the life of Poe is suggested by the fact that in 1885 he appeared at the ceremonies to recite his verses.

Among approximately a dozen other poems devoted to Poe in the 1880's, John Henry Boner's “Poe's Cottage at Fordham” stands out.(19) Published originally in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine for November of 1889, it has enjoyed far more reprintings than any other American poem about Poe, making its most conspicuous appearance as a part of the centennial exercises at the Fordham cottage sponsored by the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences in 1909. Boner expresses the fascination of his age for what it believed was the ambiguous character of Poe, for what it believed was a volatile mixture of the angelic and the demonic:

Perhaps Boner's poem is not remarkable for its artistry, but it is remarkable as one of the first and certainly the most familiar of many poems inspired by the cottage at Fordham. This humble piece of real estate was fast becoming what we Americans like to call a national shrine, in this case a shrine devoted to a national martyr well on his way to canonization.

From the point of view of poetry about Poe, the decade of the 1890's was in many respects a duplicate of the eighties. Approximately another dozen poems appeared. Like John Henry Boner, Henry Jerome Stockard, poet and professor of English at the University of North Carolina, found inspiration in the Poe cottage;(21) and Joel Benton, author of In the Poe Circle, was moved to verse by no more than a shingle from that shrine.(22) Boner himself wrote two poems “On a Portrait of Poe”; both are sonnets attesting to Poe's greatness and lamenting his defamation at the hands, rather teeth, of “vicious curs.”(23) To complete its similarity to the 1880's, the decade of the nineties had even its public testimonial. The occasion was the unveiling of the Zolnay bust at the University of Virginia at the semi-centennial of Poe's death in 1899.(24) This time the “Memorial Poem” was not the work of William Winter; instead Robert Burns Wilson of Frankfort, Kentucky, was given the opportunity of expressing the prevailing pathetic picture of Poe as a Man whose weaknesses were indicative of his greatness: [page 100:]

Wilson also acknowledges the contribution Poe's enemies unwittingly made to the vitality of their victim's name:

Another poem written for the ceremonies of the unveiling of the Zolnay bust is “To Edgar Allan Poe” by the Reverend John Bannister Tabb:

This is only one of a group of eight poems on Poe by Father Tabb.(27) His first, and one of the few line lyrics inspired by Poe, is a sonnet written in 1882:

Trenchant attack upon Poe's critics is a distinctive trait of several of Father Tabb's poems. In 1885, fourteen years before Robert Burns Wilson expressed the idea in his “Memorial Poem, ‘ Father Tabb wrote a little fable pointing up the irony that Poe's defamers unwittingly contributed to the evolution of his fame:

As much a champion of Chopin as of Poe, Father Tabb linked these two artists in a quatrain entitled “Poe-Chopin” published in the Chap-Book in May of 1896. Here he finds the element common to both men to be the association of beauty with death:

In 1897 Father Tabb published another quatrain, one adding to the growing list of verses celebrating the Fordham cottage as a shrine:

Two years later, 1899, he contributed the poem, quoted above, to the ceremonies marking the unveiling of the Zolnay bust; and in the Independent for March 3, 1904, he cast an attack upon Poe's critics in the form of a complaint by Poe himself:

When Poe failed to be elected to the Hall of Fame in 1905, Father Tabb celebrated the event with a caustic quatrain:

The last of Father Tabb's eight poems is aimed at two critics who failed to appreciate the spirit of the centennial in 1909. The poem is “For the Poe Centenary,” and the critics are Harry Thurston Peck and Brander Matthews:

With Father Tabb's death on November 19 of the year of the centennial, Poe lost a devoted and articulate champion.

Father Tabb's poetry spans the closing years of the Nineteenth Century and the first decade of the Twentieth, a decade which sustained the interest in Poe ushered in by the revival back in the 1870's. Poe was nominated for a place in the Hall of Fame twice in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, but on each occasion, 1903 and 1905, he failed to be elected. The ensuing public uproar, however, revealed the electors who opposed him to have been at odds with the prevailing attitude toward Poe. More in keeping with this attitude was the publication in 1902 of what remains the most complete edition of his works along with Harrison's sympathetic biography, the appearance of such essays as Jeannette L. Gilder's “Poe Not as Black as He Was Painted” (1903),(35) and the celebration of the centennial of his birth in 1909. [page 104:]

At least eighteen poems on Poe appeared in print after the turn of the century and before the centennial year. Among them were more verses inspired by the Fordham shrine(36) and poems by two of the more eccentric members of the Poe cult: Colonel John A. Joyce and Oliver Leigh.(37) Among them also was a quatrain by Clifford Lanier, the talented but now forgotten brother of Sidney. The quatrain is entitled simply “Edgar Allan Poe”:

This tribute appeared in Clifford's Apollo and Keats on Browning, 1902.(38) In 1905 the California poet and Bohemian George Sterling devoted a sonnet to Poe hailing him as “an undeparting light”:

By far the outstanding poem of the years between the turn of the century and the centennial is “For a Copy of Poe's Poems” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Typically, Robinson sees Poe as having pursued the gleam of light, or what he calls that “dimmed ideal”:

Published in Lippincott's for August of 1906,(40) this sonnet is not included in Robinson's collected works.

The centennial of Poe's birth in January of 1909 was marked by ceremonies throughout the world. In this country they were held principally at the Fordham cottage in the Bronx, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and at Poe's alma mater in Charlottesville, where exercises extended over three days. The profound solemnity of the occasion moved at least one wag to ridicule:

A good deal of this “emotion and commotion” took the form of poems, more than three dozen of which made their way into journals and newspapers or were recited as part of public exercises.

Most of these centennial poems merely re-echo what had often been echoed in verse since the 1870's. In the Christian Advocate (Nashville, Tennessee), for example, Mrs. Annie White Lisenby converted Poe's weaknesses into virtues:

Similarly, in verses contributed to the Carolinian for February, someone identified only as “R. E. G.” displayed a fascination for Poe's weaknesses under the guise of a willingness to excuse them:

Lizette Woodworth Reese of Baltimore resketched the conventional romantic picture of Poe's sad life in a poem recited as a part of the [page 107:] exercises at Johns Hopkins sponsored by the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association:

The late James Southall Wilson resurrected the Manichean image of Poe's psyche in a poem delivered in Charlottesville. In keeping with the spirit of the centennial, Professor Wilson awarded the palm to the good angel in the struggle for Poe's soul:

And as a part of the same exercises at the University of Virginia, Benjamin C. Moomaw pursued the practice of hurling at Poe's enemies the stones they once had thrown at him:

Above these echoes of the past several decades, there arose a clear note which characterized the centennial as Poe's “coronation,” or canonization. It was the conviction that atonement for the defamation and neglect of Poe was now complete and that he had now assumed his proper place among the immortals of literature. As one poet put it,

Edwin Markham uttered similar sentiments in “Our Israfel,” his poem delivered at the Fordham cottage as a part of the centennial ceremonies sponsored by the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences:

Also soliciting Poe's forgiveness, Charles W. Hubner, poet and librarian of Atlanta, assured him that an enlightened age would never again tolerate defamation: [page 109:]

Poe's critics were by no means permanently silenced; nevertheless, the crescendo of feeling expressed in the poetry of the centennial drowned out the opposition and marked the occasion as a culmination, a culmination of the sympathy that had been gathering since the revival of interest in Poe in the 1870's.

Drama

Five dramas are known to have been written about Poe between 1870 and 1909. Scripts for two of them survive; the other three now exist only as titles.(50) Because of the high mortality rate among unpublished playscripts, there is no way of ascertaining how many more might have been written.

The earlier of the two surviving dramas is The Raven by George Cochrane Hazelton. First copyrighted in 1893, it was revised for production in 1895, revised still further to be published as a drama in 1903 and as a novel in 1909, and it was filmed in 1915.(51) The Raven is not a dramatized biography. Hazelton made no serious effort to adhere to the facts of Poe's life and character. Instead he wrote a conventional melodrama exploiting the current enthusiasm over the romantic image of Poe. [page 110:]

The action of The Raven begins on the lawn of John Allan's home in Richmond.(52) Poe is in love with Virginia Clemm, who conveniently lives next door with her mother. His security in the Allan household and his love for Virginia are threatened, however, by Roscoe Pelham, A. M., an entirely fictitious character who is John Allan's secretary and ubiquitous villain of the piece. This scoundrel exposes the hero's gambling debts to Mr. Allan, who disinherits his foster son and banishes him forthwith. Acoompanied by Virginia and by his faithful slave Erebus, Poe departs to make his own way in the world. Neglecting most of Poe's literary career, Hazelton carries the action from Richmond to Fordham in January of 1847. Virginia's health is failing, and Poe is unable to make a living by his pen. While he and Mrs. Clemm are absent from the cottage (Mrs. Clemm has gone to her own cottage next door), Roscoe Pelham enters and is about to embrace Virginia forcibly when Poe returns. To prevent her impetuous husband from quarreling with the villain, Virginia feigns gaiety, sings, and dies of a ruptured blood vessel. After Virginia's death, Poe meets and falls in love with Helen Whitman, a wealthy poetess residing in Fordham. He is drawn to her by her uncanny resemblance to Virginia, a resemblance little short of reincarnation (an idea the playwright probably culled from Poe's short stories). Poe's plan to marry Helen Whitman is disrupted when Roscoe Pelham, who also happens to be Helen's legal advisor, reveals to her that Poe has broken his [page 111:] temperance pledge. She then bids Poe leave her, falls upon the sofa, and confesses her love for him much as Mrs. Whitman is in fact reported to have done in Providence on December 23, 1848. Before taking his leave, however, Poe recites the whole of “The Raven,” helpfully identifying it as ‘’the heart-rendering confession of my famished soul.” The play closes with Poe deranged and dying in Baltimore, where one of Roscoe Pelham's henchmen had drugged him and used him as a repeater in an election going on there at the time, ari election in which Pelham happened to be a candidate.

Hazelton's characterizations are no less fanciful than his plot. John Allan is more a stereotype of the plantation colonel than a Scottish merchant of Richmond. In the first act, Virginia is a coquettish Southern belle (probably Hazelton's conception of Elmira Royster). Thereafter she is a conventional melodramatic heroine, defending her virtue against the advances of the villain and sacrificing her life for the welfare of her husband. Hazelton's portrait of Poe is equally unreal. In the first act, he is the flippant prodigal who, like-prince Hal, claims to have hiS dissipation under control:

Evidently still with Shakespeare in mind, Hazelton has Poe address Virginia in language that reads like a parody of Romeo and Juliet:

After the first act, Poe degenerates into a ridiculous figure utterly lacking in nobility and genuine pathos. At one point, for example, he is discovered kneeling at Virginia's grave with a pistol to his temple delivering the conventional farewell-cruel-world soliloquy. Suddenly he catches his first glimpse of Helen Whitman, drops the pistol, rises, and follows her off-stage, “spell-bound.” His final speech is equally absurd. In a last lucid moment before his death, he refuses a glass of medicinal brandy offered to him by his friend Tony Preston:

Perhaps Hazelton intended this speech to assure his audience that Poe finally did solve one of his problems. [page 113:]

Hazelton's play was produced at Albraugh's Lyceum Theatre in Baltimore on October 11, 1895, with Creston Clarke, grandson of Junius Brutus Booth and nephew of Edwin Booth, in the part of Poe. A review of the production in the Baltimore Sun the following day provides some insight into both the popular taste and the popular image of Poe at the time.(53) The reviewer takes issue with Hazelton's insertion of two comic characters, Dolly and William Shucks, into his play, condemning them as “a pair of boorish people whose coarse wit was entirely out of keeping with the innate refinement of Poe.” In all other respects, however, the review is favorable:

Had the comic characters been cut, the reviewer speculates, “the success of last night's performance would have been more marked.” Evidently the public was at least as badly informed about the facts of Poe's life and character as the playwright was indifferent to them.

The other play is Olive Tilford Dargan's The Poet, published in her Semiramis and Other Plays, 1904.(54) Like Hazelton's The Raven, Mrs. Dargan's play is not a dramatization of Poe's biography. Neither, however, is it a melodrama, or at least was not intended to be. It is instead a refashioning of Poe's life in terms of a theme. The theme is that Poe was mismated, that Virginia was beautiful and [page 114:] childlike but was unsatisfactory as a helpmate to her poet-husband. What he needed and yearned for was a feminine ideal represented in the play by a beautiful young woman called Helen Truelord. She is a synthesis of the women Poe loved and lost — excluding Virginia, of course. At one point, Helen restrains her impetuous lover by pretending to be his “mamma.” Ridiculous though the episode is, it suggests Elizabeth Poe and Frances Allan:

And so forth. Like Jane Stanard, Helen Truelord is the inspiration for “To Helen,”(56) and like Elmira Royster, she is lost to Poe through a marriage arranged by her family.(57) Her sentimental character and residence in New York suggest Mrs. Osgood. She nurses and comforts Virginia’at Fordham much as Mary Louise Shew did. And if in nothing more than name, she resembles Sarah Helen Whitman. Dramatically she is the counterpart to Virginia. The idea has merit, but in the hands of Mrs. Dargan it is so poorly executed that it results in a monstrous distortion of Poe's life and character:

The entire first act of the play has no basis in fact. Its setting is, the home of Helen Truelord's father in New York. Poe makes [page 115:] an unexpected entrance through Helen's bedroom window, and although he has seen her only once before, he urges her to forsake her fiancé, Roger Bridgemore. When she hesitates, he becomes desperate, gets drunk, and makes love to her cousin Catherine Delormis, a woman of doubtful reputation with whom he had an affair “last summer in Normandy.” Although Poe loses Helen here in the first act, the memory of her haunts him throughout the remainder of the play. Act II presents Poe's marriage to Virginia. The setting is Mrs. Clemm's cottage “near Richmond,” where Poe has retired with “lines of suffering on his brow.” He marries his “little heart” on an impulse when Uncle Nelson Clemm threatens to send her away to school. Act III establishes the marriage to have been a mistake. Poe loves Virginia, but she is child-like and unable to appreciate his genius. Instead of aiding and encouraging him, she interrupts his work, finally spilling an inkwell over his manuscript. Poe is exasperated:

In another scene in the same act, he complains that Virginia is unable to share his poetic frenzy:

But Virginia cannot, and she is made to acknowledge her inadequacy on her deathbed in Act IV:

The last act finds Poe in Baltimore. In the first scene he is evicted from a Mrs. Schmidt's boarding house, where he could have remained in bodily comfort had he been willing to compromise his sense of beauty, “sell my soul for a broth-dish — a saucepan — a featherbed,” by marrying his widowed landlady. He is evicted again in the closing scene, this time from a Baltimore tavern which to his disordered mind is “the poet's house of dream that all my life I’ve sought to reach.”(61) In his final speech, it is not Virginia but Helen whom the deranged Poe addresses:

Although Mrs. Dargan tries to portray Poe as an impetuous and unfettered genius oblivious to conventions, she succeeds only in making him a madcap poet given over to bombastic garrulity. When, for example, Helen Truelord quite naturally registers surprise at his unexpected entrance through her bedroom window, Poe complains:

Poe is scarcely less unreasonable and no less bombastic in his domestic scenes with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm. He is most zany, however, when in Act III he returns home to his waiting wife from solitary nocturnal wanderings about the countryside in search of “Truth.” Here, is his entrance: [page 118:]

Perhaps such ranting and raving is appropriate when Poe is disturbed after the death of Virginia and immediately before his own, but it grossly misrepresents him to suggest that this was the typical man.

Fiction

The romantic image of Poe celebrated in the period from 1870 to 1209 found its way into five works of fiction.(65) Three of them are short stories. Two are novels.

The Valley of Unrest: A Book Without a Woman, 1883, is a short story by George Douglass Sherley offering a Poesque tale under the guise of reporting an incident in Poe's student life at the University of Virginia.(66) Sherley, himself a student at the university from 1878 to 1880, purports to interview an anonymous old man who had been a schoolmate of Poe in Charlottesville. Poe's old chum recalls how the future poet once led a band of riotous students into the Ragged Mountains as a means of avoiding a grand jury investigation of disturbances at the university. There is a kernel of truth here. Such a strategic withdrawal did occur and was reported by Poe to John Allan in May of 1826.(67) Poe was not, however, involved in the episode, and Sherley is only upholding the tradition that Poe was [page 119:] ever a rebel against society. Sherley uses the episode as a frame for his own Poesque tale. In order to enliven a dreary evening in the woods, Poe entertains his followers with a horror story delivered in the eerie light of their camp fire. The horror story is of no interest, but the frame situation presents a picture of Poe in keeping with the current image of him as a man both blessed and haunted:

Also in keeping with the current attitude toward Poe is Sherley's effort to explain his derelictions as the result of society's failure to appreciate his superiority to conventional moral standards: “at times, his fictitious old school chum observes, Poe could

No less fanciful than Sherley's tale is ‘’My Adventure with Edgar Allan Poe,” a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne's son, Julian, published in 1891.(70) Using one of Poe's own favorite themes, Hawthorne has him return briefly among the living after a premature burial forty-odd years before. The “adventure” consists of the narrator's interview with the resurrected author in a “small restaurant” in Philadelphia. As Edgar Allan Arnold (his mother's family name), Poe now occupies “the position of amanuensis to a prosperous banker,” a post in keeping with his accomplished penmanship. Although essentially unaltered in appearance, he is radically changed in character. “His love of fame” as well as “all traces of his weird imagination” are gone; gone too, it should be noted, is his intemperance: he now has “‘an unconquerable aversion to all forms of liquor.” On literary matters, he has reversed himself entirely. “‘There can be no enduring merit in such verses,’” he comments of his own poetry,

Similarly, he now finds his own theory and practice of fiction uncongenial;

One might imagine that Hawthorne's tale constitutes a critical commentary upon Poe, perhaps a dismissal of his work as the unsound product of ambition and immaturity: a product which Poe himself would have disowned had fate granted him a longer life. But the close of the tale seems to belie any serious meaning. Upon learning several weeks after the interview that Poe has died, a victim of the grippe, the narrator pays his respects to the dead man and is made to reflect upon “the quiet face in the coffin”:

No more profound as a commentary upon Poe is Hiram Emory Widener's “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” published in the University of Virginia Magazine in 1909.(73) Here three students from the university — a man of action “who had punched cattle in the West,” a “mild-eyed dreamer from the South,” and the narrator — undertake a kind of sentimental journey to the Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville “for Eddie's sake.” Almost utterly devoid of action, the “tale” consists of a series of eulogies upon “the Sage who sleeps yonder on Monticello,” upon the university he fathered, and upon one of her most illustrious alumni, Poe. When the Westerner the raises the question of “those stories about Poe's immorality,” it is the Southerner who comes to the poet's defence, providing an answer thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of the centennial year in which Widener's tale appeared:

The centennial year, 1909, saw the publication of the first full-length fictionalized biography of Poe and the first novel in which he appears as protagonist. The novel, George Cochrane Hazelton's The Raven: The Love Story of Edgar Allan Poe (‘Twixt Fact and Fancy), need not detain us. It is an adaptation of Hazelton's drama examined earlier in this chapter, an adaptation with an absolute minimum of revision. In several dozen pages, most of which are narrative, Hazelton summarizes Poe's life up to the scene on the lawn before John Allan's home in Richmond, the scene upon which the earlier play opens. With exception of one chapter (IX) surveying Poe's career from 1827 until 1847, the play and the novel are essentially the same. Dialogue is in many cases identical, and stage directions in the play appear as narrative background and transitional material in the novel. Just the play is not dramatized biography, so the novel is not really a fictionalized treatment of Poe's life. Both are conventional melodramas exploiting the current enthusiasm over the romantic image of Poe, and neither exhibits any genuine effort to adhere to the facts of his life and character. As a sample of the kind of soap opera hero Hazelton makes of Poe, here is the scene in the novel where he parts with the Allan family:

Mary Newton Stanard's The Dreamer, the fictionalized biography published in 1909, commands much more respect than Hazelton's melodrama.(76) Mrs. Stanard calls her book “a romantic rendering” of Poe's life-story,

Mrs. Stanard's “finished picture” is uniformly a sentimental one. Poe is a handsome, gifted, and sensitive young man into whose singularly gloomy and unsteady existence Virginia (“with a face like a Luca Della Robbie chorister”) shed a ray of joy and Mrs. Clemm (“with the ‘Mater Dolorosa’ expression”) provided timely support. By and large, The Dreamer remains faithful to the facts of Poe's life by confining its fiction to areas beyond the reach of biography. Thus with impunity Mrs. Stanard can lend continuity to the story of Poe's life by imagining that the refrain “nevermore” haunted him from infancy to death and that two disparate facets of his personality (“Edgar Goodfellow” and “Edgar the Dreamer”) dominated “him — spirit and body — by turns.” Mrs Stanard can pretend too that as a youth Poe swore to become a [page 125:] great author in order “to lift the loved name of his parents from the dust where it lay.” And because the facts surrounding his death even now remain obscure, she can permit Poe to die by his own hand cut of a “longing for the peace of the grave and reunion, in death, with Virginia.” For who would not contemplate suicide if the loss of a loved one had destroyed the kind of domestic paradise Mrs. Stanard creates for Poe:

Although the fictional elements in The Dreamer do not, by and large, conflict with the facts of Poe's life, they do collide occasionally. Collisions occur when the truth about Poe is at variance with Mrs. [page 126:] Stanard's sentimental portrait. For example, in an effort to endow Poe with parents as innocent as he, she suppresses the fact that his father abandoned his pregnant wife. David and Elizabeth Poe are a loving couple caught up in tragic circumstances: “It was known that she had lately lost a dearly loved and loving husband whom she had tenderly nursed through a distressing illness.” Again, Mrs. Stanard distorts the truth about Poe's intemperance. She openly admits it only when it serves to reinforce her love story. According to Mrs. Stanard, Poe's heavy drinking was an expression of loneliness for Virginia (i.e., when he first joined the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond while Virginia remained in Baltimore) or an expression of his apprehension over her health (i.e. after January of 1842). Otherwise Mrs. Stanard either minimizes or remains silent upon the subject. As a result of this suppression, she explains Poe's break with the Messenger on the grounds that the bold young editor chafed under the restraints of a timid publisher, and she depicts Poe's departure from Burton's to have been an amicable one prompted essentially by Poe's determination to establish his own journal. The subordination of fact to fiction is most apparent, however, in Mrs. Stanard's handling of Poe's relationship with Sarah Helen Whitman. The facts are that Poe caught his first glimpse of her in Providence, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1845 (and it is possible that pursuit of Mrs. Osgood took him to that city). Their first communication was a valentine poem [page 127:] addressed to Poe by Mrs. Whitman in February of 1848. The valentine invited Poe's friendship, and he responded by sending her a copy of his early “To Helen” poem, which he followed up with a new poem bearing the same title. The couple met for the first time in September of 1848, and their brief courtship ensued. Mrs. Stanard adheres to the substance of these events, but she manipulates the element of time. She has Poe catch his first glimpse of Mrs. Whitman in the summer of 1848, not 1845, and has the Providence widow then address her valentine to him. just why Mrs. Whitman would be writing a valentine in August or September remains unexplained. Nevertheless, Poe replies with his two poems entitled “To Helen.” But this creates still another difficulty because the second one, quoted in The Dreamer, begins “I saw thee once — once only — years ago.”(79) These absurdities are the result of Mrs. Stanard's effort to sustain the image of Poe as the unflinchingly faithful husband to Virginia. If Mrs. Stanard had not tampered with the element of time, she would have had to confront the truth that Poe was at least looking at another woman while his lovely child bride was still alive. To cite these deviations from fact is not to criticize The Dreamer but to point up the truth that it is primarily a fiction based upon the prevailing sentimental image of Poe.

“In response to a constant demand,” Mrs. Stanard issued a new but only slightly revised edition of The Dreamer in 1925. Despite its sentimentalism and its occasional lapses into melodrama, The [page 128:] Dreamer was infinitely more deserving of republication than Hazelton's The Raven. Both stories are of considerable interest, however, as records of the popular image of Poe during the period from the revival of interest in him in the 1870's to the centennial. Hazelton's utter disregard for the facts of Poe's biography and his gross exploitation of the melodramatic potentialities of the Poe legend suggest how thoroughly public feeling about Poe had in some instances divorced the image from the real man. On the other hand, The Dreamer represents a genuine effort to present a colorful and sentimental portrait of Poe within the framework of his real life. Of the two, Mrs. Stanard assumed the more difficult task because she was confronted with the dilemma of fact and fiction, a dilemma which was to become more acute as the legends surrounding Poe were gradually dissipated. But this is a topic more properly a part of the following chapter.