Text: John E. Reilly, “The Historical Fact (after 1909),” Poe in Imaginative Literature, dissertation, 1965, pp. 129-169 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 129:]

It was noted in the introductory chapter to this study that’. Poe's posthumous reputation has passed through three different phases. The first was one of defamation. It was initiated by Griswold almost at the moment of Poe's death, and it persisted, though diminished, for approximately two decades thereafter. The second phase was one of reaction wherein the dominant feeling was that atonement must be made for the shabby treatment that had been afforded a genuine native genius. This second phase began with the revival of interest in Poe in the 1870's and culminated in the crescendo of emotion marking the centennial celebration of his birth in 1909. Ironically, the images of Poe that prevailed in both of these first two phases were in many ways the same. More fable than fact, they were sustained not by the real Poe but by romantic and often colorful legend. The third and latest phase has been one of disenchantment. In the years since the centennial, Poe has fallen under the meticulous and, for the most part, dispassionate scrutiny of professional scholars. Through their efforts the old legendary image has gradually been uprooted and a new image of Poe has emerged. This new image, the historical Poe, has proved to be a less colorful, a far less romantic and dramatic figure than the legendary one that had been both damned and celebrated in the past. [page 130:]

Fiction

The emergence of the historical figure has created a dilemma for the author who would convert the life and character of Poe into fiction. Colorful, melodramatic, perhaps even tragic, and with just the right touch of scandal, the legendary Poe was promising material for romance, and because so many areas of his life remained obscure, it was possible for an author to manipulate and to enlarge upon the facts without seriously offending what was known to be true. On the other hand, the emerging historical Poe is not a promising subject. He is a less colorful figure who is known to have had a relatively prosaic outward life. If there is anything genuinely fascinating about him, it is the inward life of his imagination, but this is an area lying beyond ordinary narrative reach. To compound the difficulty, modern scholarship has uncovered so much of Poe's life that few areas remain where fiction would not threaten to conflict with fact. Hence the dilemma of fact and fiction. If the would-be author chooses to adhere to the real facts of Poe's life and character, the result will be biography and not fiction. If he chooses to resurrect the legendary life and character, the result will be a Poe novel in name only. And if he chooses to respect the facts of Poe's life but to present the old colorful image of his character, the result will be an abortion in which the narrative context does not support the character of the protagonist. In general, the dilemma now confronting the would-be author of a work of fiction about [page 131:] Poe is not unlike that confronting the painter in Henry James's “The Real Thing.” In both cases, the rigidity of fact threatens to curtail the plastic powers of the imagination.

Chanceloor Williams’ The Raven (1943) is an example of a novel that treats of the real Poe in little more than the name of its hero. This lengthy novel converts Poe's life story into a tasteless stew of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Das Capital spiced up with a generous sprinkling of Psychopathia Sexualis. The dominant theme in the novel is socio-economic with a decidedly left-wing cast. Utterly ignoring the fact that Poe consistently identified himself with Southern aristocracy, Williams makes him a staunch abolitionist and a champion of the downtrodden proletariat; and giving a new twist to Baudelaire's old charge that Poe was the tragic victim of American Philistinism, Williams has him suffer at the hands of such robber barons as John Allan (a “merchant Prince,” “the Southern representative of the new American system of capitalism” whose slaves and “mill workers” are restless) and “the rich and powerful Ralstons” (Roysters) who deprive Poe of his “Myra.” Williams’ socio-economic theme leads Poe into such extra-biographical episodes as a harrowing sojourn with the impoverished victims of industrial capitalism (Chapter XVIII), a walking tour through the idyllic world of American peasant farmers (Chapter XIX), and an encounter with President Andrew Jackson (the workingman's hero) in a tavern in Baltimore (Chapter XXIV). The key to Poe's [page 132:] personality, according to Williams’ characterization, is an inferiority complex born of the fact that his genitals were underdeveloped. By a turn of logic certainly not worthy of the real Poe, Williams has his hero interpret this to mean that he is something more than human:

The novel abounds with all manner of gratuitous distortion of fact: that David Poe was a Baltimore lawyer, that Poe composed “Ulalume” in 1826, that Griswold turned down “The Raven” for publication in Graham's, that Poe was attracted to Mrs. Osgood because she “was the reincarnation of Frances Allan,” and so forth. The Raven is remarkably misleading both as an account of Poe's life and as an interpretation of his character, but it is no more remarkable than the book reviewer who commended Williams for endeavoring “to give a true interpretation of the poet's character and personality and to make his narrative conform to the facts of his life so far as these are known.’‘(2) [page 133:]

Cothburn O’Neal's The Very Young Mrs. Poe (1956) confronts the dilemma of fact and fiction much more tastefully, much more artfully, than Williams’ novel. The Very Young Mrs. Poe is primarily a love story focusing upon Virginia and her relations with her famous husband, Since very little is known about Poe's wife and about the domestic life of the Poe family, the novelist is free to exercise his imagination in an area where the possibility of fiction colliding with fact is remote. O’Neal's portrait of Virginia differs from the traditional view that she was a perennial pre-adolescent, Poe's “heartsease blossom” whose “child-like heart” remained unaltered until her death at the age of twenty-four. Although O’Neal's Virginia begins in this simple state, the plot of the novel is built around her efforts to realize herself as a suitable helpmate to her husband, efforts which are made heroic in the face of a valiant struggle with failing health. For the most part, O’Neal’: handling of Poe is remarkably free of sentimentalism, treating him as a hard-working journalist and literary artist whose relations with his contemporaries were more professional than erratic. Since the novel closes with Virginia's death, the author is able to avoid treating the last years of Poe's life, years which lend support to some of the most sensational aspects of the old legends. Only occasionally does O’Neal lapse into much melodramatic characterization as when he ha's Poe make a Manfred-like protestation to his little cousin: “‘Don’t let me love you, Sissy,’ he whispered, perhaps to himself. ‘Whatever [page 134:] I love withers and dies before its time.’”(3) The Very Young Mrs. Poe is not only remarkably free of sentimentalism, it is remarkably faithful to the facts of Poe's biography in the years between 1831 and 1847, the period during which Virginia was associated with Poe.

Like Hazelton's The Raven (1909), Williams’ book and O’Neal's book fall into the category of novels as distinguished from fictionalized biographies such as Mrs. Stanard's “romantic rendering” in The Dreamer. The years since the centennial have seen the publication of two more fictionalized biographies. In each of them the dilemma of fact and fiction is encountered head-on in a vain effort to convert Poe's life into romance.

Dorothy Dow's Dark Glory (1931) is the earlier and less successful of these fictionalized biographies. Miss Dow remains faithful to the events of Poe's life by confining her fiction largely to imaginary conversation and to narrative commentary and interpolation of events .(4) But the book has two fatal weaknesses. One of them is structural. In her fidelity the chronicle of Poe's life, Miss Dow fails to produce the kind of shape or direction of events that is essential to successful narrative structure. The other fault is one of character. Although she insists that Poe is the “one god” among the “semigods” of nineteenth-century American writers, Miss Dow succeeds only in fashioning the figure of a “pitiful American poet” who, during his whole life, wandered among realities, missing them, mixing them”: [page 135:]

Miss Dow's melancholy chronicle of a pathetic and desperate life is a tale of far more darkness than of glory.

Laura Benet's Young Edgar Allan Poe (1941), the other fictionalized biography, is a book “for younger readers.” It has a distinct advantage over Dark Glory because it covers Poe's life only up to his tenure as editor of Graham's (1842), which was in many ways the apogee of his literary career and the most stable moment in his personal life. Hence Miss Benet had the good fortune of choosing a portion of Poe's biography that is inherently structural to the extent that it moves toward a kind of triumph or climax in 1842. Although the ensuing years were not without-their fine moments, it was largely an anticlimactic, aimless, and often pathetic period; and by leaving them out, the author was able to endow her narrative with a somewhat meaningful structure. In keeping with the character of her young audience, Miss Benet avoids the darker hues of the traditional portrait of her hero. For example, she minimizes Poe's derelictions by alluding to them as “vagaries” or only as the [page 136:] “occasional” use of “stimulants.” A prefatory note to the text informs the reader that the author was “especially” anxious “to keep to the facts of that extraordinary career, not to weave fiction out of them “ Miss Benet admits, however, that for the sake of “vividness.” she “decided to use material that is, by some people, considered legendary.”(6) These legends include Poe's visit to the Elgin Marbles while in England with the Mans, his student escapades at West Point, and his love affair with Mary Devereaux of Baltimore, an affair that allegedly ended with his cowhiding her uncle. Miss Benet not only

“uses” some of the old legends, she creates a few of her own, chief among which is the fiction that Poe was haunted from infancy by a “Shadow” which he ultimately embodied in his poem “The Raven.”(7) Despite her anxiety to adhere to the “facts,” Miss Benet, like other fictionists, has found it necessary to enlarge upon Poe's life.

From The Raven and The Very Young Mrs. Poe to Dark Glory and The Young Edgar Allan Poe there is a distinct step in the direction from fiction to fact. Still another step is represented by books which are essentially faithful biographies but which are not entirely free of fictional coloring. Hervey Allen's Israfel (1926) is a case in point. Allen insists that his book is not “‘fictionized biography.’”(8) His protestations notwithstanding; Israfel does contain scenes in which fact has been embellished in an effort to render the narrative more vivid. Such, for example, is Allen's description of the awakening of Poe's awareness of Elmira Royster: [page 137:]

Similarly, Allen cannot resist embellishing the scene of Virginia's last illness:

But the fictional element — perhaps “imaginative” would be more accurate — in Israfel is more pervasive and yet more elusive than simply the embellishment of certain scenes. It belongs to Allen's romantic frame of reference and is suggested by the very title of his book and by such chapter titles as “The Weary, Wayworn Wanderer” (XIV), “The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass” (XVII), ‘’The Raven and His Shadow” (XXII), and “Lenore and the Edge of the World” (XXVI). Similar to Israfel but in a much more popular vein is Irwin Porges’ Edgar Allan Poe (1963). The author of this biography frankly admits that in order “to avoid the possible dullness of a mere detailed summary of events, certain scenes have been dramatized or re-created — but always within the framework of [page 138:] established fact.”(11) In reading both Allen's book and Porges’, the reader is led to wonder whether they represent the facts of Poe's life struggling to achieve the vividness of fiction or whether they represent the last, vain fluttering of romantic legend as it surrenders to fact.

As it has been noted, one of the difficulties confronting the fictionist who chooses Poe as his subject is the lack of adequate narrative direction in the events of Poe's life. This difficulty has been avoided in two novels where Poe appears as a subsidiary character.(12) In both instances, however, the Poe episodes present him at some of his worst moments . The problem hero is that Poe's finest moments, when ha was composing, are not the stuff of fiction. They are reflective rather than dramatic events. Francis Hopkinson Smith's Kennedy Square (1911) is an especially good example of this problem because the novelist is clearly sympathetic to Poe yet presents him in a hopeless state of intoxication. The Poe episode, a fictitious one, is a dinner in Baltimore in the late 1840's. Although he is the honored guest, Poe fails to appear in time for the meal. When he does arrive, he is “dead drunk”; and when he is asked to recite something, he confounds his audience:

“There was no blasphemy in this!” the narrator comments, “It was the wail of a lost soul pleading for Mercy!” Far less sympathetic is the Poe episode in Anya Seton's Dragonwyck (1944). Here the villain, Nicholas Van Ryn, pays a visit to the Fordham cottage and plies the poet with brandy. The result is a maudlin scene in which Poe hysterically pleads with Mrs. Clemm to return the half-empty bottle which she has taken from him:

One way to avoid the dilemma of fact and fiction is to ignore the facts of Poe's life and character. This is precisely what has occurred in almost every short story about Poe written in the last fifty years. Curiously, these stories have a precedent in Poe's own work. Just as he often projected a romanticized image of himself into his strange tales, so the authors of these short stories embody the legendary image of Poe in fantastic narratives, narratives which are imitative of Poe's own kinds of fiction. Vance Thompson's “A Tenement of Black Fumes” (1916), for example., is a tale of terror clearly inspired by “Ligeia,” by “Morella, “ and by “Ulalume.’‘(15) Here the widowed Poe is prevented from remarrying when the predatory spirit of a Ligeia-like Virginia threatens to reincarnate itself in the body of Sarah Helen Whitman. Another tale of terror, Robert Bloch's “The Man Who Collected Poe” (1951), is virtually a burlesque of [page 140:] “The Fall of the House of Usher.”(16) In this story a mad bibliophile has brought Poe back to life and keeps him locked in the basement of an Usher-like mansion in Maryland. The outcome is little more than a paraphrase of the close of Poe's tale. In the tradition of Poe's tales of ratiocination, Vincent Starrett's “In Which an Author and His Character Are Well Met” (1928) has Poe meet Legrand of “The Gold Bug.”(17) The new treasure is a vial of water from the fountain of youth, a vial which, ironically, the weakened poet is unable to open on his deathbed in a Baltimore hospital. Similarly, John Dickson Can's “The Gentleman from Paris” (1950) has Poe locate a lost will in much the came manner that Dupin locates the missing item in “The Purloined Letter.”(18) And Miriam Allen deFord's “The Mystery of the Vanished Brother” (1950) has Poe exercise Dupin-like talents.(19) To the extent that tales such as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “Hans Phaall” are science fiction of a sort, Ray Bradbury's “The Exiles” (1951) belongs to another tradition in which Poe wrote.(20) In “The Exiles” the encroachment of science upon imagination has forced the spirits of such writers as Dickens, Bierce, and Poe to retreat to the planet Mars. Bradbury's theme of science versus imagination recalls Poe's “Sonnet-To Science,” and the role Bradbury assigns to Mars resembles the function of the planet Al Aaraaf in Poe's early poem. The character of Poe in each of these stories is uniformly closer to the old legendary image than to the figure emerging through the efforts of recent scholarship. [page 141:] Starrett's Poe, for example, has a “fatal effect” upon “women of whatever age and station,” but alcohol has almost as fatal effect upon him. Carr's Poe is a threadbare aristocrat who casually solves the mystery at hand without leaving his station in a local tavern. Bloch's Poe is as weird as any character in Poe's own fiction. And Bradbury's Poe is “like a satan of some lost dark cause, a general arrived from a derelict invasion.” The short story about Poe is clearly a throwback to the nineteenth-century conception of the man.

Drama

There has never been a successful drama based upon Poe's life and character, and the more scholars tell us about him, the more remote is the possibility that such a play ever will be written. The reason is that the more we know about the real Poe, the more he becomes an inherently undramatic subject. His life, as Professor Fagin observes, does not supply sufficient “complication, tension, romantic interest, and emotional appeal.”(21) His character is fascinating chiefly because of his genius, but his genius manifested itself in imaginative creation and therefore lies beyond the scope of conventional dramatic presentation. Unpromising though Poe is, numerous unwary playwrights, evidently misled by the lingering aura of the old legendary image, have made him their subject in the past fifty years. Their work extends from dramatized biography to outright fantasy and includes almost everything [page 142:] conceivable from tragedy to comedy, from ballet to detective story Most of these dramas are unproduced and unproducible playscripts meriting no attention here.(22) Of interest, however, are five efforts at dramatized biography which have been either staged or filmed. They are of interest because they illustrate how the emerging image of the historical Poe has confronted the dramatist with largely the same dilemma that has plagued the fictionist.

Poe, a four-act play by B. Iden Payne and Thomas Wood Stevens copyrighted in 1920, makes no effort to deal with the whole of Poe's adult life.(23) Its action covers the period from about 1945 to Pcs,c's death in October of 1849. Even within the limits of this period of time, Payne and Stevens must resort to manipulating and to enlarging upon the facts of Poe's life in an effort to achieve something stageworthy. The whole of Act I uses the device of a New York literary soiree to dramatize Poe's place in the world of American letters in the 1840's. Among those present at the affair are Mrs. Ellet, Anne Lynch, Margaret Fuller, N. P. Willis, William Burton, and Rufus Griswold — Thomas Dunn English has declined attending because Poe has been invited. Present also are a woman named Helen Osman (a character created out of Frances Osgood and Sarah Helen Whitman) and her mother, Mrs. Bradford (a rendering of Mrs. Whitman's mother, Mrs. Power). Poe arrives in the company of a shy, sickly, and lisping Virginia and directly involves himself. in several verbal altercations. Presumably Payne and Stevens [page 143:] intend here to show Poe's critical independence and integrity, but they succeed only in making him irascible and supercilious. Act II takes place at Fordham cottage after the death of Virginia. Poe's relations with the literary world are carried over from Act I in another altercation, this time with Thomas Holley Chivers; but the larger part of Act II deals with Poe's love for Mrs. Osman and his apparent unfaithfulness to the memory of his dead wife. In response to Mrs. Clemm's distress, Poe explains why he does not feel obliged to remain faithful to Virginia:

Act III dramatizes Poe's abortive courtship with Mrs. Whitman and establishes the basis of hostility between Poe and Griswold. The setting is the garden of Mrs. Bradford's home in Providence. Poe and Griswold contend for the hand of Helen, but Griswold, at least at this point, is not the villain. The villain is Mrs. Bradford, who forces Helen to break her engagement to Poe by offering him a brandy toast. Intoxicated after only one sip of the drink and shocked at the loss of Helen, Poe collapses and the scene passes into a long, Ligeia-like fantasy representing [page 144:] the struggle in Poe's mind between his love for Helen Osman and his loyalty to the memory of Virginia, whom “I did not hate. I did not love.” Act IV dwells upon the irony that Poe delivered his reputation into the hands of an enemy. At Fordham cottage once again, Poe. looks back upon the Osman episode as a kind of purgation which now enables him to pursue his Stylus venture. Before setting out on a trip to Richmond, Poe, with a premonition that he will not return, charges Griswold with the responsibility of setting him “right before the world.” When he departs, the curtain falls momentarily to rise upon Mrs. Clemm reading Neilson Poe's letter describing Poe's death and burial. Several persons visit her to offer their condolences. Among them is Griswold, who confides of Poe to Willis that “he was not my friend, nor I his.”

Among plays about Poe, this one enjoys the distinction of having been produced more than once. It was first produced by the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, in June of 1920, and at what was mistakenly called a “World Premiere,” it was produced again by the Palmetto Players of the University of South Carolina in March of 1933.(24) The Columbia (South Carolina) State for March 17, 1933, carried a review which was almost fulsome in its praise of the local performance. The reviewer did remark, however, that the Play

“wants unity both of purpose and construction.” The point is well taken., for in spite of the freedom with which Payne and Stevens [page 145:] handled Poe's biography, they were unable to mold the events of his life into a coherent series of episodes which would support the characterization of Poe as a noble and possibly even tragic figure.

Catherine Chisholm Cushing's Edgar Allan Poe: A Character Study, copyrighted in 1925, has the distinction of being the first drama about Poe to reach the New York stage.(25) It enjoyed a deservedly brief run of only one performance at the Liberty Theatre early in October of 1925. Although the New York Times censured the production, the reviewer did observe that “the incidents included in [it] are based plausibly enough upon known biographical fact in the man's unhappy career.”(26) just how plausible some of these incidents are will be obvious from a synopsis. When the play opens, Poe returns to the Allan home in Richmond from a university in Washington, a university from which he was once suspended but now is expelled by the president for drinking and gambling. His “wild ways” are “the talk of the South,” but they can be excused to some extent because he inherited his love of liquor from his father, a Virginia aristocrat of the bluest blood who would have been America's greatest actor had he been more temperate. Among those who welcome Poe's return to Richmond are Elmira Royster, Virginia, and Mrs. Clemm. John Allan banishes the profligate, but before he departs, he and Elmira defy Allan and Mr. Royster by becoming engaged. The engagement lasts for three years, terminating only when. Elmira visits Poe in Baltimore and discovers that he is financially unable to support her. Poe is then free [page 146:] to marry his little cousin, who has loved him all along, even while she served as the go-between for letters Poe exchanged with his fiancee. Poe's winning both the one hundred dollar prize for fiction and the fifty dollar prize for poetry in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter contest is an enormous feat because he had to compete with all of America's leading literary figures. When the prizes are awarded in Baltimore in the early 1830's, Helen Whitman and Frances Osgood are present along with Ludwig Griswold, a vicious little man who hates Poe and becomes the nemesis of his editorial career. Impressed with Poe's winning both prizes, the “Editor” (presumably of the Saturday Visiter) offers him a position on his magazine, a position above Ludwig Griswold. Poe's tenure is brief, however, culminating in a kind of kangaroo court in which Bryant, Longfellow, Willis, and Griswold charge him with critical abuse. Although Poe defends himself by offering his “Poetic Principle” as his code of critical integrity, he loses his post because the “Editor” is unwilling to offend entrenched interests. As a result of this episode, Virginia enters a decline and ultimately dies at Fordham, her last moments made comfortable by Frances Osgood and Helen Whitman. After Virginia's death, Poe, now deteriorating badly, puts in an unexpected appearance at the Richmond home of John P. Kennedy. Among others who happen to be visiting Kennedy at the time are Nathaniel Parker Willis, J. H. B. Latrobe, Helen Whitman, Frances Osgood, and Elmira Royster — William Cullen Bryant is expected but does not appear. During the [page 147:] closing days of “the man's unhappy career,” Poe is pursued by a raven and summoned by Virginia's spirit voice calling to him in her soft Southern accent, “Ed-gah.”

Miss Cushing's play lived through only one performance on the New York stage. Yet one might well wonder how it ever managed to reach production. The answer probably lies in Miss Cushing's efforts to translate Poe's life into a story that would appeal to an audience in the 1920's. She lays special emphasis upon Poe's life as the romance of a youth who rebels against convention and goes down in pathetic defeat. He rebels first against the moral and social conventions represented by the Allans and the Roysters. Then he rebels against the American literary establishment. When Willis, Bryant, Longfellow, and Griswold succeed in having him removed from his editorial post, he becomes a broken man. In character, then, he is very much a child of the “Roaring Twenties,” but not the 1820's. Here he is, for example, as a typical, college boy of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age:

Elmira, who rebels against her parents, is a fitting companion for Miss Cushing's Poe, and the dialogue between them is often the jargon of “twenty-three skiddoo.” Herd, as a sample, is how they bid farewell at the termination of their engagement:

Neither Mrs. Osgood nor Mrs. Whitman escapes vulgarization. Both of them are more like flappers of the Roaring Twenties than bluestockings of the 1840's. Mrs. Osgood has the following exchange in Act II:

And later in the same scene, one of the gentlemen lets slip an ungentlemanly phrase:

Mercifully, Virginia manages to escape translation. She retains her traditional role as the conventional, sentimental heroine. It is, indeed, a testament to the good taste of the theater-goers in October of 1925 that, in spite of Miss Cushing's efforts to court their interest, they sent her creature to an early grave.

New York theater-goers eleven years later were only a little more receptive to Sophie Treadwell's Plumes in the Dust, another Poe drama.(27) It ran for eleven performances at the Forty-Sixth Street Theatre in November of 1936 with Henry Hull in the lead role. In spite of the brevity of its stage career, Plumes in the Dust comes closer than any other conventional play about Poe to achieving a successful union [page 150:] of dramatic essentials and biographical fact. The action of Plumes in the Dust is built around almost the same series of episodes in Poe's life that form the basis, though remote, of Miss Cushing's melodrama: Poe's break with John Allan in 1826-27, his winning of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter contest in the early 1830's, Virginia's decline and death at Fordham, Poe's relations with the New York literati, his last trip to Richmond, and his death in Baltimore. From the standpoints of both drama and biography, the finest moments in Plumes in the Dust occur in the opening scene, which represents Poe's strained relations with John Allan, whom Miss Treadwell characterizes as a hypocrite and a tyrant. Tension in the scene mounts steadily until mutual hostility between Allan and Poe erupts into a heated exchange:

At other points in the play, the manipulating hand of the dramatist is more in evidence. In the climactic scene (II, ii), for example, Miss Treadwell has an intoxicated and contentious Poe in the midst of a literary soiree when Mrs. Clemm brings the shocking news that Virginia has died in his absence. The manipulating hand is in evidence again in the following scene, where Poe visits Elmira in Richmond in September [page 151:] of 1849. Using this interview to represent all of Poe's amorous ventures after the death of Virginia, Miss Treadwell takes the liberty of having Poe deliver as speeches to Elmira passages from letters that he, in fact, wrote to Sarah Helen Whitman. The manipulating hand of the dramatist is evident in Plumes in the Dust; rarely, however, is it not used in the interest of good taste and good drama.

Although Plumes in the Dust is the most nearly successlal play about Poe, it does not quite succeed either as biography or as drama. It does not succeed as biography chiefly because it offers a partial and therefore distorted account of Poe's life. Like Miss Cushing, and like Hazelton too, Miss Treadwell has the action of her play leap from Baltimore in the early 1830's to New York after 1845 because there is little in the intervening period that is potentially stageworthy. Stageworthy or not, the intervening years with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond and with Burton's and with Graham's in Philadelphia were the foundation of Poe's literary reputation, and to neglect them is to ignore the most significant period in his career. That Plumes in the Dust does not succeed as drama was explained by Brooks Atkinson in reviewing the 1936 production for the New York Times.(28) The play is “an earnest pageant of desolation and melancholy,” Atkinson reported.

It is difficult, Atkinson continues, to dramatize Poe's life without turning it into “a minor ‘Hamlet”:

In its one venture at dramatizing the life of Poe, Hollywood was no more successful than Broadway.(29) The venture was a screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Tom Reed released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1942 under the title The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe.(30) It enjoys the distinction of covering almost all of Poe's life from infancy to death, although extensive undramatized stretches are narrated with accompanying montage. As its title suggests, this picture is no mere documentary. It is primarily a love story, one in which Virginia is pitted against Elmira in a struggle for Poe's affections, a struggle.to which his literary career is largely made subordinate. That they might be suitable contenders for a poet's heart, Hollywood depicts Elmira as “a beautiful brunette” and Virginia as a precocious young lady whose “interesting little figure” is at one point displayed “in the pantalettes of the period.”(31) Among the episodes in this love story is an encounter between Poe and Elmira's husband in which the poet “socks” his [page 153:] antagonist on the jaw and a visit by Elmira to Virginia's bedside at Fordham cottage, a visit in which Virginia so completely triumphs over her adversary that the motion picture fails to mention that Poe courted the widow Shelton two years after Virginia's death. Relegated to a desultory subplot, Poe's literary career is reduced to the simple terms of Poe as the champion of international copyright struggling against the exploitative practices of American publishers. In an effort to create some interest in this subplot, the picture offers a scene in which Thomas Jefferson counsels Poe to pursue his literary inclinations, it confronts Poe with the dilemma of choosing between editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger and editorship of Graham's, it exaggerates the significance of his meeting with Dickens, and it humiliates him by having Griswold turn down “The Raven” for publication in the Broadway Journal. One would be tempted to label this motion picture a throwback to the earlier romantic attitude toward Poe, and to some extent it is, but Professor Fagin is correct when he calls The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe a concession to popular appeal.(32)

One of the most unusual and certainly one of the most ingenious dramatic treatments of Poe is Poor Eddy, a “ballet-biography” written by Elizabeth Dooley and produced by the Columbia University Theatre Guild under the direction of Professor Milton Smith in 1953.(33) Mrs. Dooley's method is to alternate short “realistic” scenes from Poe's life with what she calls “arabesques.” They are ballet pieces meant to [page 154:] depict Poe's inner turmoil. The arabesques are based chiefly upon Poe's imaginative creations which are recited while the theme is interpreted by dancers. The passage from realistic scene to arabesque is indicated by distinctive “threshold” music and by the use of a scrim behind which the dancer playing the role of Poe passes to indicate that action is moving from reality to imaginative or to internal states of mind:

The entire production consists of two acts, the first made up of three realistic scenes and three arabesques and the second made up of five realistic scenes and five arabesques. A good example is the second scene in Act I. It is Philadelphia in 1840, and Poe discovers that Virginia, now in her eighteenth year, is consumptive and that marital relations which she and Poe have postponed for five years because of her age must now be postponed indefinitely. In the accompanying arabesque a narrator recites passages from “Ligeia” while the movements of the dancers express the triumph of love over death. Similarly, the following realistic scene presents the sudden bursting of a blood vessel in Virginia's throat, and the accompanying arabesque is cased upon “The Masque of the Red Death.” [page 155:]

Since it is based upon the very questionable premise that Poe's imaginative works were associated with specific situations in his personal life, Poor Eddy brings the drama no closer to solving the dilemma of fact and fiction. It comes no closer, but it does serve to elucidate the nature of the dilemma and to indicate why Poe's life and character cannot be treated successfully by conventional dramatic and fictional methods. By the device of the arabesque, Mrs. Dooley seems to recognize, perhaps better than any imaginative writer before her, that the genuinely dramatic area of Poe's life was in his imagination and that, conversely, his outward life, the domain of conventional drama and fiction, is unpromising. Nevertheless, Poor Eddy is a compromise because its realistic scenes still cling to the belief that there is something dramatic in Poe's outward life. To go all the way, however, to accept unconditionally that the genuinely fascinating part of Poe is in his imagination would be to admit that the finest drama and fiction about him has been written and that it can be found in any collected edition of his tales and poems.

Poetry

The attitude toward Poe that had begun with the revival of interest in him in the 1870's and culminated in the centennial of his birth in 1909 persisted in poetry for three full decades thereafter. He continued to be celebrated in verse as a pathetic figure whose works [page 156:] are the painful record of a melancholy but colorful life; and in spite of the fact that the centennial had brought with it at least a just measure of recognition, he was lamented time and time again as the neglected genius of American letters.

It is to this pathetic and neglected figure that Vachel Lindsay addressed his “The Wizard in the Street,” a poem “concerning Edgar Allan Poe” published in Lindsay's Village Magazine in 1910.(34) Long an admirer of Poe,(35) Lindsay scarcely concealed his outrage at what he believed was the indifference of the American public to an artist who failed to conform to its moral code.

In a society devoted to utility, Poe is “the useless one” whose “little lacquered boxes” fascinate only “half-grown boys.” The rest of us, Lindsay charges, have turned our backs upon him:

Ironically, this lament for the neglect of Poe came at a time when, amidst echoes of the centennial celebration, Poe was elected to a place in the Hall of Fame at New York University. [page 157:]

Even George E. Woodberry seems to have become caught up in the feelings that persisted beyond the centennial. Woodberry was unsympathetic, perhaps even hostile, to his subject when he began his long career as Poe's biographer back in the 1880's. In 1913 he published “E.A.P. (On the Fly-leaf of Whitty's ‘Poe’),” a poem depicting Poe as a haunted and ultimately desperate man:

Woodberry does not, however, blame Poe for his melancholy life. Instead he mourns Poe's fate as a spirit alien to earth: a spirit that failed to find love among mankind:

As in the period before the centennial, Poe “shrines” continued to move men to verse during the first decade after 1909. When in 1913 the construction of an apartment building on an adjoining lot threatened the Fordham cottage, Richard Butler Glaenzer, in a poem entitled “The Husk,” seized the event as an opportunity to deplore the lack “of wisdom in our scheme / Of honouring the great”:

Three years late, 1916, Joseph Bernard Rethy felt “Within these walls” the spirit of Poe's imagination:

Again in 1916, the poet Clinton Scollard was carried beyond the edge of tears by Poe's grave. Like William Winter many years earlier, Scollard found in Poe's hard fate occasion to mourn the fate of all men: [page 159:]

Scollard's poem observes what by 1916 had become the time-honored practice of fabricating romantic images of Poe from the products of Poe's own imagination:

The first decade following the furious activity of the centennial was a relatively quiet one from the point of view of poetry devoted to Poe. By 1920, however, poems began once again to appear in substantial numbers. Yet there remained no essential change in attitudes. Poe was still celebrated as the pathetic representative of America's injustice to her great, the dark genius whose works are a record of his unhappy life. In 1920, for example, an anonymous contributor to Life had Poe look with disdain upon concerted efforts then in progress to preserve the Fordham cottage: [page 160:]

In lines read at the unveiling of the Boston Authors’ Club Poe Memorial Tablet in 1924, Nixon Waterman hailed Poe as “Earth's proud prince of melancholy.”(41) Several years later, 1928, the poet Howard Elsmere Fuller added madness:

In the Envoy to his “Ballade to Edgar Poe,” published in 1931, Clinton Scollard testified to the abiding power of the Poe legend to eliit compassion.

And the feeling that Poe was more sinned against than sinning was repeated in graphic terms in a poem contributed to Versecraft for January-February of 1932:

These are but samples from a substantial body of similar poetry published in the 1920's and 1930's, a body of poetry that adds little to the sentiments that had been current in verse for half a century.

The decades of the Twenties and Thirties were-not, however, without events of special interest in the history of poetry devoted to Poe. One such event was the publication in 1921 of The Enchanted Years, an anthology of verse honoring the achievements of the University of Virginia.(45) Among the contributors to this volume were John Gould Fletcher and Amy Lowell, Imagists whose poetric techniques can he traced back to Poe through his influence upon the Symbolist movement in France. Both of these poets chose to honor the university through Poe. Fletcher's poem, entitled “Prelude and Ode,” celebrates the romantic conception of the poet as one who is a “stranger,”

In “The Enchanted Castle” (subtitled “To Edgar Allan Poe”), Amy Lowell attempts to capture the peculiar atmosphere of Poe's arabesque world:

With much the same romantic frame of mind in which he was to write his Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, Hervey Allen composed two poems about “Poe in Carolina,” two poems published together in 1922.(48) One of them, “Alchemy,” is in the tradition that considers Poe an alien to earth, an idealist whose art, born of dissatisfaction, represents an effort to translate the things of this world into an image of some lost paradise:

One of the “favored spots,” the poem continues, that provided “things to be transmuted into beauty” by Poe's “alchemic” mind was Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, where he passed the winter of 1828-1829 [page 163:] attached as a soldier to an artillery battery at Fort Moultrie. The other poem by Allen, “Sullivan's Island,” credits that favored spot with much that is characteristically weird in Poe's fiction and poetry:

Two unusual poems about Poe published in the 1920's were the work of Beatrice Ravcnel and Joseph Auslander. Mrs. Ravenel's “Poe's Mother,” published in 1926, is a monologue spoken by Elizabeth Poe.(49) The framework of the poem is in keeping with what little is known of Elizabeth Poe's life. Deserted by her husband and stricken with the lung disease which was to cause her death seven months later, she is in Charleston, South Carolina, in April of 1811 as a member of a company of players. Because the recently arrived Mrs. Beaumont of Covent Garden has usurped all the leading feminine roles, Mrs. Poe has been reduced to playing minor parts. In her monologue, delivered at daybreak while Edgar and William sleep, she recalls more prosperous days when David was with her and she not only played but lived the part of Juliet: [page 164:]

As this closing line suggests, it is Mrs. Ravenel's thesis that Edgar Poe inherited his sensitive soul, his love of beauty, and even some of his literary themes from his mother. This is made even more explicit at the conclusion of the monologue when the infant Edgar awakens:

Joseph Auslander's poem, “Letter to Virginia Clemm,” is one of a series of similar epistles published in 1929 in Auslander's Letters to Women.(52) His description of Virginia appears to be based upon the unique portrait of her painted after her death: [page 165:]

Of more interest to this study is Auslander's description of Poe. It is a portrait in the tradition of the poète maudit:

Perhaps the best known lines about Poe in recent poetry, and very nearly the most obscure, are in Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930):

This passage occurs in Part VII, “The Tunnel.” Here the subway becomes a symbol of the hell into which Crane descends in the course of his epic on our modern mechanical cosmos. Crane sees something of himself in Poe, a poetic miscreant martyred, rent asunder in body and spirit, because he denied “the ticket” of sordidness and triviality of his era. There is, of course, nothing new in Crane's attitude toward Poe. It is but another equation of the Poe legend with the romantic myth cf the alienated artist.

The year 1938 saw the publication of The Muse Anthology of Modern Poetry: Poe Memorial Edition, a tribute to “the literary achievements of the foremost poet, author, and critic this country has the honor to acclaim.”(54) Compiled by Devora Lovell, edited by Dorothy

Kis sling and Arthur Nethercot, and published by Carlyle Straub, this ponderous Festschrift consists of a selection of Poe's essays and poems, a dozen essays about him, and a collection of 787 poems by various hands under the heading “Lyrics,” “Sonnets,” “Quatrains,” and “Verse Libre” Eighteen of the poems are about Poe. Among them, however, are reprints of several examined earlier in this study: John Henry Boner's “Poe's Cottage at Fordham” (1889), John Bannister Tabb's “Excluded” (1905), Edwin Markham's “Our Israfel” (1909), Beatrice Ravenel's “Poe's Mother” (1926), and Joseph Auslander's “Letter to Virginia Clemm” (1929). The whole volume approaches Poe in the same 5Pirit that ushered in the revival more than sixty years earlier. This spirit is typified in “Poe Mansion,” a poem by Daniel Henderson: [page 167:]

Typical also are two quatrains which follow the time-honored practice of bitterly lamenting America's treatment of Poe, its defamation and belated recognition of his greatness. One of these quatrains, entitled “Our Charity,” is the work of Margaret Kinton:

The other quatrain, “Consistency,” is by Lena Carnevale:

The Muse Anthology has proved to mark a turning point in the history of poetry devoted to Poe. Although the bibliography appended to this study does not pretend to be exhaustive, it does claim to register the tempo with which poems about Poe have appeared. For the two decades of the 1920's and the 1930's, it lists forty-eight poems. But [page 168:] for the two and one-half decades from 1940 to the present, it lists only seven — four published in the 1940's and three in the 1950's, none of which appeared after 1953. Even the centennial of Poe's death (1949) elicited only one poem in print. This fact is made more striking when we recall that the semi-centennial of his death (1899) was celebrated by the unveiling of the Zolnay bust and by a bevy of poems in his honor while the centennial of his birth (1909) prompted a veritable crescendo of verse. Evidently we have now passed into an era mutolo.

There are several possible reasons why poetry declined so remarkably after the 1930's. Perhaps, as it was suggested in the introductory chapter to this study, the life of Poe is now an event too remote to elicit our compassionate response, or perhaps we now respond more readily to other kinds of men and to other kinds of lives. Perhaps tco, the horrendous national and international events that have involved each of us to some extent in recent years have laid too strong a claim upon our sympathy. Although each of these things has probably had its part, the chief reason for the decline in poetry devoted to Poe in recent years would seem to be the emergence of the historical Poe at the expense of the legendary image. This legendary image was a colorful, controversial, and fascinating one capable of moving men to poetic response. The historical image of a dedicated and disciplined craftsman whose private life was exceptional for little more than its quiet poverty and whose literature has achieved at least its just measure of recognition [page 169:] is a dispassionate one, one better able to support a body of criticism and research than to sustain a body of romantic verse. The Muse Anthology has proved, then, to be not only a turning point in the history of poetry devoted to Poe but to be a swan song to the legendary image. With the demise of this image, Poe's posthumous reputation has moved into a phase not unlike that foretold by the Fourth Tempter to Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral: