Text: N. B. Fagin, “Chapter 01,” The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949, pp. 1-66 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 1:]

A PECULIAR kind of fascination has kept Edgar Allan Poe alive. It protected him during his brief lifetime against the many frailties of his personality — whether inherent or brought about by the conditions under which he was obliged to live — and, for nearly a century, it has protected his literary remains against both inner frailties and the ravages of time. Scholars and critics have passionately debated the merits of the man and his poems, stories, and literary judgments, but the very passion with which the debate has been conducted is a tribute to this quality of fascination. The greatest tribute, however, is the overwhelming testimony of his contemporaries.

Throughout his so-called unhappy life everyone who came in contact with this “saddest and ... strangest figure in American literary history”[1] was conscious of this quality in the man. The “so-called” is prompted by a feeling that Poe rather enjoyed his unhappiness, and that some of his friends, especially the many literary ladies who were drawn towards him, enjoyed it as much as the “unhappy genius” himself. At any rate, Poe's unhappiness was part of his fascination, like the glittering eye of Coleridge's ancient mariner. Other factors were his general appearance — graceful, pale, and sad, [page 2:] with “large, soft, dreamy eyes” — as one woman describes them[2] — or “magnificent” eyes — as one man describes them[3]; his dress — habitually dark and, though often shabby, always immaculate — and one must not forget the Byron collar and the cane[4]; his manner, restrained and aloof, even haughty; and his voice — that “rich, mellow and sweet voice,”[5] which Poe evidently knew how to use effectively.

It is not a mere coincidence that Mrs. Clarke, the Richmond lady who remembered the richness and mellowness and sweetness of Poe's voice, should also have noted a resemblance between the great actor Edwin Booth and the Virginia poet. Mrs. Clarke did not, of course, stop to consider the possible significance of the resemblance. She merely felt the effect which both men produced upon her, and noted that in some subtle way it was similar in nature. It did not occur to her that both Booth and Poe were actors. But with the passage of many decades providing perspective, and with nearly complete knowledge of Poe's forty years of life, of his actions and reactions, purpose and pose — with all this before us, one is forced to conclude that Edgar Allan Poe, child of actors, was himself, both consciously and unconsciously, an actor. He had somehow, by a combination of circumstances, missed his true vocation and destiny. But if these circumstances deprived him of a stage in a theatre upon which to act, there was nothing to prevent his transforming “the world at large” into a stage[6] whereon he could strut and fret to his heart's content. Generously endowed by nature to play a richly romantic rôle, at a time when the romantic gesture was the fashion on the stage and in the drawing-room, he played it both in his life and in his writings, and played [page 3:] it to the hilt. His fascination was the unfailing fascination of the theatre.

2

The life of Poe has supplied countless biographers with material for articles and books ranging from pamphlet thinness to the 1,685-page bulkiness of Miss Mary E. Phillips's two volumes. Much of this vast outpouring of biographical effervescence has been inspired by legend rather than Poe's actual life; much of it is fiction rather than fact; yet behind most of it has been the laudable desire to establish the simple truth of a comparatively uneventful life. It is significant that “No biographer thus far, not even Mr. Woodberry, has succeeded in making very interesting the narrative portions of Poe's career.”[7] This was written by John Macy in 1912, but the biographies that have come from the presses since then have not fared much better.

The trouble has been in the attempt of writers to treat Poe either as a hero or as a villain and to present his life as a series of tragic misfortunes or romantic adventures. The truth, however, seems to be, as Macy saw it, that Poe was an intelligible man whose life, stripped of the gaudy embroidery with which so many biographers — aided and abetted by Poe's fantastic posturings and inventions — have delighted to adorn it, was relatively unadventurous. It was neither colorful nor extraordinarily unfortunate, sad, or tragic. Charles Lamb began life in more unadvantageous circumstances; Charles Dickens knew greater poverty, at least in his childhood; Dostoievsky was more cruelly ravaged by spells of ill health; De Quincey, and probably Coleridge, imbibed more laudanum; and Robert Burns consumed more alcohol. In fact, the only exploits which deserve to [page 4:] be recorded with any flourishes in his biography are his writing of several beautiful poems, an equal number of excellent short stories, and some pieces of discerning and competent criticism.

At this late day, now that we have Professor Arthur Hobson Quinn's carefully-documented biography, it is no longer necessary for every writer on Poe, no matter how limited his intentions, to spread himself at great length in an attempt to disentangle the pertinent facts of the poet's life. They are comparatively few and, for the purposes of this study, may be summarized briefly.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, the son of a mother who was apparently a good actress — a worthy member of a profession which had also been honored by her mother — and a father who was only a passably good actor. David Poe had been dedicated by his father to the study and practice of law in Baltimore, but had early “displayed a fondness for amateur acting,”[8] had helped to found a Thespian Club, and had finally managed to join a professional acting troupe in Charleston. In 1806 he married Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, a young widow who played “leads” in various theatres in Charleston, Richmond, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other theatrical centers. Three years later the young actress died in Richmond, while her company was playing at the local theatre, leaving her three little children not only motherless but also fatherless, for David Poe had disappeared sometime previously. Some biographers claim he had died in Norfolk; others, more cautious, deny that anything about his end is definitely known. For us it is important to know only that Edgar, the middle child — a “handsome [page 5:] curly-headed boy” with “big gray eyes”(1) — was adopted by Mr. John Allan, a Richmond merchant, and that the adoption was never made legal.

Edgar Allan Poe attended school in the city of his adoption, except for a period of five years when the Allans were in Scotland and England, and the boy was sent to schools there. In 1826, six years after the family's return to Richmond, Poe entered the University of Virginia, where he stayed but one year, because, having conducted himself like a “gentleman” — as such conduct was then fashionably interpreted — he accumulated large gambling debts which Mr. Allan resented having to pay. His relations with Mr. Allan had become tense and unhappy sometime before he went to Charlottesville; now, upon his ignominious return, they became intolerable.

Hence, on May 27, 1827, Poe was in Boston, the city of his birth, where, under the name of Edgar A. Perry, he enlisted as a private in the United States Army. Apparently he was a good soldier, for, in time, he rose to the rank of Sergeant Major, but upon the recommendation of his colonel, he was honorably discharged, so that, with Mr. Allan's aid, he could enter West Point, a place much more fitting — in the opinion of the colonel, Mr. Allan, and Poe himself — for a gentleman. Accordingly, in the fall of 1830, Cadet Poe began his studies at the military academy on the Hudson. Here, however, his career was brief. The gentlemanly life of a cadet proved rather expensive and Mr. Allan was somewhat [page 6:] less than generous. It is also possible that Poe found the routine of the Academy not to his liking. But whatever cause or causes may have influenced him, he determined to have himself dismissed, and succeeded. At the end of January, 1831, he was courtmartialed on charges of neglect of duty and disobedience of orders, found guilty, and expelled.

The next four years he lived in Baltimore. His widowed aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, made a poor but fairly comfortable home for him. At the end of 1835, through the influence of John Pendleton Kennedy, a literary pillar of the time, he obtained an editorial position on the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Here, feeling himself for the first time financially established, he settled down with his aunt and her daughter, Virginia, whom he married when she was only fourteen years old.

His position on the Messenger proved short-lived. Even though the publication prospered under Poe's editorship, Mr. T. W. White, its publisher, felt himself obliged to discharge an editor, who, though otherwise a likeable and reliable young man, could not be persuaded to abstain from excessive conviviality. A further and probably a more serious grievance of Mr. White's was that Poe “cramped” him from exercising his own judgment as to what articles should or should not be admitted into his periodical.[9]

Poe now decided to seek his fortune in New York. He contributed to various periodicals, while Mrs. Clemm tried to augment the family income by keeping a boarding house. But the efforts of neither proved remunerative enough, and in the summer of 1838 Poe took his family to Philadelphia, which was then, like [page 7:] New York, a publishing center. Here, after a brief period of floundering, he obtained an editorial position on The Gentleman's Magazine, owned and edited by the ex-comedian William Burton. Later he associated himself with Graham's Magazine. Although his relations with Mr. Graham were cordial, he nevertheless soon tired of his position and resigned. He dreamed of establishing a literary periodical of his own, which he could edit in his own way, printing only the kind of material he approved and refusing to print material which he felt did not merit the honor of publication, but he failed to secure the necessary financial support for the enterprise. Thereupon he tried to obtain a government position in Washington, using all the “influences” at his disposal, and again failed.

In the spring of 1844 he was back again in New York. Once more he tried to earn a livelihood by contributing, as a free-lance, to newspapers and magazines, but again, in the end, he was obliged to seek the security of regularly paying editorial jobs. At least two periodicals — the New York Mirror and the Broadway Journal — found his services useful. In time he even came to own the latter publication, but it was not his dream come true, and it mercifully died for lack of financial energy.

In January, 1847, his wife died in their little cottage at Fordham. On October 7, 1849, Poe himself died, in Baltimore, where he had unaccountably been found unconscious several days before near an election polling place.

3

Assuredly Poe's life, thus presented in bare outline, does not add up to anything remarkable. It promises neither the romanticism of great deeds nor the exoticism [page 8:] of great strangeness, and it hardly suggests a fascinating “subject” for biographical lushness or dramatic exploitation. In fairness to Poe, it must be admitted that the brief chronology presented in the preceding section is incomplete. It fails to record, even in summary, the one phase of a “subject's” life which looms largest in modern biography: his experiences in love.

Poe's relations with women have been a rich source of material for many novelists, poets, playwrights and scenario writers, as well as biographers — both semi- and pseudo-scholarly — and psychoanalysts. The scribe who not so long ago labeled a motion picture as “The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe”(2) drew from the same storehouse of possibilities which imaginative persons all over the world have not only drawn from but added to with zeal and profit to themselves. Neither the purpose nor the scope of this book permits a detailed restatement of all the legends or even the facts of Poe's romantic entanglements. Nevertheless, since so much of his histrionic talent was expended on this area of the “stage,” it is necessary to identify at least some of the female members of the cast.

The leading lady remains Virginia Clemm Poe, his cousin and wife. Susan Archer Weiss, after picturing the Home Life of Poe, came to the conclusion that his feeling for Virginia was, from beginning to end, merely “the affection of a brother or cousin for a sweet and lovable child” and that whatever “sentimental things he may have written concerning [his marriage], his whole conduct goes to prove its insincerity.”[10] Joseph [page 9:] Wood Krutch, under the spell of Freudian theory and methodology, came to a more startling conclusion; namely, that Poe's affection for any woman, including his wife, could not have been anything more than mental or Platonic, for Poe, Mr. Krutch believes, was impotent.[11] Which prompts Professor Quinn to dismiss Mr. Krutch's whole book with the terse yet delicate notation: “Based on a mistaken theory of Poe's physical constitution.”[12] For Mr. Quinn is convinced that, at least just before his marriage, “Edgar Poe loved his little cousin not only with the affection of a brother, but also with the passionate devotion of a lover and a prospective husband.”[13] There seems to be no reason to believe that this passionate devotion ever changed after Virginia became Mrs. Poe.

Poe himself is reported to have made conflicting statements, at various times, about his marriage. In a letter which has but recently come to light, a Massachusetts gentleman, Amos Bardwell Heywood, recounts one version of the marriage which he heard Poe tell. Mr. Heywood was the brother of “Annie,” a married lady who for a while, after Virginia's death, was “important” in Poe's life. Sitting one evening in her home in Lowell, Poe said that for two years after his marriage he had been a husband in name only, occupying a chamber by himself. To be sure, during part of this time he had been travelling, alone, in Europe — a statement not borne out by any of the known facts. However, Poe, added Mr. Heywood, “spoke of his wife in a most eloquent and touching manner, the tears running down his cheeks in torrents.”[14]

Next to Virginia, Sarah Elmira Royster deserves consideration among the featured players upon Poe's stage. [page 10:] She was the Richmond girl who promised, when he left for the University of Virginia, to wait for him, but who proved too weak to resist the promptings of her practical-minded parents and the blandishments of the wealthy Mr. Shelton. When young Poe came back after less than a year, Elmira was Mrs. Shelton. Long years afterwards, with his wife dead and Mr. Shelton dead, Poe again returned to Elmira, perhaps with less passion but with greater prospects of success. They achieved a reconciliation and their marriage was impending, when Poe's sudden death eliminated her from the stage — except as a writer of reminiscences.

Another featured player was Sarah Helen Whitman, the Providence poetess and spiritualist, who floated daintily in silken draperies and filmy scarfs, exuding the odor of ether — which she imbibed for a heart ailment. She was a widow of forty-five when Poe met her. He addressed to her a whole series of bad literary letters, in which his love-making is painfully violent. He also wrote for her another “To Helen,” a poem as unremarkable as the first one to bear the title was beautiful. The first one had been addressed to a lovely Richmond lady who had befriended Poe as a boy and had died early in life. Mrs. Whitman finally consented to marry the impetuous poet, but on condition that he promise to abstain from intoxicating beverages. Poe, of course, promised. But though the banns were proclaimed no wedding bells rang for them. ...

Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard, the original inspiration of his earlier “To Helen,” must be credited with having played the most gracious, most unselfish part in Poe's life. She was the mother of a playmate of his, and her kindness and sympathy bestowed upon a lonely boy of fourteen [page 11:] inspired him, he later wrote, with “the first purely ideal love of [his] soul”(3) and to the writing of his first undeniably distinguished poem.

Of the married ladies to whom he made presumably non-ideal love, only a few deserve more than a passing mention. In the end they all felt embarrassed by his attention; possibly their embarrassment and, in a few cases, downright surliness were a result of the irritating eye-liftings and mutterings of the paradoxical world which, though pretending to love a lover, persists in misunderstanding the beloved. Besides, the ladies Poe selected had reputations to uphold; and, in such cases, there are always husbands and loyal friends whose delight seems to be the safeguarding of these reputations.

One entanglement provoked a fair-sized scandal. Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood was a Boston-born lady and the attractive wife of a New York artist; she was also a passably good poetess. Poe wrote favorably of her work, mentioned her in a public lecture, and sent her a copy of his “Raven” for an expression of opinion. He even called in person to hear her opinion expressed. She published some verses referring to him as Israfel. He dedicated to her several poems, including one he had written ten years before in Richmond to the daughter of editor T. W. White, and he composed especially for her a valentine which skilfully imbedded her name.

Mrs. Osgood was, however, imprudent enough to write at least one letter to this strange, irresistible swain [page 12:] which, in the opinion of another literary lady, Mrs. Elizabeth Fries Ellet, was indiscreet. Decidedly Mrs. Ellet should not have seen the letter, but there it was lying open on a table in Poe's cottage with no one else, at the moment, to read it or to see her read it. As a consequence, a committee of ladies consisting of the Misses Margaret Fuller and Anne Lynch soon called on Mr. Poe and, in behalf of Mrs. Osgood, requested the return of that lady's letters. With the precious bundle recovered, Mrs. Osgood deemed it wise to absent herself for a time from New York. She went to Albany; thence, to Boston, to Lowell, and to Providence;(4) but everywhere Poe followed her, until, back again in Albany, he was compelled by illness to abstain from further pursuit.

Mrs. Ellet herself deserves a few more words. When the propriety-minded committee called on Mr. Poe, he lost his poise to such an extent that he unguardedly exclaimed that Mrs. Ellett “had better come and look after her own letters.”[15] Before that incident he had sometimes written favorably of Mrs. Ellet's talents as a versifier.

These were some of the principal players with whom Poe, either by choice or accident, performed. The list is far from complete. His biography is studded with names that have not been mentioned here.

“Annie,” who has been referred to, was absorbing enough to merit greater detail. She was Mrs. Nancy Richmond of Lowell, Massachusetts, who inspired at least one good poem and a sheaf of strident letters, some of which he wrote at the very time he was wooing Mrs. [page 13:] Whitman. He has left us a vivid pen-portrait of her in “Landor's Cottage.” Even the factual-minded Mr. Quinn is led to psychoanalytic speculation. Poe, he concludes, loved “Annie” “as a man loves a woman, while he loved Helen Whitman as a poet loves a poetess.”[16] Just how poets love poetesses is somewhat obscure, but that Poe's letters to Mrs. Richmond breathe of the kind of love we generally attribute to a man for a woman is unmistakable.

But what about the minor players — those who played “bits” or mere “walk-ons”? That Richmond girl, Eliza White, for instance. She was the daughter of the owner of the Southern Literary Messenger, and the subject of more than one poem by its youthful editor. Such a careful biographer as Professor Woodberry, after sifting the evidence, is led to the speculation that Poe's “flirtation” with Eliza may have contributed to his dismissal from his first editorial position.[17] Another recipient of his poetic effusions, at the time, is said to have been a girl named Mary Winfree. To be sure, these poems were later readdressed to other women, but that does not invalidate the fact that Eliza had once contributed to his performance or that Mary had once been an inspiration. Then there was “Baltimore Mary” who as a young girl had lived next door to Mrs. Clemm. When Poe returned from West Point he fell in love with Mary (Devereaux), courted her and proposed marriage — if the reminiscences of the same Mary as an old lady can be trusted.[18] And there was his cousin Elizabeth Herring to whom he addressed poems. Legend also mentions a pretty Miss Kate Bleakley in Baltimore to whom ex-Cadet Edgar Allan Poe wrote verses and letters.[19] And always, in the last years of his life in New York, [page 14:] there were “literary women” whose “pestilential society,” he once wrote to “Annie” in one of his blue moods, he was determined to shun. ... They were, he had discovered, “a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonorable set, with no guiding principles but inordinate self-esteem.”[20] There were also the non-literary women, like Marie Louise Shew, to whom he made love. Mrs. Shew had nursed Virginia in her last illness and continued her ministrations to Poe himself when he went to pieces after Virginia's death. Poe addressed ardent poems to her and insisted on publishing a few of them, until the lady was obliged to make him understand that she was not interested in his amorous avowals.

The moot question as to which of these women Poe really loved or how much he loved any one of them cannot be answered here, if anywhere. That several of his best poems — “To Helen” (1831), “For Annie,” “Annabel Lee” — were inspired by women cannot be denied; they indicate that Poe possessed not only the gift of song but also that of genuine and profound emotion. That most of his poems engendered by the same impulse are not of equally high quality is just as undeniable. But they do not indicate that in every such case no emotion had been experienced. More likely the emotion was different in nature.

Poe's letters to women make this clear. They are hardly a major contribution to epistolary literature. Generally, even at his mediocre best, Poe was a disciplined prose writer. In these letters, however, he is shrill, flamboyant, and graceless. Above all, their emotionalism is so highly charged as to be unconvincing. It is as though he felt at once too much and too little — too much as a writer and too little as a man. Their extravagant coloring [page 15:] conveys the impression of a species of emotional writing partaking of both Wertherism and surrealism.

No wonder many of Poe's biographers have been shocked. Woodberry felt that fortune had been kind in destroying much of this correspondence.[21] Mrs. Weiss charged Poe with “insincerity and dissimulation” when he wrote to Mrs. Whitman that he had loved her for years, during which time he had been unable to either see or hear her name “without a shiver, half of delight, half of anxiety.” Yet that was the same period, complains Mrs. Weiss, when Poe was infatuated with Mrs. Osgood, and, moreover, when his wife — whom he claimed to have “loved as man never loved before” — was still alive.[22] And Quinn, incensed by Poe's revelation to his new Helen that he had done violence to his own nature in marrying Virginia, calls him a perpetrator of “deliberate falsehood.”[23])

Yet Poe was neither insincere nor a liar — in the usual sense of these words. His affections for women were, as Harrison observes,[24] fleeting, but they were none the less intense. In this respect, “simulator” is a more appropriate description of Poe than “dissimulator.” Some of his biographers have come close to an understanding of the true nature of his “love.” Even Miss Phillips, whose analytical powers can hardly be called acute, realized that Poe was “an unconscious actor.”[25] Woodberry, too, noted that Poe, even as a boy, “either was or affected to be the creature of impulse.”[26] But are affectation and impulse always separable? Poe himself could not have been always aware of which came first, the genuine impulse or the affectation; in either case they soon became one and, for the time of duration, genuine. Stoddard must have sensed this [page 16:] when he remarked of the poet's sentiments for Mrs. Osgood that “Poe was enamored of her, felt or fancied that he was, which with him was the same thing.”[27]

It was the same thing because Poe was a creative actor, one who throws himself into a rôle and proceeds to interpret it by tapping an emotional reservoir within him — which supplies him with the necessary artistic energy — and by shaping it into a unified creation. In Poe's case, the rôles, though varied, had a similarity of tone: the ardent, sad lover; the underprivileged, the misunderstood; the lover of beauty, of gentleness, virtue, womanhood. His identification with his own character-creation was at times so complete that art and life became interfused; the actor became the character. It was romantic art, and by modern naturalistic standards, short of convincing; but by the standards of the time, and by the standards of refined, “sensitive” ladies like Mrs. Osgood, “divinely beautiful.”

4

Scholars and biographers sometimes forget that the person they have selected for study is significant primarily because of some outstanding contribution to the arts, the sciences, or to human history in general. This is especially true in the case of a writer like Poe. “The most casual reader,” says Jacques Barzun, “will have noticed that whenever a romantic artist is talked or written about the facts of his life seem to outnumber and overwhelm the facts describing his work.”[28] It is wholesome to be reminded that what the man did in his work is a greater — if not the sole — justification for adding another volume to the over-stocked shelves of the world than his merely having been a boy, a man, a husband, [page 17:] a lover, a pessimist, an optimist, a neurotic, a kindly soul, a boor, or a gentleman.

Poe was an artist, a creative writer. With that as a center all other facts about him become relevant and important: they may have contributed to the development, or stunting, of his talent. It is because his poetry still lives, his short stories still give pleasure, and his literary theories still have enough vitality to provoke discussion that Edgar Allan Poe is of contemporary interest. Edmund Wilson, writing in 1943, has called attention to the same obvious but often neglected fact. “In any presentation of American writing,” he says, “it is still necessary to insist on his value. In the darkness of his solitary confinement, Poe is still a prince.”[29]

Just how early Poe began to write has never been definitely established. That his first attempts were in verse is certain. Joseph H. Clarke, his Richmond schoolmaster, remembered a manuscript volume of verses Mr. Allan had brought him one day for a critical examination and advice. The ten-year old Edgar had given these verses to his “father” with the request that they be published.(5) Of some of his earliest published poems Poe himself remarked that their date of composition was “too remote to be judicially acknowledged.”[32] More important is the certainty that, from his schooldays onward, there was never a question in Poe's mind that he was destined to be a poet; that he was as much of a dedicated spirit as Wordsworth ever claimed to be. Mr. John Allan might be practical enough to disapprove of poetry as a [page 18:] vocation — as he had disapproved of “strolling players” as worthy progenitors of offspring — but the boy knew his own calling and never betrayed it.

Excluding the brief time spent, under duress, in Mr. Allan's tobacco warehouse, Poe never earned one cent in any other way except by writing — unless the time spent by Mr. “Perry” in the United States Army be credited to Poe's attempt to earn a livelihood. Unless, also, we are willing to accept the unsubstantiated rumors of his having been employed as a professional actor in Boston and as a common laborer in a brick-yard in Baltimore.[33] His monetary returns from his writing were extremely modest, yet even in the year of his death he could write to a friend: “Depend upon it, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a littérateur at least all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.”[34]

His first published volume appeared soon after he left Richmond to seek his fortune in the North. It was Tamerlane and Other Poems, a thin little book printed in Boston in 1827. With it he achieved neither fortune nor fame, for the critics of the period hardly suspected that this pamphlet of juvenile verses marked the appearance in American literature of a poet of stature, one destined for world renown and popularity.(6) Perhaps, if [page 19:] the critics noticed the volume at all, they felt resentful of the young author who obviously possessed little modesty and less humility. “We will not say,” he wrote in the preface, “that he [the author] is indifferent as to the success of these poems ... but he can safely assert that failure will not at all influence him in a resolution already adopted. This is challenging criticism — let it be so.”[35] It was not until many, many years after the poet's bones had been mouldering in his grave that the little book “By a Bostonian” acquired the dignity of a collector's item, making fortunes for the few rare souls who have accidentally stumbled upon copies in neglected attics and junk-shops.

The second volume was published in Baltimore in 1829 and was entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, ancl Minor Poems. Here Poe's habit of perpetually reprinting earlier poems — sometimes after but minor revisions; at other times, after complete rewriting becomes established. All through his writing career the artist in Poe was to labor toward the achievement of the inevitable form for his poems and, later, his stories. Critical reviews of this second book were few and inconclusive, ranging from a comparison of the meter of the leading poem with a “pile of brick bats” to a comparison of the youthful author with Shelley. Perhaps, however, not the least achievement of the volume was in impressing Poe's relatives that there might, after all, be something of value in scribbling verses. One hitherto aloof member of the family was moved to credit “Edgar” with possibilities: “Our name,” he exclaimed, “will be a great one yet.”[36]

A few months after Poe's expulsion from West Point, in 1831, his third book appeared, this time under the [page 20:] imprint of a New York publisher. It bore the modest title, Poems by Edgar A. Poe. The modesty suggests the possibility that the poet had by now acquired a measure of self-assurance. The book was dedicated to the United States Corps of Cadets, whose subscriptions may have encouraged the New York publisher to undertake the venture. The only notice, says Woodberry with a slight exaggeration — Poe received “was from the laughter of the cadets, who were disappointed because the little green volume of dingy paper had not turned out to be a book of local squibs.”[37]

And yet this “dingy volume” contained some of Poe's best poems, poems that in years to come would be quoted and recited in most of the world's known languages. It contained “Helen,” “Israfel,” “The Doomed City (later to become “The City in the Sea”), and “Irene” (to become, after many revisions, “The Sleeper”). That such poetry could pass unnoticed is a commentary on the state of literary taste and judgment in America at the beginning of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century.

But even more than the maturing of a first-rate original poet was passed over in silence. That little green book also marked the emergence of a first-rate literary critic, gravely needed in American letters at the time. In a prefatory letter addressed to “Mr. B.” — probably his publisher Elam Bliss — Poe enunciated certain theories on the nature of poetry which he was later to sift and refine. It matters little that some of these theories were derived from others, notably Coleridge; everything he touched became peculiarly his own as it passed through his keen intelligence. In this letter Poe ex- pressed an aesthetics, at once classical and romantic, [page 21:] which he was soon to apply effectively. “In American criticism,” a professor of classical learning was to state one hundred and eleven years later, “Poe set the fashion; ... and much of the classical thinking of later critics ... has one root in the classics, and another in Edgar Allan Poe.”[38] The reception accorded his first three volumes of verse evidently convinced Poe that the writing of prose might prove more profitable.

He therefore turned to the short story. From Baltimore, where he soon found himself living with his relatives, he sent five stories to The Philadelphia Saturday Courier. They were all published, but not one of them — not even the powerful Gothic tale “Metzengerstein” — was deemed worthy of the $100 prize which the periodical had offered for the best short story submitted.

He was more fortunate when, sometime later, he submitted six short stories to the Baltimore Saturday Visiter and carried off the prize of fifty dollars with his “The Manuscript Found in a Bottle.” Moreover, the judges — including no less a literary figure than John Pendleton Kennedy — in announcing the award confessed that they had been equally well impressed with all six of the stories, and expressed a hope that all of Mr. Poe's stories would soon be published in book form.

That book had to wait until 1840, when a Philadelphia publisher brought out the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in two volumes. In the meantime Poe's stories had appeared in numerous periodicals, both obscure and popular. Among the twenty-five tales in the Philadelphia collection were such indubitable masterpieces as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” and William Wilson.” Poe had become the master of the American short story. [page 22:]

In the meantime also he had had published in New York — and in London — his only attempt at novel writing, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).

Two other collections of short stories followed the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Several of these later stories introduced a new type of short fiction, the tale of “ratiocination” or the detective story. In them Poe created a new kind of hero, a Frenchman named C. Auguste Dupin, a man of keen, perceptive mentality — a man apparently like Edgar Poe himself who by ingenious logical deductions and inferences solved crime puzzles which eluded the unimaginative mentalities of the professional sleuths. As a foil — or “stooge” — Poe created a subsidiary character, a man who followed the great detective around, asking questions and receiving wise answers, and sometimes whole lectures on the simple yet mysterious operations of logic. The two characters have since become better known in world literature, under the names given them by Sir Arthur Conan- Doyle, as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

One other important contribution Poe made to the short story. In 1842 he published in Graham's Magazine a review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales which has become, according to Professor Fred Lewis Pattee, the historian of the American short story, “the leading document in the history of the form.”[39] In it he formulated a comprehensive theory of the technique and aesthetic bases of what was to become the most popular form in American fiction.(7) [page 23:]

That review was part of a larger contribution which Poe made to literary criticism in general. By the time it appeared Poe had already established himself as one of our leading critics. His quill was prolific and he turned out reviews and literary essays so numerous that he was in danger of being forgotten either as poet or as story-teller and remembered only as a critic.

The appearance, in 1845, of another collection of Tales, and still another volume of his poems, containing “The Raven,” somewhat restored the balance.

This almost completes the record of Poe's literary activity — almost though not quite. For in addition to these three main types of writing, in each of which he achieved fame if not fortune, Poe also from time to time digressed into various other fields. Thus he once wrote a book on conchology — mostly a rewriting of another's work. He solved cryptograms and perpetrated journalistic and pseudo-scientific hoaxes. Altogether he did a prodigious amount of hack work. It paid little, but it paid. ... And toward the end of his life he published Eureka, which he called a “prose poem” but which might be described with equal justice as a philosophical treatise or “scientific” dissertation. It was his most ambitious undertaking, his Book of Truths — a turgid disclosure of his comprehension of the laws and destiny of the universe. Critics to this day are baffled by it and differ widely on its value. Poe himself believed that Eureka was his magnum opus and would be read “two thousand years hence.”[40] He dedicated it to Alexander von Humboldt, whose Cosmos had influenced some of his own philosophical reflections. [page 24:]

5

Edgar Allan Poe was a highly gifted writer. His stories are imaginative and his poems are musical. In both genres he was impressively romantic. The effect of his work upon the imagination is vivid and haunting. Yet to attribute the extraordinary impression he has left behind him solely to the qualities of his work would be erroneous. Shelley was imaginative and romantic; Keats was vivid and musical; but their fascination is purely that of the excellence of their work, and is confined to lovers of poetry. Only Byron somewhat approximates Poe's appeal, and it is significant that Poe as a youngster was strongly stimulated by the dramatic character of Byron's personality and writings. He felt impelled not only to emulation in verse, but also to a successful imitation of Byron's swimming exploit: six or seven miles[41] against the tide in the James River — duplicating the British poet's feat of swimming across the Hellespont.(8)

It is Poe's personality which has remained the in explicable yet tangible core of his appeal. He was and still is a tantalizing mystery. Our emotional or critical attitude toward his work seems to have only a slight and remote connection with our warm curiosity. Even if we perceive some justice in Henry James's carefully-shaded self-congratulation — “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection”[43] — we nevertheless do not abandon Poe. No more than Yvor [page 25:] Winters did when he publicly confessed several years ago, for himself and his friends, that Poe had long passed casually, with him and with them, “as a bad writer accidentally and temporarily popular.” A psychologist might accept the act of confession itself as a disclosure of preoccupation.(9)

Poe's “temporary” popularity need not detain us. Edmund Wilson, Horace Gregory, Malcolm Cowley, Van Wyck Brooks, Professor Matthiessen, and others(10) have recently taken care of that. Whether there was — and still is — an element of the “accidental” in Poe's popularity is largely a matter of semantics. If the sum total of physical and psychological equipments, aptitudes, and patterns of behavior which constitute personality be merely accidental to a writer's work, then Poe's appeal has been “accidental.” But we are still baffled by the man, and the attempts of some of the best minds to explain him have intensified rather than lessened our interest. Was Poe Griswold's scoundrel or Baudelaire's saint, one of the holy army of martyrs? Was he Lauvrière's congenital degenerate or Hanns Heinz Ewers's dreamer “beautiful in body and mind”?[44] Was he the satanic genius, the poet of hell, who like Lucifer, fell from sheer intellectual pride, or was he a great spiritual writer?(11) We shall probably never know [page 26:] the answer. Poe will continue to haunt us and to raise questions. Perhaps all we shall ever know definitely is the indubitable fact noted by a reviewer of Harrison's Life, away bach in 1903, that “Edgar Allan Poe is the most interesting and picturesque figure in American letters.” That reviewer, Jeannette L. Gilder, justified her use of the adjective “picturesque” by adding, “because of his weaknesses and misfortunes.”[46] She was partly right. Poe's weaknesses and misfortunes have contributed to his picturesqueness. The element of pathos, if not tragedy, always hovered above him, like a dark halo: Orphaned as a child; sent to the university, but, alas, for one brief year; dismissed from West Point; deserted by the girl he loved; yoked to a child-wife, frail, consumptive, who died leaving him ill and lonely; and always poverty trailing him like a lean beast throughout his life; and, the crowning stroke of fate, his death — alone, unknown — in a charitable institution. Add to that his “weaknesses” — a predisposition to alcohol, a sensitive nervous organism, instability, irritability, inordinate pride perpetually wounded, physical pain necessitating the anodyne of alcohol or opium.

But add also Poe's unerring sense of romantic effectiveness. Consciously or by intuition he turned his weaknesses and misfortunes into assets. His letters teem with laments and complaints, with bitter outcries against [page 27:] an unjust fate, with proud defiance of a callous world, and with almost rhapsodic indulgence in self-pity.

“I am in the greatest necessity,” he writes to Mr. Allan, after leaving that gentleman's house following a quarrel;” not having tasted food since yesterday morning I have no where to sleep at night, but roam the streets — I am nearly exhausted ...[47] Two years later, as a soldier stationed at Fort Moultrie, he writes: “I have thrown myself on the world like a Norman conqueror on the shores of Britain &, by my avowed assurance of victory, have destroyed the fleet which could alone cover my retreat — I must either conquer or die — succeed or be disgraced.”[48] Three weeks later he follows up this letter with one at once more proud and more abject: “There is that within my heart which has no connection with degradation — I can walk among infection & be uncontaminated. ... , My father do not throw me aside as degraded I will be an honor to your name.”[49] After his dismissal from West Point he again appeals to Mr. Allan for assistance — for the last time, he assures him. “I feel that I am on sick bed from which I never shall get up.”[50] He does, however, get up, and he does write again to Mr. Allan. Not, to be sure, to ask for any favors, but merely to express his gratitude for past favors, to call himself the greatest fool in existence, and to curse the day he was born. Also to add, ever so casually — merely by way of general information — that he is wretchedly poor.[51] And if a month later he writes once more — and this time definitely begging financial assistance — it is only because he is in the greatest distress,” having been arrested for a debt incurred on his brother Henry's account.[52](12) [page 28:]

If Poe managed, in one mood or another, to call attention to his misfortunes, he managed equally well, in one key or another, to dramatize his weaknesses. In 1835 he writes to his friend and benefactor, J. P. Kennedy, that he is suffering from a spell of melancholy which he is unable to account for, as his financial condition, at the moment, is rather good and the prospects of future prosperity are even better. He is wretched and knows not why. “Convince me,” he pleads, “that it is worth one's while — that it is at all necessary to live.” One tell-tale sentence slips into this letter: “I say you will believe me, and for this simple reason, that a man who is writing for effect does not write thus.” This hardly requires the analytical powers of a M. Dupin to draw the obvious inference that Poe was aware of the possibility that his writing might produce an effect he did not intend to produce.

It is not, however, until thirteen years later, during his unsmooth courtship of Mrs. Whitman that he attempts to do something about this feeling that it is not at all necessary to live. He buys two ounces of laudanum, writes to “Annie” imploring her to come to his death bed, and then swallows “about half” the laudanum. The amount is not enough to end his life, but it is enough to make him deathly sick. In the hysterical letter in which, several days later, he tells her the story, he renews his request that she come to him. “I am so ill” he concludes; “so terribly, hopelessly ILL in body and mind, that I feel I CANNOT live, unless I can feel [page 29:] your sweet, gentle, loving hand pressed upon my fore head.”[54](13)

To Mrs. Whitman, who insisted on his curbing one of his weaknesses before she would consent to marry him, he confessed: “I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been a desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories.” Perhaps the medical comment of Dr. John W. Robertson, one of Poe's friendliest biographers, is the only one that can be made on this confession: “If there were ‘memories,’ they were of prenatal inheritance.”[55]

To another correspondent, who had evidently asked him for an explanation of the circumstances — or the “terrible evil,” as Poe had hinted — which had caused his “irregularities,” Poe wrote of the anxious years during which his wife had been desperately ill. “But I am,” he wrote, “constitutionally sensitive — nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank — God only knows how often or how much.”[56] The explanation sounded impressive. John H. Ingram, the most painstaking English biographer of Poe, was the first to unveil “this terrible mystery in the poet's life,” and he was so startled that he felt as though he were committing sacrilege in publishing the letter. And Harrison was moved to exclaim: This, then, was the form that gnawed relentlessly at Poe's heart for six years, and well-nigh drove him mad. ...[57]

It is not strange that Poe should have conveniently [page 30:] forgotten that these “fits” had been part of his history long before Virginia's illness; but it is strange that his sympathetic biographers should have apparently shared his lapse of memory.(14) Harrison, for example, prints Poe's letter to Dr. Snodgrass, written seven years before the great revelation, in which Poe replies to the accusations made against him by his former employer, William Burton. After pledging, “before God, the solemn word of a gentleman,” that he is temperate even to rigor, he proceeds, with due candor, to inform Snodgrass upon what foundation Burton “has erected his slanders.” He has never been, he repeats, in the habit of intoxication, but he admits that sometimes, during his stay in Richmond, when he was editing the Messenger, he, “at long intervals,” gave way to the temptation held out on all sides by the spirit of Southern conviviality. “My sensitive temperament,” he explains, “could not stand an excitement which was an every-day matter to my companions. In short, it sometimes happened that I was completely intoxicated.”[59]

Poe obviously believed his passionate assertions each time he made them, and he died believing them. On his last visit to Richmond he told his friend Dr. Carter that if people would not tempt him, he would not fall. He declared, “in the most solemn manner,” that he would restrain himself.[60] Indeed, he was so confident that he could restrain himself that he took a pledge of total abstinence and became a member of the Order of Sons of Temperance, thereby gladdening the hearts of the [page 31:] “best” people of Richmond, as one clerical gentleman later recalled.[61] Several days later he lay fatally ill in Baltimore. ... What seems strange is that he made his biographers believe his explanations and avowals. That certainly is a tribute to the persuasiveness of his style, to his ability to make any moment vivid and complete.

6

Attempts to explain any creative gift are generally unconvincing, if not fatuous. In the case, however, of Poe's ability to present any moment as a complete experience, acquaintance with the whole history of the man can be very helpful. The concentration he managed to bestow upon any situation or mood is strikingly akin to that which one observes — or forgets to observe — intense moments on a theatre stage. A gifted actor interpreting a part enters into his rôle with such intensity — even when controlled by artistic discipline — that each moment is a unique experience. There is no question of contradiction or affirmation of what has preceded; there is only an enactment of each scene, confrontation, or dramatic unit with such self-absorbed concentration as to render it roundly complete.

The resources of Poe for a successful career in the profession of his parents were very considerable. His heredity, temperament, mind, body, and voice would have been great assets to him had he been permitted to choose acting instead of literature as his profession. Such a choice was never his to make. The accident of his adoption by a petty Scotch merchant aspiring to become a Virginia gentleman deflected his life from a course which might have been the only logical one for him. The contempt with which a man of Mr. Allan's type — [page 32:] who came into money soon after adopting the boy looked upon “strolling players” early affected Poe him self and was always to wage war with his natural inclinations. Edgar Poe, reared to be a gentleman but unprovided with the means needful to maintain the life of one, could find only in literature an occupation tolerable to a tradition of genteel values. He followed it, but remained at heart as much of an actor as if he actually trod the boards. If we must find a split personality in Edgar Allan Poe, it is clearly discernible in the conflict between the gentleman and the repressed strolling player. Both were unhappy, because neither was permitted to function naturally, and each sought compensations and made adjustments: the gentleman by facing the world with insolent pride, by wearing his shabby attire with meticulous dignity, and by turning himself into a literary histrio; the player by turning the world itself into a stage.

That this conflict continued throughout his life there can be no doubt. In 1845 Anna Cora Mowatt, a New York lady accustomed to the highest social circles, found herself obliged, by a stroke of financial reverses, to professionalize her acting talents and, as a consequence, she also found herself the object of severe disapproval by certain members of her own class.(15) Among the voices that defended and encouraged her was that of the by then well-known literary and dramatic critic, Mr. E. A. Poe.

It was logical, of course, that he should defend her — [page 33:] and the acting profession as well — on general principles; but his vehement defense contains a short passage — one gratuitous autobiographic sentence — which shows special concern, as though the subject had long festered within him, like a hidden wound: “We have no sympathies,”’ he wrote, “with the prejudices which would entirely have dissuaded Mrs. Mowatt from the stage. There is no cant more contemptible than that which habitually decries the theatrical profession a profession — which, in itself, embraces all that can elevate and ennoble, and absolutely nothing to degrade In the mere name of actress she can surely find nothing to dread. ... The theatre is ennobled by its high facilities for the development of genius — facilities not afforded elsewhere in equal degree. By the spirit of genius we say, it is ennobled — it is sanctified — beyond the sneer of the fool or the cant of the hypocrite. The actor of talent is poor at heart, indeed, if he do not look with contempt upon the mediocrity even of a king.” Then follows the tell-tale sentence: “The writer of this article is himself the son of an actress — has invariably made it his boast — and no earl was ever prouder of his earldom than he of the descent from a woman who, although well born, hesitated not to consecrate to the drama her brief career of genius and of beauty.”[63] The parallelism — and the self-identification — is obvious. So is the betrayal of the inner conflict: that touch about his mother having been “well born” and the qualifying “although.”

For the seeds of this conflict one must go back to Poe's childhood. He grew up to express pride in his actress mother; but in the environment of the Allans, in the private schools to which he was sent, and in the circle [page 34:] of his early friends themselves a product of nineteenth century upper and middle-class Virginia he heard but little that was favorable of acting and actors.(16) All of his biographers agree that Poe, especially as child and boy, was often hurt and humiliated because of his “low” lineage. At the Allan home the “memory of his outcast ancestry was not allowed to fade” so that the boy might remember his debt of gratitude to Mr. Allan and that “he was among ladies and gentlemen on sufferance only, that he did not belong among them and never could.”[64] At school, things were no better. Mrs. Weiss cites the instance of one “sprig of an aristocratic family” who objected to associating with the son of actors and was in return lampooned by young Poe as “Don Pompiosa.”[65] And Krutch, in trying to account for Poe's dislike of Boston, suggests that “it may be that in receiving these first wounds of the spirit” the snubs and insults to which his schoolfellows had subjected him as the son of an actress “he identified the place of his birth with its heritage of shame.”[66] Quinn's summary is sufficient to speak for all the biographers: “There can be little question that Poe's heritage in the theatre did him little good in his social relations.”[67]

Yet he could not escape that heritage; nor would the world which condemned him for it permit him to escape it. For it is the nature of the theatre to attract, and even the sober-minded and overly-respectable persons in [page 35:] whom it inspires distrust and disdain are affected by its “sinful” power. The suggestion of one biographer that Poe's earliest memories were of the stage onto which he may have been carried to enact the rôle of an infant seems far-fetched, although it is unquestionably true that much of his infancy was passed in the green-rooms of the various theatres in which his parents performed. It is equally true that as a little boy he enchanted the Allans and their guests by his acting. “At the age of six,” says Woodberry, “he could read, draw, and dance; of more showy accomplishments (a chair, or else the long, narrow Virginia table, cleared for dessert, being his stage), his trick before company was to pledge their healths in sweetened wine and water with roguish grace, and his talent was to declaim, for each of which he had, perhaps by inheritance, an equal aptitude.”[68] There is some doubt about his pledging “their healths,” but there is none about his other accomplishments, including that of “spouting” verse, even at the early age of five.[69]

In the fashionable schools to which he was sent, both in Richmond and in England, he distinguished himself in declamation and debate. The boy of obscure parentage evidently knew how to make the most of his special gifts in competition with boys who had the advantage of social prestige. “Talent for declamation was one of his gifts,” recalled T. H. Ellis, the son of Mr. Allan's partner. “I well remember a public exhibition at the close of a course of instruction in elocution, and my delight when, in the presence of a large and distinguished company, he bore off the prize in competition with Channing Moore, Cary Wickham, Andrew Johnston, Nat Howard, and others “[70] [page 36:] All through his later life Poe was to know the power to be derived from his talent. Declamation and elocution — as we shall soon see — were to be an important part of the glory that was Poe.

That the boy's successes gave him a feeling of superiority is probably true, but that they were, as is generally believed, bad for him is not so certain. The applause of his teachers and playmates at his performances and the enthusiastic approval of the home circle may have enhanced his innate pride, but to the born actor approval is the confirmation of his talent and helps to determine its direction. Had it not been for the hostility of his social environment toward the theatre Edgar Poe's dramatic powers might have found creative direction; as it was, they became distorted into mere sound and fury. There was no such hostility toward theatricality as one of the social graces; as such it was encouraged. It is not surprising, therefore, that the elocution and the grand pose never left the boy impelled to exhibitionism.

The episode of the Thespian Club is instructive. A group of boys from the Classical School founded a “Thespian Club.” It may have been a coincidence, but it is worth recalling that Poe's father as a boy in Baltimore had been known to his friends as “a clever amateur actor and a boon companion of the Thespian Club.”[71] Edgar's dramatic group in Richmond improvised a stage and gave performances for a small admission price, drawing audiences of forty or fifty for each performance. It introduced at least one good actor — Edgar Poe.” He was,” reminisced Dr. Creed Thomas, who had been a fellow-Thespian, “one of the best actors.” “He had undoubted talent in this direction,” confirmed Col. T. H. Ellis. But while the audiences [page 37:] might have been pleased Mr. Allan was decidedly dis pleased, and he forbade Edgar's “having anything to do with these theatricals” — an action which was, records Mrs. Weiss, “a great grievance to the boy.”[72]

Beyond a very plausible likelihood there is no evidence that Poe ever again participated in dramatic performances. Ellis, whose information has proved correct in other respects, believed that when Poe first went to Boston, after leaving the Allan home, he tried to support himself by turning professional actor[73]; and Quinn reports finding an item in the Boston Courier for April 24, 1827, announcing that the part of Bertrand in the Foundling of the Forest would be played by “a young gentleman of Boston, his first appearance on any stage.”[74](17) We know that Poe was in Boston at the time, arranging for the publication of his first book, to be signed “By a Bostonian.” It is also worth recording that the late Mr. James H. Whitty once claimed having seen a Philadelphia playbill listing Mr. Edgar A. Poe as a leading actor in a benefit performance for a Philadelphia charity.(18)

But allowing for the possibility that these acting experiences are — like so many other rumors about Poe — mere legends and hypotheses, it is nevertheless clear [page 38:] that not having the limited area of a theatre stage at his disposal did not stop Poe from exhibiting his talents. The curly-headed little boy who mounted Mr. Allan's dinner table to captivate the hearts of his audience by his declamation and general histrionic “cuteness” soon grew into the fifteen-year old Lieutenant of the Richmond Junior Volunteers who stood at the quay, sword in hand, welcoming General Lafayette. It was during the old General's triumphal tour of the United States in 1824, the same year in which Mrs. Stanard, “Helen,” died, and whose grave the boy is said to have haunted, preferably at midnight. When the General went to church the next day, Sunday, “tradition has it” that Lieutenant Poe escorted him to the pew of Chief Justice Marshall.[75] One is not at all surprised to learn that at West Point Cadet Poe was also a Drum-Major.

Other forms of exhibitionism obtrude themselves. There was his “lifelong love of hoaxing.”[76] John Mackenzie, a boyhood playmate of Edgar's, remembered that Poe “delighted in playing practical jokes” and in “masquerading.”[77] There is Col. Ellis's reminiscence of the Christmas toy — a “hideous imitation of a serpent” — which young Edgar persisted in poking at little Jane Ellis until “it almost ran her crazy.”[78](19) There is the story of the Christmas ghost that appeared at the Gentleman's Whist Club meeting at the Ellis home. Behind its mask was young Edgar Poe.[79] And there is the story of the “slaying” of old K — a West Point professor, whose body hidden in a burlap sack turned out to be the bloody carcass of a gander dragged into the barracks as part of a little comedy.[80] [page 39:]

Poe's literary hoaxes, an ingrained element of his in tellectual make-up, according to Harrison,[81] must be accepted as still another species of exhibitionism. Such fictions as “Hans Pfaall,” “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” “The Balloon-Hoax,” and “Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis” were passed off deliberately as news, actual adventure, and scientific investigation. His display of learning came pretty close to hoaxing: garbled quotations from obscure authorities; florid references to “great” names, often non-existent, and scholarly annotations of his own work, such as those appended to “Al Aaraaf.” There are also his reviews; anonymous, like the one of Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America, in which he takes the opportunity to mention “the brilliant career of Graham's Magazine under Mr. Poe's care, and its subsequent trashy literary character since his retirement”[82]; or pseudonymous, like the one of “The Raven,” under the mask of “Quarles” — very technical, very learned, and obviously intended to im press the reader as being very profound. His easy as sumption of pseudonyms and aliases — E. A. Perry, Henri Le Rennet, E. S. T. Grey, Esqr.,[83] Thaddeus K. Peasley[84] — needs no special comment.

These posturings and pretensions, combined with other forms of exhibitionism — such as most of his verses and epistles to ladies — undoubtedly helped to create the impression that he was essentially insincere, but a more understanding interpretation is decidedly possible. Professor J. Montgomery Gambrill, for instance — a trained historian — acknowledges the “basis of fact” underlying the accusation but does not overlook the extenuating circumstances. Poe, he says, “repeatedly furnished or [page 40:] approved statements regarding his life and work that were incorrect, he often made a disingenuous show of pretended learning, and he sometimes misstated facts to avoid wounding his own vanity.” All this is true, of course, but, continues, Mr. Gambrill, “This ugly fault seems to have resulted from a fondness for romantic posing, ... Perhaps, too, he inherited from his actor parents a love of applause, and if so, the trait was certainly encouraged in early childhood.”[85] In the light of all that we now know of Poe's life — from his Richmond childhood to his death in Baltimore — there can no longer be any “perhaps” and “if so.”

7

Although Poe was obliged to use the world at large as his theatre — and he was aware of the inescapable necessity fairly early — he nevertheless found himself unable to keep away from the real theatre and its peculiarly colorful people. His activities as playwright and dramatic critic are important enough to deserve extended treatment in separate chapters. But his relations with men of the theatre cannot be omitted from a consideration of either Poe the man or Poe the writer. They are significant in any possible interpretation of what Poe himself so aptly phrased as the “literary histrio.”

It cannot be a mere coincidence that he should have been thrown together repeatedly with so many actors, playwrights, and elocutionists, and that some of his closest friends should have come from among them. It was as though the unindigenous Virginia gentleman, never quite accepted by the society(20) which by his early [page 41:] conditioning he both respected and feared, found the theatre a place of light and warmth. Here at least he felt himself no alien, for here he found people whose easy camaraderie betrayed no moments of condescension, no tiny isles of frigid reserve. Like Mrs. Mowatt he might feel it necessary to defend the institution against his own unconscious contempt, but here, ultimately, was acceptance, congeniality, home.

One of the earliest of his friends in his Richmond boyhood was Robert Sully, whose father, Matthew Sully, had acted with Poe's mother.[88] Perhaps that knowledge influenced Edgar in becoming the protector of a delicate and sensitive boy against the tyrannies of his sturdier and more aggressive playmates. He would not allow the big boys to tease “Rob”; he also helped him with his lessons.[89] In later life, when Poe was a member of the circle of artists, actors, and writers meeting at a hotel in Philadelphia, Thomas Sully, Robert's uncle, painted a portrait of Poe draped in a cloak which “savored of Byron.”[90]

Poe's relations with John H. Hewitt are difficult to characterize. They were friends, says Whitty[91]; acquaintances, says Quinn.[92] Certainly they were at one time rivals, for it was Hewitt who under the name of “Henry Wilton” carried off the poetry prize offered by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter.(21) And it was Hewitt who likened the measure of “Al Aaraaf” to a pile of [page 42:] brick bats. It was also Hewitt who left us an account of a fight he had had with Poe on the streets of Baltimore.[93] Besides being a poet and journalist, Hewitt was also a playwright, a composer of operas, and a member of a theatrical company organized by his father.[94]

Poe was a comparative newcomer in Baltimore when he became one of the group of young writers and artists meeting at the Seven Stars Tavern, all of them “knights of the quill, brush or stage.” Poe, it is said, became “very popular with these littérateurs, both because of his pleasing manners and his singular elocutionary charm.”[95] One of the group was T. S. Arthur, whose Ten Nights in a Bar-Room was to prove a forerunner of Abie's Irish Rose, Tobacco Road and Life with Father in its appeal to American theatre audiences. Another was Lambert A. Wilmer, whose Merlin dramatized Poe's early romance with Elmira Royster.

Little is known of the literary and theatrical coteries to which Poe may have gravitated when he returned to Richmond to work on the Messenger. It seems worth recording, however, that he soon found himself scribbling verses into Eliza White's album, the same Eliza White who in later life became a “well-known Shakespearean reader” and visited Poe at his home in Fordham.[96]

I have already mentioned the fact that during his residence in Philadelphia Poe was a member of a coterie that included many actors and playwrights. Quinn believes that William Burton, ex-comedian turned editor and publisher, “probably invited Poe to the dinner parties which he is reputed to have given at his home.”[97] Hervey Allen has “no doubt” that the “theatrical [page 43:] Mr. Burton ... occasionally arranged to take his young editor” to the Chestnut Street Theatre “to see Edwin Forrest rant and tear.”[98] It is certain that the Graham's invited their “interesting, good-looking young editor” to their home, where, at weekly parties, he left the impression of “an elegant black-cloaked figure making actor-like entries on the scene.”[99] All contemporary sources indicate that Poe in Philadelphia met with such prominent actors and playwrights as Burton, For rest, Richard Penn Smith, James N. Barker, Robert M. Bird, and Robert T. Conrad,[100] some of whom be came his friends. His friendship with Junius Brutus Booth was close enough to have inspired a story of the two of them returning on one occasion from the theatre in such “high-flown” condition that they indulged in perpetrating a practical joke at the expense of an offended Jew.[101]

But it was in New York that Poe found himself closer to the theatre than he had ever been before. Wherever he went, at Frank's Place in Barclay Street,[102] at the homes of Willis, the Hon. John R. Bartlett, Miss Anne C. Lynch, Mrs. Oakes Smith, or at the theatre, he met many playwrights and actors. In his poorer days, friends, such as the bookseller Gowans, supplied him with tickets; later, his editorial connections, especially as dramatic critic on the Broadway Journal, enabled him to keep up with the theatrical life of the city. A celebrity in his own right and an influential commentator with magazine columns at his disposal, he was invited to first nights and to theatrical supper parties. Playwrights, actresses, and producers “angled for his notice and appeared to hang upon his words.”[103] By then he was also the famous author of “The [page 44:] Raven,” which no less an accomplished actor than James E. Murdoch was willing to recite in public.

The first reading of the poem was as theatrical as Poe could manage to make it. Alexander Taylor Crane, in his recollections of the time when he was employed as errand boy and mail clerk in the office of the Broadway Journal, remembered Poe's coming in with Murdoch one day and handing him the manuscript of the poem. Murdoch, “one of the finest elocutionists,” then proceeded to charm the office staff.[104] Sometime later Murdoch and a collaborator published a text-book on dramatic elocution, in which they included three of Poe's poems: “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells.”[105](22)

Another New York friend was Gabriel Harrison, whom Poe discovered in a general store on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. Harrison was a playwright, an actor, and a founder of the Brooklyn Dramatic Academy. He was famous for his Othello to Lester Wallack's Iago. His acting, it is said, was characterized by perfect enunciation and magnetic power of voice and manner.[106] Long after Poe's death Harrison continued to write to Mrs. Clemm and to refer to “dear Eddie.” His recollections, published toward the end of the century, testify to the friendship that had existed between him and the poet.[107](23)

The opportunities with which New York provided Poe were many. It is not at all surprising, for instance, [page 45:] to learn that the first book publication of “The Raven” was in a text on elocution, written by George Vandenhoff. Poe, as Professor Mabbott — the discoverer of this fact — states, “was, by March, 1845, a well-known public figure in New York and was always friendly to actors. Vandenhoff, like his father, was an actor primarily.”[108] How well acquainted Poe was with Vandenhoff we have no way of knowing; but we do know that Poe thought well of his acting talent, for in the Broadway Journal of April 12, 1845, Poe praised Vandenhoff's performance as Creon in the Antigone.(24)

That he was well acquainted with such a personality as John Brougham we know from the testimony of William Winter: “My old friend John Brougham, the comedian, who knew him [Poe] well.”[109] Brougham, before coming to New York had been a prominent Irish playwright and actor and had played at Covent Garden with Mme Vestris.[110] We also know that Poe was equally well acquainted with the playwrights Samuel Woodworth and George Pope Morris. Woodworth was the author of popular successes such as The Forest Rose, “One of the longest-lived American plays before the Civil War.”[111] Morris, besides being well-known as a journalist and the author of the celebrated “Woodman, Spare That Tree” — which Poe considered a composition “of which any poet, living or dead, might justly be proud” — had achieved fame as a playwright some years before Poe came to New York.[112] Poe's friendship with Nathaniel Parker Willis, Morris's journalistic partner, and himself a playwright of note, is too well known to need more than a mention. [page 46:] Nor is more needed to be said here of Poe's relations with Cornelius Mathews, author of The Politicians and Witchraft [[Witchcraft]]. Mathews's testimony regarding Poe's theatre habits also happens to shed an interesting light on Poe's practices and theories of composition and consequently will be discussed in a later chapter.

Of the numerous ladies whom Poe met the record of those connected with the theatre is scanty. We know that he met and admired Mrs. Mowatt, both as a playwright and actress. His presence at the Park Theatre on the opening night of her comedy, Fashion, reads like a dramatic homecoming, for it was at the same Park Theatre that both his mother and father had often acted.[113] Several of the ladies with whom his relations were more than casual or merely social were playwrights as well as poets. Mrs. Osgood wrote Elfrida, in which the hero is strikingly suggestive of Poe. Mrs. Ellet wrote Teresa Contarini. And “Stella” (Mrs. S. D. Lewis) wrote Sappho of Lesbos which, when published in 1876, she dedicated to her “devoted friend Adelaide Ristori, the greatest living tragédienne.”[114](25)

This is not by any means the complete record of Poe's relations with the theatrical fraternity; it is sufficient, however, to warrant the conclusion that it was more than accident that threw him together with all kinds of [page 47:] theatre folk. He gravitated toward them naturally, and they as naturally responded. The kinship was there to begin with, and the atmosphere of the theatre brought them together. Vachel Lindsay caught more of this spirit of Poe than a hundred solemn, analytical critics:

8

Whether Poe's face was or was not “painted for the stage,” his voice was definitely pitched for elocution. We have seen that all through his childhood and boyhood he excelled in the arts of oratory and recitation. No small part of his personal appeal must be credited to the impression he produced as a conversationalist, lecturer, and reader. The impression was, of course, a result of his whole personality — figure, dress, manner — but the share contributed by his voice and delivery was extraordinarily large.

It is dangerous, if not impossible, to abstract Poe's voice from all the other elements that compounded his appeal for those who heard him speak or lecture in private or public. He “possessed,” says Didier, “all the qualifications that make a man shine in society. His manners were graceful and refined, his voice was low, musical, and exquisitely expressive, and there was about him that air of unmistakable distinction, which ordinary men cannot assume, and which few men ever have.”[118] [page 48:] On the basis of the numerous reports left by ladies whose salons Poe graced with his magnetic presence, a more recent biographer evolves a picture of a romantic figure standing “by the mantlepiece talking and reciting poetry to a rapt circle. His buttoned frockcoat and black stock threw up the pallor of his face, his half-chanting voice, his restrained intensity was felt by all present, and whether it was Margaret Fuller ... sitting on a sofa with Mrs. Oakes Smith, or Miss Lynch in the background, or Mrs. Osgood on a stool at his feet, all had their faces upturned to him like children listening to a ghost story.”[119] The persistent mention of the quality of his voice, in all such reports and summaries, constitutes a powerful testimonial. It is like the chorus of references one reads in histories of the modern theatre to the voice of Max Reinhardt's star, Alexander Moissi, whose “gesanghafte Reiz der Stimme seems to have been unforgettable.[120] The question as to whether Poe's voice alone, disembodied as it were, or unaccompanied by his other mesmeric graces, might have produced the effect described must remain unanswered.

That Poe knew how to use his voice — a “smooth baritone,” low and deep[121] — to make its subtle qualities tell is amply clear. His powers as a conversationalist must have been considerable indeed, for one who most assuredly cannot be accused of having wished to pay tribute to Poe,(27) the notorious Rufus Wilmot Griswold himself, has added his enthusiastic impression: “His conversation was at times almost supra-mortal in its eloquence. His voice was modulated with astonishing [page 49:] skill, and his large and variably expressive eyes looked repose or shot Eery tumult into theirs who listened, while his own face glowed, or was changeless in pallor, as his imagination quickened his blood or drew it back frozen to his heart.”[122] Allowing for the Reverend's tendency toward metaphysical eloquence,(28) we still get an impression of a voice skilfully modulated and capable of profoundly affecting its hearers.

Griswold's tribute is glowing enough, but for a real understanding of the part played by Poe's vocal appeal in enhancing his popularity we must once again listen to the ladies. Mrs. Oakes Smith, at whose salon “no one received any more marked attention than Edgar A. Poe,” candidly reported that “He did not affect the society of men” but “rather that of highly intellectual women with whom he liked to fall into a sort of eloquent monologue, half dream, half poetry. Men,” she concluded, “were intolerant of all this, but women fell under his fascination and listened in silence.”[124]

As a matter of fact, men — too as at least one of them, Bardwell Heywood, admitted — could hardly “listen to him one moment without being at once spellbound.” But men were, generally, intolerant. When one evening during a discussion of vocal music at “Annie's” home, Poe, helping himself to ice cream, remarked in his usual categorical manner that males ought never to sing, and that females alone could make harmony, young Hey wood had a strong inclination to throw a glass in his face. Men seemingly resented the poet's pontifical pronouncements and his rather unsubtle flattery of the gentler sex. [page 50:] And Poe's not affecting the society of men was very likely a result of his awareness that his social technique was far from effective with them, whereas it — monologue and all — made him irresistible to women. Mrs. Osgood, for one, confessed that she could listen to him for hours “entranced by strains of pure and almost celestial eloquence.”[125]

The best-balanced record of the poet's conversational gifts — during the years when he was most fashionably in demand — was left by Mrs. Whitman, who, in spite of the ether atmosphere in which she floated, nevertheless possessed an underlying hard-headedness. After recalling the drawing-room exploits of such accomplished verbalists as Walter Savage Landor (“the best talker in England”), Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Neal, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott, and Emerson — to all of whom she had had occasion to listen — she comes to the conclusion that “Unlike the conversational power evinced by these was the earnest, opulent, unpremeditated speech of Edgar Poe.”[126] Unpremeditated it may have been, but hardly without the speaker's consciousness of its effectiveness. The impulse to impress, to charm, seems to have been always with him. Even when he addressed only a few casual callers, mere boys, who one day in Richmond came to pay their respects to the famous author whose work was appearing regularly in their beloved Southern Literary Messenger, he seemed to them “to be talking ... to a peopled atmosphere.”[127]

An important attraction at the salons where he was “lionized” was his readings of his own poems, and not infrequently of the poems of Byron or some other romantic bard. Here his talent for declamation, which [page 51:] had served him so well ever since childhood, shone in its fullest glory. Had Poe actually been a professional actor, there can be no doubt as to the kind of actor he would have been. In spite of his known dislike of Edwin Forrest,[128] Poe too would have been a ranter, a flamboyant declaimer of sonorous lines. The acting style of the day favored the Forrests, and although Poe as a dramatic critic anticipated — as we shall see later — a quieter and more natural style, he was temperamentally close to the inflated stage of his time. His acting, however, would have had at least one difference from that of the established ranters: his modulated voice and his gentlemanly dignity would have sufficiently shaded the purple impulse to make the purple effect seem less starkly violent. Instead of Forrest's bull-like roar the audience would have heard tones that ranged from whispering softness to the musical cry of despair.

And this was essentially what happened in his performances as a reader. We have glowing tributes to “the beauty of his readings and recitals in parlor and hall”[129]; they not only give us an impression of the effect but are detailed enough to help us understand his technique. There is always, of course, the necessity of sifting the facts from the generalities, of discounting the personal “raves,” of extracting the bits of objective statement from the mass of vague poetic description and mystical emanations.

At the University of Virginia, we are told, his “little room on West Range was often filled with a ... select audience of his most particular friends who, spell-bound, scarcely breathed while they eagerly listened to some story ... that he had just written and that he read with his whole soul thrown into every action and intonation [page 52:] of his voice now loud and rapid, like the mad rush of many waters, and now sinking into a scarcely audible whisper. ...”[130] At this time his technique may have been unconscious, merely the intuitive changes of expression to accommodate the nuances of the narrative. And it may have been instinctive when later in Baltimore he repeated the famous speech of Cassius, for the benefit of a young girl, Mary Poitaux, who in her old age still remembered “how his flashing eyes and mobile mouth expressed the various passions of scorn, contempt and anger.”[131] And it surely was instinctive when in the office of Mr. Latrobe, one of the judges that awarded to him the short story prize offered by the Saturday Visiter, he told the projected story of “Hans Pfaall.” Mr. Latrobe's recollection of the incident is vivid enough. Poe described for him the imaginary voyage to the moon and in the course of his recital became “so excited, spoke so rapidly, gesticulating much “that his listener was “carried along” as “a companion of his aërial journey.” After that Mr. Poe the gentleman, having regained his self-control, apologized for Poe the actor, for the latter's excitability, “which he laughed at himself.”[132]

But there was nothing unconscious or merely instinctive about his technique at public recitals in his socially popular years. “The Raven” was the piece most generally in demand, and his manner of setting the stage for its reading indicates that the effect he wished to create was definitely preconceived. “He would,” recalls one lady, “turn down the lamps till the room was almost dark,(29) then standing in the centre of the apartment he [page 53:] would recite those wonderful lines in the most melodious of voices; gradually becoming more and more enthused ... he forgot time, spectators, his personal identity. ... To the listeners came the sounds of falling rain and waving branches; the Raven flapped his dusky wings above the bust of Pallas, and the lovely face of Lenore appeared to rise before them. So marvelous was his power as a reader that the auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken.”[133] It was by means of such theatrical expedients that he made people feel that to hear him repeat “The Raven” was “an event in one's life.”[134]

A more moderate estimate of Poe's power as a reader is that of Howard Paul, whose uncle, T. C. Clarke, employed Poe on the staff of The Saturday Museum, in Philadelphia: “His voice, though not especially melodious, possessed a peculiar charm, guided as it was by a dramatic instinct, and, of course, by rare intelligence. In his recital of The Raven ‘ there were weird, fantastic touches that remind me of some of Henry Irving's tones in his rendition of the part of Mephistopheles. It is not every author that can give dramatic effect to his own creations.”[135] Mr. Paul's tribute to the dramatic instinct which guided Poe's voice may actually have been a tribute to a conscious art which was never entirely free from artifice. It is nonetheless clear that Poe was a master of “weird, fantastic touches” — vocally as well as in writing.

Those were the days of the lyceum, and Poe began to capitalize on his declamation talents by giving public lectures. His first lecture — on “The Poets and Poetry of America” — was given in Philadelphia, at the William Wirt Institute, in 1843.[136] The same lecture [page 54:] — with some changes and additions — was repeated a year and a half later in New York. The impression he produced upon the several hundred listeners can be gauged from Willis's reactions printed in the Weekly Mirror: “He becomes a desk — his beautiful head showing like a statuary embodiment of Discrimination; his accent drops like a knife through water, and his style is so much purer and clearer than the pulpit commonly gets or requires, that the effect of what he says pampers the ear.”[137]

One such lecture — and reading — was given in Boston. It was the famous, or notorious, one which incensed some of the “frogpondians” because Poe had not bothered to write a new poem for the occasion but had chosen to palm off his youthful “Al Aaraaf” instead. Responding to the vociferously shouted demand of the disappointed audience he also read “The Raven.” His “melancholy performance” that night was superciliously attacked by the editor of the Transcript,(30) but perhaps Thomas Wentworth Higginson's description, being at once the reactions of an intelligent boy and the recollection of a mature man of letters, is more illuminating: Poe's voice, in reading “Al Aaraaf,” had at one point become softened until it “seemed attenuated to the finest golden thread ... every syllable was accentuated with ... delicacy and sustained with ... sweetness.” Walking back to Cambridge from that lecture, young Higginson and his comrades felt that they had been “under the spell of some wizard.”[139] [page 55:]

That the wizard was a disciplined performer, an actor who knew his “lines” and “business,” and was not above indulging in subtle “asides” for personal advantage, is shown by an incident during his lecture in Providence. That evening he drew a large audience. He read “The Raven” and other selections and then, as a closing number, began to recite Pinckney's “A Health.” Mrs. Whitman — whom Poe was just then trying to induce to marry him — was seated directly in front of him. As he read the lines beginning “I fill this cup, to one made up of loveliness alone” he looked down into the eyes of the lady, and, says the narrator of the incident, Dr. Harry L. Koopman, “You can imagine the emphasis he gave, and how dramatic it was.”[140]

Another incident is still more indicative of the skilled actor's presence of mind which enables him to take advantage of the moment and to improvise dramatic climaxes as opportunity presents itself. Mrs. Weiss recalls that one evening as Poe was reading “The Raven” at the Archer home in Richmond, the colored servants had stationed themselves outside the window and were listening. “As the speaker,” Mrs. Weiss narrates,

Some dissenting impressions of Poe's skill as a reader must be noted. They are by men and refer to a lecture given at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, in the last [page 56:] year of his life. Bishop O. P. Fitzgerald found in Poe's reading an absence of elocution. “There was not a trace of any such thing in his delivery. Not a gesture was made by him from first to last. His voice was without any conscious inflections in the usual sense of the word.”[142] Similarly Professor B. L. Gildersleeve retained the impression that Poe “did not read very well. His voice was pleasant enough, but he emphasized the rhythm unduly. ...”[143] Both of these dissenting voices are supported by the editor of the Richmond Examiner who reported the event as a disappointment, because “Mr. Poe ... did not make his own ‘Raven’ an effective piece of reading.”[144]

The explanation of Poe's failure on this particular occasion might lie, of course, in the simple fact that performers are not always at their best. This might have been an “off” night for the histrio; it might have been one of those nights when a performer is uninspired, “dry,” even bored, and consequently not “giving.” Mrs. Weiss's detailed description of the reading of “The Raven” at the home of her parents certainly supports this probability. She notes that in the course of his reading “the speaker became more impassioned and excited,” until “he turned suddenly toward the window, and, extending his arm, cried with awful vehemence: ...” That time he was fully aware of his audience and his performance; he was “giving” — in his customary and, for him, normal way.

Another explanation of his unimpressive performance, as reported by the two gentlemen, suggests itself. The lecture was given in the music hall of the fashionable Exchange Hotel. Poe stepped upon the platform to confront an audience of thirteen persons, including the [page 57:] janitor. Few performers can be at their best under such circumstances and Poe was certainly not one of them.[145]

But there is still another, and more fundamental, explanation. Professor Gildersleeve's touch about Poe's undue emphasis of the rhythm supplies the cue. And the testimony of another gentleman, the novelist John Esten Cooke, who along with Gildersleeve was present on that auspicious occasion at the fashionable hotel, makes this second explanation even more plausible. Cooke, like Gildersleeve, found Poe's “sing-song” objectionable, although, unlike Gildersleeve, he was thrilled by the wonderfully clear and musical voice.”[146] When we recall that Poe's very definition of poetry was “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” we are not at all surprised by his habit of stressing metrical values. When we recall further that in his first review of Fashion he chastised the actor who read the prologue for not stressing the meter of the lines, we know that” his own practice in reading verse agreed with his theory. “It is pure irrationality,” he exclaimed on that occasion, “to recite verse, as if it were prose, without distinguishing the lines.”[147]

To most people of that elocutionary era this “rational” way of distinguishing the lines was natural and attractive. One lady, for instance, a Mrs. Trumbull who heard him lecture at Lowell, found that his illustrations were “rendered with pure intonation and perfect enunciation, marked attention being paid to the rhythm. He almost sang the more musical versifications.” In his reading of Byron's “Bride of Abydos” that evening he measured “the dactyllic movement perfectly as if he were scanning it.” To her the effect seemed “very [page 58:] pleasing.”[148] If Poe read the same way at Richmond, which is more than likely, the two young men, Gildersleeve and Cooke, did not find the effect pleasing, for they apparently belonged to the dissenting few to whom public scanning, or almost singing, of verse did not seem an attractive way of conveying poetic values.

9

In the light of these characteristics and abilities of the man, the circumstances of his life, and the nature of the reaction of the “world” upon which he played, the “mystery” of Poe becomes considerably less mystifying. In one way, the time and the man met. The age of Romanticism supplied an appropriate setting for his histrionic personality and his particular form of art. The description of the German romantic actor of the period which appears in Karl Mantzius's History of Theatrical Art is, in most respects, as vivid a sketch of Edgar Allan Poe as if the Danish historian had had the American literary histrio “sitting” for him: “A strange being, with long, wild hair, black if possible, framing a pale, emaciated face; deep, melancholy eyes under dark, contracted brows, and a bitter, sorrowful smile on his quivering lips; his form ... moving among his fellow men now with ostentatious, gloomy remoteness, now with hollow, rather scornful mirth.”[149] This is Roderick Usher, and the numerous “Is” of Poe's other stories; it is, except for the wild hair, Poe himself.

But in another way, the time for Romanticism is never completely at an end. The appeal of a Poe has always been that of an unfortunate, lonely, remote, misprized genius. “In those days,” Mantzius goes on to say, speaking of the heyday of Romanticism, “there was a universal [page 59:] passion for genius,’ and ‘genius’ was scarcely thinkable without its external attributes of mystery, suffering, and contempt for the world.” Those days have more or less persisted, and so has the interest in Poe. Certain realists of today may demur; they may find little in Poe that has survived from an age of rant and pose and ecstatic gloom. When several years ago Dumas Malone placed Poe fifth on a list of the most important literary figures America has produced, the Saturday Review of Literature objected editorially. “Poe,” it commented, “is important chiefly as a vested interest of professional scholars . .. hardly anyone would put him on such a list, hardly anyone would call him, except as a historical figure, a first-rater.”[150] The “hardly anyone” is easily debatable. That he is far from being merely a historical figure the preceding pages, I hope, have helped to prove. And if it is true, as the editorial statement admits, that Poe “has been more widely and more exhaustively studied than any other American writer” it has not been so much because he is a vested interest of the scholar as because he is still a living American writer whose power and influence have grown rather than diminished with the passing of time.

To be sure, Poe is a historical figure. More than any other literary artist he represents the expression of our abiding attraction to the misty mid-region of Weir. Like O’Neill's Dion Anthony, in The Great God Brown, Poe was born with ghosts in his eyes and he was brave enough to go looking into his own dark. Possibly many of us sense this bravery in Poe, although we may call it weakness. Possibly many of us — strong in puritanism and common sense and balance as we are — also sense our kinship with his other “weaknesses” and applaud [page 60:] his ability to have enjoyed them, as a man and an artist. Walt Whitman, no mean actor himself, felt an “indescribable magnetism about the poet's life and reminiscences as well as the poems.”[151] That life and those reminiscences, as well as the poems and the magnetism, still exist; and not only for professional scholars but for the world at large. Poe continues to exist by virtue of the power he holds over us, a power which is not unlike that which Shaw's Candida felt in the boy poet Marchbanks when she sent him away into the night.

It is true that Poe “appealed to sentimental women by his figure, his history and his actions, and to kind-hearted women by his suffering”[152] and that, as Arthur Hopkins once remarked, he has had more posthumous sweethearts than any other American writer.(31) But it is also true that Poe “has furnished mysteries enough for two generations of essayists and biographers, not to list romancers.”[153] Three generations is now more exact — and many of the essayists and biographers have been men of sound intellectual astuteness.

It is, as a matter of fact, the work of these men — and of a few women, too — with its painstaking scholarship animated by eagerness to understand and clarify — that has made it possible for Poe to emerge finally neither as a demon nor as a saint, but as a comprehensible human being who happened to be, within his limited field, a great artist. The key to his humanity as well as artistry seems to have been his talent for acting.

Mrs. Weiss noted that in “all Poe's accounts of himself, and especially of his feelings, is a palpable affectation [page 61:] and exaggeration, with an extravagance of expression bordering on the tragic and melo-dramatic: a style which is exemplified in some of his writings, and may be equally imaginative in both cases.”[154] The applicability of his style to both his emotional life and his artistic creation is not a coincidence. The actor in dress and manner, in love and despair, in school, editorial office, and drawing-room, was also the writer creating parts for the declaimer and handsome, mysterious sufferer. Bishop Fitzgerald remembered him as “distingué in a peculiar sense — a man bearing the stamp of genius and the charm of a melancholy that drew one toward him with a strange sympathy.”[155] And that was precisely the rôle Poe had selected for himself. That he was supremely successful in this chosen rôle is evidenced by the almost universal impression he produced, an impression carefully intended and achieved.

The autobiographic nature of much of Poe's writing needs no elaborate proof at this time. His “heroes” are so often portraits of himself that one is justified in comparing the original with them. Roderick Usher, it has already been mentioned, strikingly resembles Poe; William Wilson is undeniably Poe — or as much of him as Stevenson's Mr. Hyde is of Dr. Jekyll or O’Neill's “Loving” is of John Loving (in Days Without End). Harrison noted long ago that in “Eleonora” Poe drew “his own silhouette out of the cloudland of memory and self-analysis.” It is the silhouette of a dreamer, poet, madman; an “ardent lover, the remnant of an ancient race, feverishly enamored of the Beautiful,” a “solitary deluged with poetic visions. ...”[156] Much of all this he undoubtedly was; much of it he believed that he was; all of it he wished others to believe that he was. [page 62:]

A good deal of his sadness was genuine. He was, in Longfellow's phrase, “a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.”[157] What was mainly wrong was that he was a strolling player with no theatre, an actor with no bookings, or very few. In spite of various attempts in modern scholarship to show that he was not entirely aloof from the social, political and cultural ideas of his time, he wrote singularly little about the broad problems that agitated either his country or his world. Here and there he expressed an idea on slavery, on democracy, on government, or on a more restricted topic, such as the need of an international copyright law. But it would be easy to show that his ideas were the conventional views of the intrenched Southern aristocracy, to which he was a poor relation — although he would not acknowledge it.[158] He felt that as an Allan and a Poe and an Arnold(32) he belonged to a superior class that was entitled to make the rules of government; all others belonged to the rabble, whose power in our democracy he resented.

For the most part, however, he refused to be interested in problems that, according to his aesthetic creed, did not concern the artist. Had he allowed himself to be tainted by the “curse” of didacticism his range might have been wider and his life less self-centered. Professor Parrington's conclusion that “Aside from his art he had no philosophy and no programs and no causes”[159] is, in the main, justified, if we add the word social before “philosophy.” Poe's art was intensely personal, centripetal; his intellect played upon a cosmos whose core was Edgar Allan Poe. Mallarmé's belief that Poe [page 63:] was killed by a soulless, unimaginative public, the “rabble,” is but a blind worshipper's belief. For the truth is that no one killed Poe. He functioned well enough as the human being and writer that he was by heredity, environmental conditioning, education, and the general circumstances of his life. Norms of success differ, but since Poe himself attached so much importance to fame — and yearned passionately for it(33) — is it possible not to conclude that his brief hour upon the stage was reasonably successful? Even Parrington, whose general attitude toward Poe is not overly friendly, is obliged to record that “as an aesthete and a craftsman he made a stir in the world that has not lessened in the years since his death, but has steadily widened.”[161] And it was as an aesthete and craftsman that Poe wished to be known, although, like many another person, he also thought himself a monstrously clever fellow in other respects: as a philosopher, for instance; and as a mathematician, and as a generally erudite gentleman.

But the weakness of exhibiting versatility and cleverness, universal as it is, assumes an intense coloring in the actor, and becomes a strength. Poe was good at mathematical deductions; his show of erudition did impress people; and even his philosophical speculations, such as those so loudly proclaimed in Eureka, combined as they were with a strain of poetry, added to his attractiveness. If his acting enveloped him in a sort of solitude, as though he were always on the other side of the footlights, behind a proscenium, he nevertheless enjoyed being on display, and he enjoyed the very aura [page 64:] of aloofness. To be sure, psychologically, there may have been another reason for his intrenching himself behind a proscenium. One who does not feel too secure in the midst of a confident self-assured society finds in isolation, in distance, a measure of protection. The principal reason, however, remains: he enjoyed both his isolation and the elevated platform.

Very likely he was often lonely up there on the boards of the world. Behind the actor's mask was the face of a hurt little boy who craved understanding and sympathy and warmth. He found all three in his dear “Muddie,” the simple, uncritical Mrs. Clemm, and in “Sissie,” his girl wife. Now and then he also found it in one or another of the numerous sentimental ladies who were attracted to him. Mostly, however, women loved him as Margaret Fuller, writing to Mrs. Browning, remarked — more “with passionate illusion which he amused himself by inducing than with sympathy.”[162] This is acute, except that “amused himself” is much too light a phrase for Poe's need to be loved.

That he has greatly “amused” us, for over a century, is the one important fact. A critic of the type of W. C. Brownell may have been temperamentally incapable of doing full justice to a writer like Poe, but he was right in attributing the growth of Poe's legend to “largely romantic” reasons.[163] Some of these reasons have been within us rather than the poet, but the center of all of them has nevertheless been a romantic personality endowed with indubitable gifts and able, like all good actors, to exhibit them arrestingly. This offspring of stage performers was richly equipped to continue their tradition. He was denied the opportunity of following their profession, but he could not help practicing their [page 65:] art.(34) Handsome in face, figure, and bearing, the possessor of a melodious voice and a volatile, sensitive temperament, he also received an education and training which enhanced and refined his natural gifts. He was early taught dancing, drawing, recitation, oratory, and music,(35) everyone of which arts he practiced for his own amusement and that of his friends and public. Besides being of use to him in the drawing-room, they also, especially drawing, music, and oratory, profoundly affected his writing.

And that writing was for him as much a form of acting as his public “lectures” or his public challenge to decipher any or all cryptograms. It was also, like all creative art, a form of rich living. Something happened to Edgar Poe when he knew that eyes were upon him, something akin to what happened to Henry James's nobleman who functioned creatively only in public. Poe, to be sure, also had a “private life,” but even at his writing table the consciousness of an audience is ever present, and influences the rhythms and patterns, the very idiom and intonation of his work. For, essentially, the one great quality Poe brought to his life and art is the peculiar histrionic ambivalence to feel vicarious experience as though it were his own and to feel his own experience as though it were vicarious. That sense of dream within a dream” is not mysticism but part of [page 66:] the actor's aloofness from the rôle which fascinates him, an aloofness which enables him to recreate that fascination for the benefit of others.

A lady poet like Mrs. Whitman remembered Poe's

but a leading representative of the acting profession understood him more profoundly. On May 4, 1885, a monument to Poe was unveiled at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York. It was Richard Henry Park's “Angel of Sorrow.” Among the speakers at the ceremony was Edwin Booth, great romantic actor himself, and son of Junius Brutus Booth, who had once been Poe's boon companion. “The stage,” said Edwin Booth in tribute to Poe, “will always live in him as one of her children. The gypsy blood that runs in her veins ran also in his veins, and in the exuberance of his imagination she sees the power and the freedom of her own wild spirit.”[166] Booth's prophecy has been fulfilled: the stage still lives in its strange poet-offspring. For, in the final analysis, it is the histrionic quality of Poe's exuberance of imagination which explains his contemporaries and posterity alike.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 5:]

1 This description is taken from Mary E. Phillips's Edgar Allan Poe, the Man. It was Poe's destiny to “charm” not only the ladies with whom he came in contact during his lifetime, but also many of his lady biographers in years to come. Miss Phillips, writing her two heavy tomes in our own century, was obviously under the spell at frequent intervals.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 8:]

2 I cannot help sympathizing with the disappointment of the great masses of habitual patrons of Hollywood art, for the picture presented but two loves: one legitimate, ending in marriage; the other, not illegitimate and rather trivial.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 11:]

3 “... the lines I had written in my passionate boyhood to the first, purely ideal love of my soul to the Helen Stannard [sic!] of whom I told you — flashed upon my recollection. I turned to them. They expressed all — all that I would have said to you — so fully — so accurately — and so conclusively, ...” — The Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 12:]

4 It was during this trip to Providence that Poe first saw Mrs. Helen Whitman. (“ I saw thee once ... / Clad all in white ... / Was it not Fate ...”)

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 17:]

5 Mr. Clarke's recollection of dates was not very reliable.[30] Poe must have been somewhat older at the time. This does not however impair the value of the aged teacher's recollection that the verses consisted “chiefly of pieces addressed to the different little girls in Richmond, who had from time to time engaged his youthful affections.”[31]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 18:]

6 “It can be safely said that the works of Edgar Poe are better known than the poetry of Longfellow or of Whitman ...” — Horace Gregory in Partisan Review, May-June, 1943. “Without any question, the most significant thing which can be said about Poe is simply that his work has been read, or at least read at, by more Americans than has any other among our native classics.” — Joseph Wood Krutch in The New York Times Book Review, August 6, 1944.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 22:]

7 Teachers of creative writing and writers of textbooks on the short story should he forever grateful to Poe for writing that review. It has become the heart of their teachings. It might be interesting to inquire to what extent Poe can be blamed for the machine-made short story which finds its way in such appalling numbers into our popular magazines, both the “slicks” and the “pulps” — but that is another story.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 24:]

8 For an illustration of Poe's careful study of Byron, the reader is referred to Roy P. Basler's “Byronism in Poe's ‘To One in Paradise.’” — American Literature, May, 1937. Lest, however, I may seem to overemphasize Poe's indebtedness to the English romantic bard, it is well to remember Edward Shanks's observation that Poe was not too successful as an imitator: at least in the better of his early poems his “own natural genius warps his imitative intent.”[42]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 25:]

9 Mr. Winters's interpretation of his impulse toward confession deserves quotation, at least in a footnote: “the fact of the matter is, of course, that he [Poe] has been pretty effectually established as a great writer while we [Mr. Winters and ‘most’ of his friends] have been sleeping.” — American Literature, January, 1937.

10 Among the “others” may be included the anonymous writer of an editorial in the Baltimore Sun (January 18, 1946) who began with the caption “Despite Poe's Critics, People Keep Right on Reading Him” and ended with the statement, “The more the termites nibble, the sounder and bigger his reputation seems to grow.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 25, running to the bottom of page 26:]

11 The following titles suggest the range of opinion: “The Satanic [page 26:] Streak in Poe's Genius,” Current Literature, January, 1910; Great Spiritual Writers of America, by George Hamlin Fitch, 1916; “Three Interesting Sinners,” by Newman Flower, The Bookman, October, 1926. I wonder, however, what Poe's own reaction would have been to the eulogy of an eminent Virginia educator: “I have always been an admirer of Poe, not only as our greatest literary genius, but as a good, safe household poet.”[45]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 27, running to the bottom of page 28:]

12 At Professor Quinn's suggestion, two scholarly Baltimoreans, Mr. [page 28:] Louis H. Dielman and Dr. J. Hall Pleasants, made a thorough search of all Baltimore jail records for the years 1831 and 1832, as well as the records of imprisonments for debt, but found no mention of Poe in any of them, nor of “any misdemeanor that appeared to fit the case,” assuming that Poe was sentenced under a borrowed name.[53]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 29:]

13 The italics and capitals are of course Poe's.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 30:]

14 There is something almost pathological in the attempts of scholars to prove that Poe drank, much or little, or did not drink. In this connection, H. L. Mencken's comment, somewhat over-vigorous and over categorical as it may be, is apropos: “Strapped to the water-wagon, with a ton of Bibles to hold him down, he would have been precisely the same Poe.”[58]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 32:]

15 Perhaps the worst condemner of Mrs. Mowatt was her own class consciousness. “The idea of becoming a professional actress was revolting,” she confessed. After eight years on the stage she was, however, able to tell “those who do not frequent theatres” that actors were not disreputable persons.[62]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 34:]

16 A characteristic Richmond sentiment: “Those amusements are unlawful, which, if not in themselves absolutely sinful, have a dangerous tendency to sin. This will particularly include the diversions of the Playhouse. ... For consider 1. The Company of whom composed? Some virtuous characters, no doubt, are among them. But what a vast number of the most vicious and profane! Is not the Playhouse the very exchange for harlots? ... 2. The Players generally speaking, who are they? loose, debauched people ... ‘ Quoted by Agnes M. Bondurant in Poe's Richmond.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 37:]

17 It is interesting to note that as far back as 1908 Padraic Colum, in his introduction to the Everyman collection of Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, wondered that Poe, after leaving the Allan home, did not ... try the stage; it would have fitted his temperament and his gifts, but perhaps,” he added, “the career of his parents had biassed him against the theatre.”

18 Mr. Whitty told me of this playbill at his home in Richmond. He was, at the time, a very old gentleman and in bad health. The possibility of the existence of such a playbill cannot be ignored, but it is necessary to remember that there have been too many reminiscences and statements regarding Poe by aged people whose memories were their only source of evidence. So far, to my knowledge, no one else has seen the playbill.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 38:]

19 It is rather surprising that this episode has been overlooked by the confirmed psychoanalysts. What an opportunity for injecting significant symbolism!

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 40, running to the bottom of page 41:]

20 “His engagement to Mrs. Shelton [in 1849, just before his death] had made a vast difference in the way he was regarded even by the [page 41:] Mackenzies [who had adopted his sister Rosalie] who, from having ignored him, now overwhelmed him with attentions and apologized for not accommodating him in their mansion.” Una Pope-Hennessy.[86]

Poe's elation over this belated acceptance of him by Richmond society is betrayed in a letter to his mother-in-law: “I have been received everywhere with enthusiasm.”[87]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 41:]

21 Poe's entry, “The Coliseum,” was rated very high by the judges, but since he was to be awarded the short story prize the judges felt that the poetry prize should go to another contestant.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 44:]

22 Poe managed to work into a review of “Mr. Murdoch's Lectures” a pre-publication announcement of this text-book. “We shall look with much interest,” he wrote with apparent casualness, “for a work on Elocution which we understand he is preparing.” Broadway Journal, II, 31 (April 26, 1845).

23 Harrison was also a painter and has left us an interesting portrait of Poe.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 45:]

24 For what Poe thought of the other players in the cast, and of the production in general, see Chapter III.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 46:]

25 “The play was put on the stage in London in 1868 and afterwards was given on the Athenian stage in a modern Greek version?” David M. Robinson, Sappho and Her Influence, Boston, 1924.

The lateness of both production and publication was fortunate for Poe: he did not have to review the play. He had, however for a consideration edited her earlier poems and written several reviews of them,[115] once going so far as to call her the “rival of Sappho.”[116] It must be added lest we assume that monetary considerations were the sole inspiration of such fulsome reviewing that Poe had also once penned a sonnet to the lady which ingeniously spelled out her name Sarah Anna Lewis. The poem was entitled “An Enigma?”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 47:]

26 The epithet is, of course an ironic repetition of Emerson's careless jibe at Poe's expense.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 48:]

27 Unless the very violence of Griswold's malice, rancor, and jealousy, with which his Memoir is permeated, are a form of tribute.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 49:]

28 Another example of Poe's power of metaphysical communication is recorded by Mrs. Gove: “so good a talker was Poe, that he impressed himself and his wishes, even without words, upon those with whom he spoke.”[123]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 52:]

29 If the reading took place during the day, he would “shut out the daylight and read by an astral lamp.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 54:]

30 Poe was not one to accept in silence any public criticism. The editor of the Transcript at the time was a lady, Cornelia Wells Walter. Hence the “melancholy” performer chose to retort by calling her a “pretty little witch.” To which rather gentlemanly appellation she replied by calling him “a wandering specimen of the Literary Snob, continually obtruding himself upon public notice. ...”[138]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 60:]

31 The remark was made at a party in Baltimore after the opening of Sophie Treadwell's play, Plumes in the Dust. The play failed, like all the plays thus far written on the life of Poe.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 62:]

32 He liked to believe that his grandfather Poe had really been a “General.” His mother's maiden name was Arnold and he liked to pretend that he was related to General Benedict Arnold.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 63:]

33 “I love fame ... I would drink to the very dregs the glorious intoxication. ... Fame! glory! they are life-giving breath and ... blood. No man lives unless he is famous.” — Poe to Mrs. Mary Gove.[160]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 65:]

34 It may be interesting to add that Poe's brother, William Henry Leonard, also “recited in private and was proud of his oratorical powers.”[164]

35 For a study of the “Ciceronian and forensic “Southern tradition to which Poe belonged by breeding and education, see Herbert Marshall McLuhan, “Edgar Poe's Tradition,” Sewanee Review, January-March, 1944. For Poe's musical accomplishments, both as a performer (on the flute) and as inspirer of composers, some as notable as Debussy and Rachmaninoff, see May Garretson Evans, Music and Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore, 1939.