Text: Virginia Clemm Poe, “[Valentine to Edgar Allan Poe],” manuscript, February 14, 1846

Notes:

This poem is printed here with permission of the Enoch Pratt Free Library (Baltimore), owners of the original manuscript.

Virginia Clemm Poe wrote this valentine for her husband, Edgar Allan Poe. It is an acrostic poem, the first letter of each line spelling “Edgar Allan Poe.” This was a traditional form for valentines, which Poe himself used in his valentine for Mrs. F. S. Osgood. This is the only poem Virginia is known to have written, although in the album of Elizabeth R. Herring, she wrote out a poem by Edgar and signed her own name to it. In general, Virginia was not well-read and cared little for poetry, even that of her husband. The following shows the first letters marked in red, revealing Poe’s name:

The envelope in which the valentine was presented to Poe is addressed: “Mr Edgar Allan Poe [/] 85 Amity St [/] New York”. The whole manuscript is written in a very nice hand. The paper has an embossed border and an embossed floral mark in the upper left corner.

A facsimile of the manuscript was published by Josephine Poe January, “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Child Wife’: With an Unpublished Acrostic by Her to Her Husband,” Century Magazine, October 1909, pp. 894-896. Another facsimile appears in J. Anthony Lukas, “Virginia Poe, Her Valentine,” The Sun (Baltimore), March 5, 1965, pp. 28 and 22. Arthur Hobson Quinn reprinted the photograph from the J. P. January article in his Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, 1941, facing p. 498.