Text: George W. Eveleth to Edgar Allan Poe — June 9, 1846

Phillips, June 9, 1846.

Sir — I ought perhaps to have immediately acknowledged the receipt of your letter enclosing my money. I now gladly do so and still more gladly own you a gentleman throughout the whole business, although, with some reason as you will admit, I half believed for a while that you were playing the rogue. Well, I have the long wished for Poems by Edgar A. Poe, Esq. I am pleased to see them in just the plain neat dress that they are in. I hope soon to meet with the remainder of your tales, your essays and criticisms and that — what shall I entitle it? — that work on the New York Literati from the same library of American Books. I don‘t believe the Raven can be beat in versification and but a precious little beyond it to my mind can anything go in beauty of conception. Isn‘t there a false idea though in this? “whose faint footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor?” I don‘t see anything very irrelevant in the last stanza and that Hartford Review man was a fool to think that he could. There might be more ways than one fixed so that the lamplight streaming on the Raven would cast a shadow on the floor within the room. And it might be explained without the aid of [[Ralph]] Waldo Emerson. There is as much poetry (to me) in “The Valley of Unrest,” barring perhaps the four first lines in — The Sleeper and The City in the Sea as in any pieces of the same length which the volume contains. I can see vividly as in a nightmare those trees stirred by no wind that palpitate the whole tone about the sleeper. It almost sets the brain whirling to read the City in the Sea. Why didn‘t you give us more scenes from Politian? That Magazine I‘ll take if you please.

G. W. Eveleth.

Edgar A. Poe, Esq., City New York, N. Y.