Text: Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, “American Bookmen: Edgar Allan Poe,” Bookman: An Illustrated Literary Journal (New York, NY), vol. 5, no. 3, May 1897, pp. 205-216

[page 205:]

For a long time it was hard to get at the truth about Poe's life. His first biographer, the Rev. R. W. Griswold, whom Poe named as his literary executor, told such an unflattering tale that since 1850 it has been the rdle of many important writers to abuse this reverend [column 2:] gentleman. An enthusiastic French translator of the tales inquires concerning him: “Il n’existe donc pas en Amérique d' ordonnance qui interdit aux chiens I entrée des cimetiores?” An American admirer of Poe asserts that Griswold appointed himself literary executor, paid Mrs. Clemm, the poet's mother-in-law, a small sum for the papers in her possession, and made her sign a statement that Poe had chosen him to collect and edit his works — all with the purpose of [page 206:] vilifying the dead man's fame. This is manifestly false; but from 1850, when Griswold's memoir appeared, until 1885, when Mr. George E. Woodberry, in his biography in the American Men of Letters Series, threw a white light upon many vexed questions, there was hardly an attempt at describing Poe in which the errors either of undue praise or of undue condemnation were not obvious. It is now felt that Griswold in the main told the truth, though generally without kindness or tact. In the present sketch Professor Woodberry's statements are accepted as authoritative.

Why should the old, unpleasant stories be told again at all? “Why do you have the same old toys for sale every Christmas?” a lady once asked a shopkeeper; “why don’t you get some new ones?” “Madam,’‘ was the reply, [column 2:] “there are always new babies.” And there. are always new reade1s — and some old ones with short memories. For both of these classes, and for more besides, Poe's tales and poems are eternally new; and some knowledge of the man who produced them bears essentially upon the fulness of their meaning.

If we were to adopt Poe's own stories of himself we should have, in the first place, to give him several birthdays, each later than the actual one. This was January 19th, 1809, and, as if his life began with contradictions, Boston, the city of his detestation, was his birthplace. But his mother was an actress — Elizabeth Arnold — whom his father, David Poe, the son of an excellent Maryland family, had married against the wishes of his people; and it is the fortune of the children of the theatre to be born “on the road.” It was Poe's misfortune that in Richmond his mother died when he was less than three years old; his father had already quitted the scene. The three children of the marriage were adopted by benevolent friends and relatives, Edgar falling into the care of the childless wife of a wealthy merchant of Richmond, whose name of Allan the boy received. It could not have been foreseen that the ill-starred waif: might almost as well have been left to shift for himself.

Through his boyhood there was no lack of kindness in the treatment his foster parents bestowed upon him. They were proud of his good looks and precocity, and gave him the best of schooling, first in Richmond, and then, during their stay abroad, for five years at the Manor House School, Stoke Newington, a London suburb. Here the headmaster observed merely that he was clever, but injured by “an extravagant amount of pocket money.” Poe's story of “William Wilson” records his own remembrances of the school.” He was brought back to Richmond [page 207:] in 1820, and for six years pursued his studies there under the best auspices preparatory to entering the University of Virginia.

It is worth remarking that in this schoolboy period Poe made no friends. He was at once sensitive and supercilious, desirous of a regard he did not excite, and quick to show his contempt for wits less keen than hisown. These qualities he never outgrew, and for the life he was destined to lead they provided as poor an equipment as one can well imagine. One strong attachment which he did form at this time, however, is equally noticeable for the quality it foreshadowed. It was his romantic devotion to the young and beautiful mother of one of his schoolmates. Poe never ceased to crave the society of women who could “understand” him; and when this lady of Richmond, after winning the boy's heart by her tenderness toward him, died an early death, the young dreamer would go to her grave by night, and brood by day upon the bitterness of his loss. She seems to have been his first Lenore.

Of the youth who was capable of such feelings one does not exactly expect the record Poe made for himself at the University of Virginia, which he entered in February of 1824. To be sure, when his university career ended in less than a year, he took with him the highest honours in Latin and French; but he left behind him gambling debts to the amount of twenty-five hundred dollars and a reputation as an extraordinary drinker. ‘’It was not the taste of the beverage that influenced him,” a college contemporary has written. “Without a sip or a smack of the mouth he would seize a full glass, without water or sugar, and send it home at a single gulp.” But cards were his destruction at college, and it was no wonder that Mr. Allan declined to send him back to Charlottesville.

The alternative for college life was a clerkship in Mr. Allan's office, and it [column 2:] was a matter of course that Poe could not long submit to it. If again we were to adopt his own account of himself, at least as he authorised it in biographical sketches of a later date, we should have to follow him now to Greece, where, according to the mythical story, he went, like Byron, to fight for liberty; we should find him, too, in St. Petersburg, involved in some mysterious trouble, from which he was extricated only by the help of the American consul. The real, if less romantic, truth appears to be that going forth from Richmond to seek his fortunes in the world, he soon found himself in poverty in Boston, where an obscure. publisher printed for him in 1827 an obscure little volume, “Tamerlane, and Other Poems, by a Bostonian.” It was nothing then, but five years ago one of the three known existing copies of the book sold for $1850. The inference from the fact [page 208:] that the publisher in later life never associated ‘’ Tamerlane’‘ with the famous name of Poe is that the young singer was making use of another name. This inference is borne out by the enlistment at Boston of Edgar A. Perry, on May 26th, 1828, as a private in the United States Army, and by the identification of this young soldier, who soon became a sergeant-major, with Edgar A. Poe. This person, Poe or Perry, received a leave of absence from Fortress Monroe when Mrs. Allan, Poe's benefactress, died in Richmond, early in [column 2:] 1829; and it was Mr. Allan who applied for it, and a little later was instrumental in bringing about his foster son's admission as a cadet to the Academy at West Point. It was doubtless a relief to the respectable merchant to feel that he had thus done his duty by the young man, with whom his sense of kinship had been growing year by year more remote.

It was in 1830 that Poe entered West Point, having published in Baltimore, in the year before, a second little volume of poems. Though his age was recorded [page 209:] at the Academy as nineteen, it was the face of a man of more than the twenty-one years he had really lived that his fellow-cadets learned to know. It was their jest to say that he had secured an appointment for his son, and, the boy having died, he had come to take his place. It was no great wonder that Poe bore the look of age before his time. Estranged from those who had tried to help him, solitary, sensitive and poor, and endowed by nature with a spirit which, from first to last; preyed remorselessly upon itself — what was there to give his face the look of youth? And how could such a one have been expected to adapt himself to a life in which self-effacement is the first rule? It made no difference that Poe had chosen for himself the military profession. He soon tired of it, and deliberately brought about his own expulsion from the Academy. Perhaps this was rendered the easier by his reckless habits through the six months of his cadetship. His literary tendencies were well known at West Point, and there is a certain irony in the fact that a third little book of verse, which a New York publisher undertook on the strength of the cadets’ support, distinctly disappointed the subscribers because it was not made up of local squibs.

Poe's worldly prospects, when he made his way from West Point to Baltimore, were certainly far from bright. Mr. Allan had married a second wife, and the birth of a son soon dispelled every hope Poe might have entertained of coming into the property which asa boy he had had some reason to count upon. There was nothing for him but to live by his own wits, and for a time the living he made was of the barest. Happily for hin, a Baltimore paper, The Saturday Visiter (sic), offered in 1833 some prizes in money for the best contributions in prose and verse. Poe's story of “The Manuscript Found in a [column 2:] Bottle” won him a hundred dollars, and his poem “The Coliseum” would have secured the first place in its class also had it not been thought unwise to give two prizes to one man. The success was of the greatest importance to Poe, for it secured him the influential friendship of John P. Kennedy, through which, in turn, he secured the associate editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger, a new Magazine in Richmond. This was not until 1835, and in the meantime Poe had been reduced to the narrowest straits of poverty. On one occasion he had been obliged to decline Mr. Kennedy's invitation to dinner, because of his “persona! appearance.”

But all was changed in Richmond, where his new duties called him. His remarkable talents as an editor did wonders for the circulation of the Messenger; and his own pen, departing from the traditions of commonplace in fiction [page 210:] and criticism, spread his fame abroad. There was, moreover, almost for the only time in Poe's troublous life, a sufficiency of income for his needs. These were not great, although in September of 1835, feeling himself unable to part from the relatives with whom he had lived in Baltimore, his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia, he had privately married his young cousin. How young she was all the world did not know; for when the public marriage took place in Richmond, in May, 1836, Poe's bondsman — under the marriage law — declared on oath that Virginia Clemm was of twenty-one years” In reality she was not quite fourteen, and Poe was about twice her age. The spectacle of this marriage with a child has its relief in the picture of sonship and motherhood, the relations which Poe and Mrs. Clemm bore to each other through life with a peculiar tenderness. A weak man never needed the help of a strong woman more than Poe needed it, and as it was never to come from his wife, it was well that her mother could also be truly his. The fortunate circumstances of Poe's life were few enough. This was one of them. [column 2:]

Prosperity now seemed easily within reach of the small family in Richmond. Its revenues were increased by the keeping of a few boarders, and apparently all would have gone well except for Poe himself. But before he had left Baltimore his habits — or freaks — of intemperance had begun to get him into trouble. They had better be called freaks, for it does not appear that they were habitual. No man so susceptible to stimulants could have indulged in them habitually and have done one half the work that Poe did in the world. It is Mrs. Clemm's testimony that a single cup of coffee would intoxicate him. For such a man the obvious thing to do was to shut his besetments as he would shun the plague; but this, at least for periods of any length, Poe had either the purpose nor the courage to do. The prostration that followed each attack of intemperance was rendered the more complete by his use of opiates. It was as if he did his best to incapacitate both body and spirit. These, in a word, were the conditions ‘under which much of his mature life was led. That they had begun to affect his work as early as in the [page 211:] Richmond days we are clearly informed by a letter to Poe from Mr. White, the proprietor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Its spirit of expostulation 1s of the kindest, and a single sentence, if it is based upon fact, shows the need of good advice in which Poe already stood: **No man is safe that drinks before breakfast.”’ It is unnecessary to quote more or to wonder that thé first number of the magazine for 1837 made the announcement that Poe's connection with it had ceased.

It would be a sorrowful progress to follow Poe through all his vicissitudes. There is a monotony of pity in the spectacle of the man entering with courage upon new editorial ventures, making surely for success through weeks or months, winning the admiration of his associates, and then, suddenly or by degrees, failing with a completeness that rendered the brave hope of each beginning only. the more tragic. Such, in a general way, were his experiences with Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and its successor, Graham's Magazine, in Philadelphia, where he lived from 1838 till 1844. Pursuing through all these dark days the ignis fatuus of a magazine of his own, he was nevertheless taking his place more and more firmly as a prose writer of the first popularity. As a poet he was scarcely known, but his [column 2:] stories and reviews in magazines, and his excellently well-named volume of 1840, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, had secured him a general esteem quite out of keeping with the sordidness of his personal circumstances. It was in this period not only that his story of “The Gold Bug” won him his second prize of a hundred dollars, but that he wrought the wonders in cryptography, which — save the mark! — might have made a Baconian of him to-day, and from the opening chapters of Barnaby Rudge foretold the conclusion, a feat which caused Dickens to inquire if Poe were the devil. But the substantial value of such successes as these was small, and in 1844 New York became the scene of his struggles.

There was editorial work to be done on the Evening Mirror, conducted by N. P. Willis, and Poe secured the opportunity of doing it. Willis was all kindness and forbearance, and has testified heartily to Poe's regularity and efficiency throughout their entire intercourse. But “Willis was too Willisy for him,” as another editor expressed it, and Poe, before a year was out, went through the unfamiliar proceeding of leaving an employer who was sorry to have him go. Before the end of 1845 his next venture was a thing of the past. He had joined with C. F. Briggs in the management [page 212:] of the Broadway Journal, had become proprietor of the paper, and had had to give it up, all within about ten months. In the process he lost the friendship of Lowell, through whom Briggs and he had been brought together, and supplied Horace Greeley, who had lent him money to keep the Journal alive, with one of his characteristic “Recollections”:

With Poe's abandonment of the Broadway Journal his work as an editor ended. He was still an important contributor to the magazines, and his series of articles in Godey's, “The Literati of New York, in which he belauded and berated his contemporaries with equal vigour, made no little stir in its time. Many of his judgments about the most important men of his day, as, for example, his immediate recognition of Hawthorne's genius, showed that the true critical faculty was in him. That he did not always exercise it sincerely we may infer from his answer to a friend's protest against his high praise, in print, of the productions of a lady writer: “It is true,” he said, “she is really commonplace; but her husband was kind to me; I cannot point an arrow against any woman.” Something of the same disingenuousness, to call it here by a gentle name, permitted him to sell several times over, often in slightly varied forms, the works of his pen, and to re-dedicate verses to successive ladies as the occasions arose. It made the less matter, however, at the time with which we are now concerned, for he had written “The Raven,” first published in the Evening Mirror January 29th, 1845; and though the commercial value of the poem is said by some to have been ten, by others five dollars, its effect was to carry Poe's name into every corner of the land. He whose reputation had been based almost entirely upon prose suddenly found himself known high and low as a poet.

Neither his fame nor the publication of two volumes in 1845, Tales and Poems, made him other than an object of pity. Most of the time he was desperately poor, and worse than poverty was the condition described in this letter of his own — read it as you will — written in 1848:

“Six years ago a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before, ruptured a blood vessel [page 214:] in singing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially, and I again hoped. At the end of the year the vessel broke again. I went through the same scene. . . . Then again — again — and even once again, at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death, and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am 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. Asa matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.”

In 1846 Poe, with Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, had moved to Fordham, near ‘New York City, and established himself in the cottage now owned by the New York Shakespeare Society, and always kept open to visitors. His interrupted writing brought the scantiest returns in money. By the autumn of this year it was felt that Mrs. Poe's last illness was upon her. A visitor has described the scene in the cottage:

“There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband's greatcoat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her [column 2:] great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet.’‘

Poe himself was only a little less ill, with poverty and dread, and when Virginia died, in January of 1847, the good women who cared for him nearly despaired of his recovery. There were always good women to care for Poe. To Mrs. Clemm, Poe himself well knew what he owed, as the lines “To My Mother” continue to tell the world; and it is well worth while to repeat the pathetic words which Willis wrote of her in the Home Journal after Poe himself had died:

“Winter after winter, for years, the most touching sight to us, in this whole city, has been that tireless minister to genius, thinly and insufficiently clad, going from office to office with a poem or an article on some literary subject, to sell — sometimes simply pleading in broken voice that he was ill, and begging for him — mentioning nothing but that ‘he was ill,’ whatever might be the reason for his writing nothing, and never amid all her tears and recitals of distress suffering one syllable to escape her lips that could convey a doubt of him, or a complaint, or a lessening of pride in his genius and good intentions.”

At this crisis of Virginia's death it was a Mrs. Shew who, after Mrs. Clemm, was most to Poe. To her we are said to owe “The Bells.” The story runs that in one of Poe's visits to her house he said that he had to write a poem, and complained of his total lack of inspiration for it. The sound of church bells prompted. her, in spite of his irritation at the noise they were making, to write at the top of a piece of paper, “The Bells, by E. A. Poe.” Then, as a first line, she jotted down “The bells, the little silver bells,” and after Poe had done one stanza, wrote “The heavy iron bells” for him in the same way; having finished this stanza, he wrote above them both “By Mrs. M. L. Shew,” and handed her the manuscript. This was a pretty bit of fooling, but it lacked the warmth which Poe wished always to infuse into his friendships with women, a warmth which soon put an end to his intimacy with Mrs. Shew. Another of his women friends has left the record of Poe's own [page 215:] declaration that in his wife, gentle, devoted, and beautiful as she was, he missed “a certain intellectual and spiritual sympathy,” a lack which he was always willing to let the women who “understood” him try to supply. After Virginia's death these intimacies took a conspicuous place in the spectacle of his wofully shattered life.

Poe made no mystery of his affection for sympathetic women. Such lines as those “To Annie,” a lady of Lowell, and the longer poem, “To Helen,” strike the personal note with an unmistakable clearness. “Helen” was herself a maker of verse — Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, of Providence, R. I. — and before she had actually met with Poe wrote and printed poetical addresses to him. In 1848 he made desperate efforts to marry her, and if her head had not remained as completely hers as her heart seems to have been his, she would doubtless have become Mrs. Poe. Griswold's story of their final interview was cruelly untrue, although it is evident that Poe's indulgence in his besetting sins at the very time and place when he should have been most himself put an end to his hopes of Mrs. Whitman. Apparently he was acting at the time upon the advice of Mrs. Shew to save himself by marriage. One is not surprised, therefore, to find him in 1849 ardently wooing a wealthy widow of Richmond, a Mrs. Shelton, with whom as Miss Sarah Elmira Royster he, as a boy, had had romantic [column 2:] dealings. One suspects that the romance was quite of the past,- and the suspicion is borne out by a portion of a letter which Poe wrote from Richmond to Mrs. Clemm at Fordham, after he had secured the promise of Mrs. Shelton's prosperous hand:

“And now, dear Muddy, there is one thing I wish — to pay particular attention to. I told Elmira when I first came here that I had one of the pencil-sketches of her that I took along while ago in Richmond, and I told her that I would write to you about it. So when you write just copy the following words in your letter; ‘I have looked again for the pencil-sketch of Mrs. S., but cannot find it anywhere. I took down all the books and shook them one by one, and, unless Eliza White has it, 1 do not [know] what has become of it. She was looking at it the last time I saw it. The one you spoilt with Indian ink ought to be somewhere about the house. I will do my best to find it.”

One would gladly dispense with the discovery of such letters as this one, written in the last month of Poe's life. It is needless to comment upon it or the state of unhealth which it reveals. It is for the psychologist to confer with the physiologist and divide the blame for Poe's condition between his spirit and his body. He himself once wrote to a friend: “You will find yourself puzzled in judging me by ordinary motives.” And if he had been any one else, a fortunate ending to the Richmond visit could almost surely have been predicted. He was lionised by old and new friends. The two lectures which he gave were greatly successful. He was full of hope for the success of his long-desired magazine, The Stylus. Yet twice [page 216:] during the visit he yielded to his passion for liquor, and the doctors told him that if he did so but once again it would kill him. With this knowledge he started for the North to arrange some business matters preliminary to his marriage. It is difficult to trace his footsteps with certainty from the time he left Richmond, on Sunday night, September 30th, 1849, until Wednesday afternoon, when he was found helpless in a Baltimore polling booth, which was also a drinking-place. As the day happened to be that of election, the supposition is that he had been seized by politicians and made to vote at many polls. When his friends found him, he was taken to the Washington Hospital, where, after four days of delirium, he died on Sunday, October 8th, saying, “Lord, help my poor soul.” The doctor who attended him has within recent years published his opinion that Poe was drugged and not intoxicated when he was brought to the hospital; and so with contradictions, as at the beginning, his life ended.

Hardly anything can be said of Poe, even of his personal appearance, which somebody will not stand ready to contradict, As of the man, so of his work; the differences of the opinion it has excited are as wide as the world. To Emerson he was merely the “jingle-man,” and Emerson's was not an isolated belief. For some of our French and English kinsmen, as for some of us at home, his genius stands virtually supreme in American letters. It has been possible here to glance merely at some of the conspicuous events of-his ill-controlled life. An infinite deal, perhaps of equal interest, has been omitted. Many pages would be needed to discuss to any purpose his familiar definition of poetry as the “rhythmical creation of beauty,” his insistence, in and out of season, that long poems do not exist, the large significance of his work in criticism, and the unique place to which his poetry [column 2:] of magical music and his fiction of a power almost superhuman entitle him. Happily there is no dearth of suggestive comment upon all these themes. Nearly all we know and all we need to know about them is gathered into the biography by Mr. Woodberry, and the complete edition of Poe which he and Mr. E. C,. Stedman have recently prepared.

When one has read whatever there is to be said about the man and his work, and has done a little thinking for one's self, a few considerations make themselves reasonably clear. In the first place, one abandons the foolish thought of “what might have been.” In his life of the spirit Poe was a dweller in misty borderlands; in the flesh he was a highly developed Bohemian in the midst of respectability. If he had been something else, in either regard, he simply would not have been Poe, and the different works of a different man would have been his contribution to literature. He must be taken as he was, and so taken, with all his imperfections on his head, he is conspicuously of those who make us feel the rigour of the line that is drawn between talent and genius. With a reasonable confidence we place him on the higher side of the line, and our confidence need go little further. It was one of the dicta of Poe's ambitious philosophical work, “Eureka,” that as man cannot conceive of a being superior to himself, man is therefore God; and we feel ourselves at this point fortunate in disagreeing with such a dictum; for judgment is an attribute of deity. As we are merely human, the necessity for rendering final verdicts upon such fellow-beings as Edgar Allan Poe is happily spared us.

M.A. De Wolfe Howe.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 205, column 1:]

Note. — The above portrait is taken from a photograph of the painting by Oscar Halling in the possession of John Prentice Poe, Esq., Baltimore, Md., and is here reproduced by his kind permission.