Text: Anonymous, “Edgar Allan Poe,” The Nation (New York, NY), March 25, 1875, pp. 208-209

[page 208, column 2:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE.*

IT is indicative of a renewal of interest in the character of Poe that newly simultaneous biographies should be published on both sides of the Atlantic whose chief if not entire object is to clear his name from the aspersions thrown on it by the misstatements of Griswold, self-appointed foster-father of all new-born American genius. In this they are both and singly successful, Mr. Stoddard in his brief memoir doing summary justice to the detractions, without at the same time hiding from himself the real faults of the man or seeking to throw a false light on his personal character. Mr. Ingram, on the contrary, apparently regarding himself as the sole and ay- pointed restorer of a reputation which he considers Poe's countrymen and the world at large to have set themselves to tarnish, whitewashes him so completely that his American friends would hardly know him. He contemptuously [page 209:] ignores every story that tends to the discredit of his hero, and loses no opportunity to manifest his sense of American unworthiness of so great a fortune as to be the birthplace of his Magnus Apollo. Not content with proving (no more convincingly, however, than Mr. Stoddard) that Griswold was a slanderer, he tries to trace every rumor discreditable to Poe to the same or similar sources. Alluding to the verdict of the court-martial which dismissed him from West Point, Mr. Ingram, with a total misapprehension of all the bearings of the case (pardonable, perhaps, in an Englishman who dislikes America, and rather prefers to show that he does), says: “In the grandiloquent style of the Academy officials, he was ‘dismissed the service of the United States’! Better for him, poor fellow, and better for the credit of his countrymen, if he had then and there accepted the fiat of the Academy officials as that of his nation, and sought on some foreign shore the hospitality denied him by his own countrymen.” But why “grandiloquent”? Having been tried by court-martial and pleaded guilty to all the charges, and being, while a pupil of the Academy, in the service and under the pay of the United States, what simpler English could have been employed than “dismissed the service of the United States”? And why “accept the fiat of the Academy officials as that of his nation, etc.”? What earthly connection is there between his dismissal from the Military Academy, of which he was a most discreditable pupil, as pupil, and exile from his native land? But why exile at all? Poe was received by his countrymen with all the fervor and enthusiasm an ordinate ambition could ask; he had plenty of work if he would do it, plenty of friends whom he took no pains to keep. He quarrelled with every one who had a less indiscriminate admiration of him than Mr. Ingram has; was adopted by a wealthy man, whose money he wasted at wine and cards, and whose affection he alienated by all sorts of misconduct, and who finally forbade him his house. He attacked every literary man of eminence greater than his own with virulent and senseless abuse, and, though poor, had that sublime contempt for earning money which Mr. Ingram would call philosophic, perhaps, but which common-sense people in America call shiftlessness. But will Mr. Ingram assure us that his treatment by his countrymen was worse than that of Keats, Shelley, Byron, or many others whom he better than we can name, by theirs?

Mr. Ingram sneers at the cadets at West Point because they received with “ridicule” a volume of Poe's poems which was not at all what he had promised them, and which even in its present shape contains much sheer rubbish. Mr. Stoddard shows that this was a volume published by subscription of the cadets, at two dollars and fifty cents — an enormous price in those days, and which they “paid in advance almost to a man.” “When the volume appeared, they were disgusted with it. It was a penny volume, of about fifty pages, bound in boards, and badly printed on coarse paper, and, worse than all, it contained not one of the squibs and satires upon which his reputation had been built up. Few of the poems contained in that collection now appear in any of the editions of his works, and such as have been preserved have been very much altered for the better “ (letter from Maj. Boynton, West Point). But here Mr. Stoddard, in common with his English colleague, fails to see that what the cadets wanted in the book was just exactly what Poe left out and what they had been interested in him for. They hardly cared, we may naturally conclude, for sentimental efforts of any kind, and were scarcely to be expected to perceive the promise in these crude efforts, which, like others more celebrated, would have escaped even Mr. Ingram's eyes had Poe not lived to write the “Raven.”

In explanation of Poe's separation from his adopted father, Mr. Ingram merely says that they had “a violent quarrel.” Stoddard says: “It is in the recollection of the lady who was his playmate in childhood that he insisted on seeing Mr. Allan, who was confined to his bed by illness, and that Mrs. Allan, not being willing to risk the scene that was likely to have ensued, refused him admittance to her husband's room. This excited his wrath, and he broke forth into invectives against her of a nature so insulting that it became necessary Mr. Allan should know of them, and that he should be forbidden the house.” Ingram says of the prize award for the ‘Saturday Visitor” tales: ‘'Some well-known literary men consented to adjudicate, . . . and, after a careful consideration of the various contributions, decided unanimously that Poe was entitled to both premiums.” Stoddard says: ‘’The elegance of his penmanship tempted one of the committee who was to make the award to read several pages of the MS. volume in which these sketches were written. He was interested in them, as were also the others, so much so that they decided to read no more of the manuscripts, but to give the prizes to ‘the first of geniuses who had written legibly’” — which is substantially Griswold's account. This Mr. Ingram denies circumstantially, and asserts that two of the committee surviving denied the story; but his extreme carelessness throughout in quoting authorities, and strong [column 2:] bias against every statement which opposes his notion of Poe, make it im- possible to accord the credit which he does to the favorable version, where there are two, of the same event.

Mr. Ingram again explains Poe's critical malignity and the ill-feeling it excited as “the dauntless intrepidity with which he assailed the fragile reputation of the small book-makers,” while his associate in one of his literary undertakings, the English Burton, writes to him on the subject: “You must, my dear sir, get rid of your avowed ill-feelings towards your brother authors, You say the people love havoc; I think they love justice.” As to his critical justice, Mr. Ingram does not leave us to infer it when he tells us that in his “Literati” he assigned the highest position to Mrs. Osgood! Mr. Ingram denies persistently that Poe was addicted to intoxication from his academical days — considering this only as the failing of his “lonesome latter years.” Mr. Stoddard quotes Mrs, Allan as saving to a visitor in the family; “Mr. Gilliet, what do you think of Edgar? His father has just paid an enormous swum for his debts in Charlotteville, and now here is a bill for quantities of champagne and seventeen broadcloth coats, which he has gambled away.” “Yes,” answered Edgar, “I went to see how much of the old man's money I could spend, and I have done it.” “The university was then a most dissolute place, and Mr. Edgar A. Poe was remarked as the most dissolute and dissipated youth in the university,” writes one of the most friendly of his biographers, though this is partially contradicted by a fellow-student writing nearly thirty years later. “At West Point.” according to Mr. Stoddard, “instead of his boyish drink, champagne, he drank brandy, and his room was seldom without a bottle of the best that could be smuggled in. It shattered his nerves and made him appear much older than he was.”

The picture which we must draw even from the conflict of testimonies does not justify Poe's English biographer in inveighing against the Americans for not doing for him what it was quite impossible for any one to do. If his vices were genial ones, they were still those which necessarily entail the greatest hardships on the individual and leave their curses on his own shoulders. Neither England nor America could have made him a happy man. The final scenes of his tragic life are by Mr. Ingram wrapped up in a mystery which becomes the friend more than the biographer. Mr. Stoddard has taken the pains to investigate all the particulars, and we learn from him that on a journey preparatory to being married to his early love, he got intoxicated at Baltimore, and, wandering in the streets on the eve of an election, was drugged by election agents, used next day as a repeater, and then picked up senseless and carried to a hospital, where he died four days after leaving Richmond. His wretched life and still more wretched death were not owing to want of friends or want of appreciation; for, unlike the illustrious Joaquin Miller, he did not need to go to England to find his place in the world of letters.

Of the selections which follow both memoirs much need not be said. Some of the poems are silly enough, and much of the prose of the English edition would have been omitted by an editor considerate of his author's reputation. Such stuff as “The Oval Portrait,” “The Island of the Fay,” and some’others, can but diminish the fame of the author of “The Gold- bug” and “The Descent into the Maelstrom.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 208, column 2:]

* ‘Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by John H. Ingram.’ 4 vols. Edinburgh, A. & C. Black.

‘Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, with an Original Memoir by R. H. Stoddard. New York: W. J. Widdleton. 1875.