Text: Anonymous, “Poe and His Defamers,” Brooklyn Daily Times (New York, NY), (no volume or issue number specified), April 28, 1876, p. 2, col. 2

[page 2, column 2, continued:]

Poe and His Defamers.

The literary world, we believe, regards with little favor the ill-advised letter of Mrs. Oakes Smith in the Home Journal respecting the cause of the death of Edgar A. Poe, that being beaten in a most ruffianly manner at the instigation of a woman whom he had wronged, he thereupon “went to Baltimore, which he had barely reached when he died.” It would have been pleasanter for us to read that Mrs. Oakes Smith, whom personally we respect, had laid a rose upon his grave, rather than brought this charge against the poet — pleasanter to have associated her with the generous Mrs. Riddell, who though shamefully lampooned by Robert Burns was the first to start forward and confront his defamers, indignantly repelling the foul slanders breathed from lips that would have trembled at his sarcasm; or with the high souled and highly gifted Mrs. Whitman, who sixteen years ago did for the proscribed and hunted author of “The Raven” as noble a service. Mrs. Smith by this act of hers has run the risk of affiliation with the attempt of a sister authoress to place the Satanic brand on the brow of a great English poet, whose unhappy destiny it was to find not even repose in the grave.

In a letter from Richmond, dated 10th written in very temperate style, Mrs. Susan Archer Weiss who claims to have been an intimate friend of Poe, who conversed with him before he went on his last visit to Baltimore, and knew all the circumstances connected with that visit, in our judgment sufficiently proves the foundationless character of the story above alluded to, and to which, Mrs. Weiss Bays, Mrs. Oakes Smith gives unfortunately too reader credence.

Long — too long — the memory of the rarest (it somewhat bizarre) poetical genius America Las ever produced been blackened by the perverted [column 3:] facts and baseless assumptions in Rufus W. Griswold's memoir, transferred without question to Gilfillan's Literary Gallery, and embodied the biographical annotations of every School Reader throughout the world. ‘What grievous amount of wrong his for many years passed unchallenged and unrebuked!

What if he did die in his poverty before he had time to take take [[sic]] up that paltry I. O. U. held by Sam Sinclair, and of which so much contemptible capital was made? Many an honest man has gone to his grave a bankrupt. The voluminous writings of Byron and Burns, completed before their thirty-seventh year, are evidence sufficient that they were not sots. They worked with far too much industry to permit of such a supposition. The four closely printed volumes containing Poe's works, written within the same limits, as to time, and far more analytic and difficult of execution than those of the two bards named, we offer in support of the same presumption. It was no intellect muddled with stimulants that produced in painful succession amid penury and neglect, the Gold Bug, the Mysteries of the Rue Morgue, the Maelstrom, the story of Marie Roget, &c. We have merely to stretch forth a hand and, from the pigeon-hole of the desk where the writer sits, produce written evidence which cannot be gainsaid, that Poe was never rusticated or dismissed from Virginia University, nor even rebuked by the Faculty there, never expelled from West Point, though he might not have been popular among the aristocratic cadets, never was guilty of the base conduct to a Southern lady imputed to him by Griswold, so far as known to any of his friends in Richmond. never went purposely intoxicated to the residence of another lady with the settled purpose of breaking off an intended marriage and this evidence while discrediting malicious calumnies serves, moreover, to establish his claim to traits most creditable to him as a man. Not seeking to conceal the errors which no one lamented more poignantly (though with proud humility and in secret) than himself, the fittest legend that can be carved on his tomb is Implora pace! In the words of one of his truest friends and defenders, and at the same time one of the most brilliant and accomplished women in America, “Theodore Parker has nobly said that every man of genius has to hew out for himself from the bard marbles of life the white statue of Those who have best succeeded in this sublime work will best know how to look with pity and reverent awe upon the melancholy torso which alone remains to us of Edgar Poe's misguided efforts to achieve that beautiful and august statue of Peace.