Text: John S. Patton, “Poe at the University,” New York Times (New York, NY), vol. LVIII, whole no. 18,578, December 5, 1908, p. 19 (Literary Section, “Holiday Book Number”)

[page 19:]

POE'S name is linked with that of the University of Virginia, where he spent a memorable year. That institution has never been indifferent to his tame. Its first librarian, the venerable William. Wertenbaker, was one of the earliest of his defenders. Its Poe Memorial Association, composed of professors and students, unveiled there on the fiftieth anniversary of his death the bronze bust by Zolnay, and Mr. Mabie made on that day an address on Poe's place in American literature which was enriched by some of the best judgments in brief that have been passed upon the achievements of the most original American genius” and “prince of American poets.” More recently Dr. James A. Harrison of that university has written a notable life and edited a valuable edition of his works, giving to the world, with a great deal of new matter and much graceful criticism, a frank interpretation of Poe's life based on the total of the known facts of his career.

Now his Alma Mater promises a noteworthy celebration of the poet's centenary, which arrives on the 19th of January. On the 16th of that month the room he occupied when a student will be opened as a Poe museum. The sermon the next day in the chapel, a rod or two from the room, will probably strike a note in harmony with the commemoration. On Monday morning the guests of the university will be taken on a pilgrimage to the Ragged Mountains, about the only spot made famous by his stories, since his genius was independent of locality; and in the afternoon the Ravens, an organization whose membership is made up of students who have won distinction by intellectual achievements during their college careers, will celebrate the occasion with musical and dramatic events with motifs drawn from Poe's lyrics. The 19th — the birthday — is, of course, reserved for the strongest features of the programme of commemoration. The morning will be devoted to an international, celebration, It is too early to give names, but it is not premature to announce an address by a distinguished Frenchman, a discourse in French on Poe in France,” one in German on Poe In Germany,” poetical tributes in foreign languages, and letters from eminent men beyond the Atlantic.

The National tribute will be paid in the afternoon, and will include an address by distinguished American, poems by some of the chosen of the muses, and letters from writers whose deliverances will be worthy of an event so significant.

Poe had just passed his seventeenth birthday when he arrived at Charlottesville to enter the university, then in its second session. It was midwinter, and the little village clustered about the Court House could not have been very alluring. A mile away, through thickets and over a rough country road, he reached the university. His love of beauty, if offended by its still raw, ungardened grounds, should have been satisfied by the architectural integrity of its buildings, which set one to

For a time Poe shared a room on West Lawn with Miles George, also of Richmond. There was a schoolboy fisticuff, a handshake in acknowledgment of satisfaction, and Poe went to West Range, set up his household gods, and adorned the walls with cartoons in crayon and the ceiling with a charcoal copy of a plate in Byron's poems. According to the memory of men, No. 13 in the block then known as Rowdy Row has been accepted as the room he occupied. It has become a shrine. Over its door is a bronze tablet which reads:

following the thought of the epigram on the modest home of the great Erasmus in Rotterdam. Small as was the home in Hoogestraat, that In West Range was smaller — one room, about twelve feet square. The date of the [column 2:] poet's entrance is not known, but his last night there is fixed pretty definitely, by the reminiscences of William Wertenbaker, a fellow -student. It was the 20th of December, 1826, that the two, returning from a social gathering at’ the home of a professor, spent the remainder of the evening in No. 18. Mr. Wertenbaker believed this was Poe's last night at the university.

These young men had met. in the lecture room of Dr. George Blaetterman, a learned German who, with pleasant English bride, had reached the university by way of London. Dr. Blaetterman was a man of extensive, probably profound, learning, especially in languages. In his day the catalogue announced his offer of courses in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Anglo-Saxon, and if any one wished to stray further afield in linguistics the good doctor would guide him safely among the idioms of Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and Portugal. With all learning, the irascible German had but poor control over his classes, and Poe must have witnessed some of the frequent quarrels that disturbed the academic peace of his classroom.

Poe haunted the library as much as the narrow restrictions of that day permitted. For the time it was an excellent collection, for, in spite of the need of money for buildings and equipments, Mr. Jefferson dealt liberally with this branch of his infant institution. Young Wertenbaker was in charge, and his record showed that this 17-year-old boy borrowed Rollin's Histoire Robertson's America,” Marshall's Washington,” Voltaire's Histoire and Dutief's Nature Displayed.” In addition he read, with his friend Tucker, Lingard and Hume, and enjoyed a pageantry of the poets from Chaucer to the singer of Abbotsford, the latter just then entering. the shadow of the financial eclipse of the publishing house of Constable.

J. T. L. Preston wrote late in life that he sat on the same form with Poe in John Clark's school in Richmond. Even then, at 15 or 16, he spent much of his time in writing verses, which he submitted to Preston, who in turn submitted them to his mother, a daughter of Edmund Randolph. Poe claimed that his first edition — printed in Boston in 1827 — containing Tamerlane and nine other pieces — was made up of poems written in 1821-2, before he had reached his fourteenth year. No doubt he took these early creations of his genius to the university, and indulged his propensity to reshape and polish. That he did this, or wrote the poems in his student days, is almost certain. The thin volume was printed before May 26, 1827, the date of Poe's enlistment in the army, and less than six months after he left the university. That interval he spent at a desk in his foster-father's store in Richmond, and on his way to Boston, leaving him little time for the production of ten poems of such high order of merit that nine of them are included in all collected editions of his works. They show us the mastering moods of his mind and soul in his eighteenth year. The college boy was already a man psychologized by gloom, awed by the pitiless transience of things, the sureness of death's victory, and fascinated with the beauty of its young victims.

His friend Tucker tells of his efforts and successes in writing short stories, which he read in No. 13 to a favored few of his friends, and no doubt the first draft of his first published story, the Manuscript Found in a Bottle,” was made there. More than fifty years after he recalled these readings in the little room when Poe, forgetting everything but the story to which he was giving expression, wrought so powerfully on his eager auditors that, it is said, they were afraid to breathe lest [column 3:] the enchanted spell be broken. The room, with its fantastically pictured walls lighted dimly by a candle, and the rapt group of young men, formed a fitting milieu for the histrionism of the strange children of his fancy. Once only he ventured on a story in which there were humorous touches and no gloom of sere Octobers or bleak Decembers, and he met for the first time flippant and laughing criticism. In sudden anger he cast the manuscript into the fire, where his astonished guests saw it reduced to ashes. Thereafter they called him Gaffey, after the hero of the story.

We get in all this the amiable and honorable side of his university life, already darkened with pathetic foreshadowings of his world of moan.” The psychic note in his character did not generally recommend him to young men who felt rather than thought, and it is probable that he did not have a large acquaintance. But there were choice spirits in his set — like Thomas S. Gholson, afterward an honored Judge; Upton Beall, and Philip S. Slaughter, venerated clergymen in the after years, and William M. Burwell, who became an editor of De Bow's Review. They knew the young poet for “as true and perfect a friend as the waywardness of his nature would allow.” There was never then,” one of them declared, “the least trace of insincerity.”

Poe's year at the university was not an idle one by any means. He did his class work well enough to pass ing examinations and earn the highest academic honors then bestowed; he read many books, copied favorite poems for his friend Tucker, prepared an essay for the Jefferson Literary Society, engaged in society debates, wrote stories and read them to his friends, and took long walks in the Ragged Mountains southwest of the university. He had arrived at the Institution, with an athletic record, and. probably went in for military evolutions and tactics, the form taken by the “gymnastics” of the day, a West Pointer, William Matthews, being the drillmaster. Obviously there was no need of much dissipation to kill time. That he was to some extent dissipated he tells us, and we may believe him. It he did not drink and gamble and fight it was not for lack of example in the society of the collegians among whom he moved. Their convictions and ideals were based on misconceptions, on a confusion of personal liberty with lawless license, and sometimes led beyond the playing of cards and the frenzy of drink to criminal acts, and once, some years after Poe had left the university, even to the length of murder.

If the records are silent as to much of Poe's history at the university, they are loquacious of the atmosphere in which he lived. There is preserved at the institution the first volume of the minutes of the Faculty, a long, narrow, unruled book which tells a vivid story of gambling and drinking and other forbidden practices, but Poe's name is set down only once, and then he appears as a witness who knows nothing about the case under investigation. If a student ever indulged in loo or drank mint sling or cherry bounce, he was pretty sure, to be detected, and the narrative of his sinning entered in the minutes by the Professor Secretary. The very day of Poe's: matriculation the professors were busily investigating withdrawals of books from the library on forged orders, and several students acknowledged their guilt without any apparent loss of consequence. Cases of lingering and drinking at Mowsby's shop,” where mint sling was dispensed, even on Sundays, were tried and the offenders punished, and the firing of squibs was reprehended as it it had been a new gunpowder plot. The college bell was rung at unseasonable hours, against the peace and dignity of the academic commonwealth; backgammon seduced and committed its unwise votaries to’ the terrors of the enactments. Callow youths carried dirks and revolvers, and drunken ones sought to stop the carriage of a professor returning from church with the ladies of his family. The Sheriff even tried to summon twenty-five to a Grapd Jury in aid of an inquisition intended, it is said, to ferret out gamblers, and failed ignominiously in spite of the co-operation, of the Faculty. He did not fail to produce an exodus, but the story that Poe led the fleeing collegians to the Ragged Mountains, although found in a charming biography, is a graceful fiction. Poe had no occasion to fly to a mountain of refuge. The names of the students involved [column 4:] are written down at length in the Faculty's minutes, and Poe's name is not there, although those of his friends Tucker, Beall, Slaughter, and Burwell adorn the list. This episode and frustrated duel between two beardless Hotspurs were perhaps the most exciting in a year that was full of moving events and help us to realize Poe's entourage. Of the same informing character is, the Faculty announcement in regard to the director of physical culture, that he, Mr. Matthews, is held responsible for riots and disturbances of the peace happening during his attendance upon the students composing the class.” The very air was charged with threats of “riots and disturbances.”

The rioters have gone their ways in peace. Poe, too, but for his genius, would have sunk into his grave and been forgotten. His gifts put him beyond the merciful ministrations of oblivion. Israfel singing widly well,” Ligeia with her undiminishable harmonies, Annabel Lee in her seaside kingdom, Helen with her hyacinth hair, Lenore with “the life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes,” have held him bound to earth to be scourged. It has seemed to the world, certainly until recently, to be right and proper that Poe's private life should be forever exposed to the inspection of the kind of people who visit the morgues, that he should be denounced as sot and worse, and that the measure of his genius should be taken by standards that gauge things moral and ethical, and not the visions of the creative soul. The students of’ the University of Viwwwrginia in the year 1826 drank and swaggered and fought. They owed debts of honor, and they did things that were constantly getting them into hot water with the Faculty, and, indeed, getting them expelled, but the man who should indite the biography of one of them with the same freedom that many have written about Poe would find a descendant of the gay collegian facing him and demanding to know by what right he assailed his private character. The world would back the demand; why has it not supported the protest of those who believe that Poe's name entitled to like immunity and protection?