Text: Anonymous, “Poe Centenary Observed,” New York Herald (New York, NY), January 20, 1909, p. 7, col. 1

[page 7, column 1:]

Miton Lackaye Reads a Poem and A. A. Stoughton Presents the Exercises at Teachers College, at Columbia and the New York University.

The one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe was celebrated yesterday with exercises at three places. The earliest exercises commemorative of the day were those of the Normal College at 9 o’clock yesterday morning, where Prof. John Erskine of Amherst College delivered an address to the students. In the afternoon the interest centred [[centered]] about Fordham, where the Poe cottage — a small white, gray shingled frame building, stands on the Concourse at 194th street. Just opposite the cottage is an open place which has been christened Poe Park, and here at 2 o’clock a bust of the poet was unveiled Five hundred persons stood in the cold wind while Wilton Lackaye read John Henry Boner's poem “Poe's Cottage at Fordham.” Then Arthur A. Stoughton, chairman of the Poe memorial committee, presented the bust to the city behalf the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences. of which Chancellor McCracken of New York University is president. Park Commissioner Joseph I. Berry accepted bust for the city. The Second uncovered Battery, fired a salute and heads were uncovered as the cloth was pulled from the bust.

The cottage was open most of the day, and there were many visitors before and after the ceremony in the park. The bust was set up on a temporary wooden pedestal, and after everybody had gone was taken into the cottage and locked up — there to await a more permanent foundation.

From the cottage and the park the party moved on over the hill to New York University.

Chancellor McCracken presided at this meeting and introduced Prof. George E. Woodberry as the first speaker. Edward Markham read a poem and Hamilton Wright Mabie, editor of the Outlook, delivered an at the End of a Century.” Wilton Lackaye recited “Ulalume” and “To One in Paradise.”

“Annabel Lee,” from an unpublished score of Miles M. Dawson, professor of actuarial science at the School of C’ommerce, was sung by W. Postley Sinclair. The quartet of the New York University Glee Club gave “The Bells.” “Poe's Life at Fordham’ Was the subject of short address by Henry Noble MacCracken, instructor in literature at Yale University.

After Wilton Lackaye, “To read a couple more of Poe's Helen” “The City in the Sea.” David Bispham gave a recitation to music of “The Raven.”

Columbia University held exercises Earl Hall last night in commemoration the Poe centenary. With Thomas Nelson Page, Prof. Brander Matthews, and John Erskine of Amherst College, the speakers of the evening, the members the English department of Columbia, arrayed in academic costume, proceeded the auditorium and took places on the platform. A number of Poe relics were on exhibition in the hall, among them an old daguerreotype of the poet, the mantelpiece before which Poe wrote “The Raven.”

Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the university, formally opened the exercises and ‘introduced Prof. Brander Matthews, who spoke on “Poe's Cosmopolitan Fame.”

Thomas Nelson Page sketched the life of Poe and defended, his character against many which he said had been made from the time of Poe's college days and even down to to-day. branded as a falsehood statement that Poe was expelled from the University Virginia and showed that on the faculty records Poe was put down as excelling in Latin.

John Erskine, professor of English at Amherst College, read an original poem commemoration of Poe as a man of letters.

BOSTON REMEMBERS POE.

Authors Club, Mrs. Howe Presiding, Pays Tribute to His Genius.

BOSTON, Jan. Edgar Allan Poe's memory was honored this afternoon by the Boston Authors Club, whose members and many friends gathered at the Chauncey Hall Building.

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe presided and briefly called attention to the anniverwary which had brought the company together, giving some of her own impressions of Poe. the platform were Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Judge Robert Grant, Prof. Bliss Perry, editor of the Atlantic, and the Rev. Samuel M. Crowthers. Between the addresses there were musical selections, and among the numbers played were Charles M. Loeffler's musical setting for two of Poe's poems and Henry F. Gilbert's piano composition “The Island of the Fay.” The two addresses of length were those of the Hon. John D. Long and Colonel Higginson.

Prof. Perry, read a short essay, in the course of which he said that Poe wore upon his finger the magic ring and the genii did his bidding. “We could wish, said he, “that the beautiful palaces they reared for him were not in such a sombre twilight land; that no such unearthly light gleamed from its windows; that no such haunted forms rushed forth. Some of us may wish that Poe's nation dealt more often with the normal life of man, with the sweet realities of the world. We may wish that he had painted nature in calmer, happier moods; that, like Wordsworth, he had made them moods interpenetrate the nobler moods of man, instead of reversing Wordsworth's process and attuning nature's ghastly and terrible forms with the strained, tortured emotions of the soul. We could wish that his imagination dealt more often with those primitive terrors that belong to the childhood of the race, those blind superstitions, those mysterious moods of communication that we have outgrown; but when his spell is upon us we lapse back into a primal savagery: there is a recrudescence of long forgotten fears.”

Col. Higginson told of seeing Poe when he was a student at Harvard. It was in 1843 when Poe startled Boston by substituting his boyish production “Al Aaraaf” for the more serious poem which he was to have delivered before the Boston Lyceum.

Col. Higginson described the poet as of slender build, his bearing as erect, and his head with its ample forehead. brilliant eyes and narrowness of nose and chin; an essentially ideal face, not noble yet anything but course, with that look of oversensitiveness which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing than coarseness.

“It was a face to rivet one's attention in any crowd.” he said, “yet a face that to one would feel safe in loving. It is not perhaps strange that I find or fancy the portrait of Charles Baudelaire, It French admirer and translator, some of the traits that are indelibly associated with that one glimpse of Poe, although Baudelaire hurt Poe's memory by filling own poem with that unusual coarseno from which Poe is absolutely

This evening Robert Treat Paine opened the exercises of the International Poe Association meeting in Sleeper Hall. Poe's place in literature was discussed by George Daniels of Virginia; “To Anne [[Annie]],” by Poe, by Prof. C. T. Copeland of Harvard, and a paper on “Poe's Birthplace and Parentage,” was read by Walter K. Watkins.