Text: James A. Harrison, “Introduction,” The Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman (1909), pp. 1-3

[page 1:]

IN publishing the following correspondence between Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe exactly as it occurs in the original MSS., with out change or alteration of any kind, the editor feels that he is not dealing with a hackneyed subject, but one which, in its present form, is almost entirely new. For the first time this celebrated courtship, involving one of the loveliest women and the most talked of poet of their day, is revealed in full, with all the authenticity possible to accurately copied MSS., and the most scrupulous care taken in abstaining from “editing,” adding, or condensing in any shape or form.

The result is honorable alike to both sides. The false delicacy of a generation ago submitted (without [page 2:] knowing it) to curtailed and unfaithful copies of a correspondence all or none of which should have been published. Garbled extracts got into biographies of Poe; single letters were divided up into several, undated or unsigned; long passages were omitted or placed where they are not found in the original, and an incoherent mass of unintelligible rhetoric, as different as possible from the lucid and direct Poe, was brought together where the originals, in Poe's exquisite hand-writing, show perfect order and clearness.

Mrs. Whitman's friends, wearying of this injustice to a man who honored the Rhode Island poetess so highly, have consented to the full publication of her correspondence with Poe.(1) At least half the letters of Poe here given are new, and the other half have been restored to their complete integrity. Poe's contract of marriage with Mrs. Whitman is here given for the first time in book form. Mrs. Whitman's most intimate living friends do not believe that she ever intended to marry Poe; but this the marriage contract and the lady's intense sincerity of soul, her never-ceasing love for the poet, and her expression in one of the unpublished letters of her “unutterable affection for him,” contradict this belief. Her eloquent defense of Poe against his critics proclaims in every line her admiring affection and the beautiful poems [page 3:] addressed to him by her confirm the statement. She was singularly like him in the ethereal flow of a poetic gift as spontaneous, as delicate, as a moonbeam, and her insistence that her maiden name Power was only another form of Poe was not merely fanciful.(1)

The letters as now given present a mass of “human documents” not easily equalled in the annals of literary men and women.

[[Footnotes]]

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

1. See paper on Poe and Mrs. Whitman in the Century Magazine for January, 1909.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 3:]

1. The Family of Poe or Poë,” by Sir E. T. Bewley, 1906.