Text: Philip Alexander Bruce, “Edgar Allan Poe and Mrs. Whitman,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Durham, NC), vol. XII, no. 2, April 1913, pp. 129-140

[page 129:]

The most interesting, perhaps because the most tumultuous, of all Edgar Allan Poe's love affairs was the one which he had with Mrs. Whitman of Providence. The first sight which we get of her suggests that she was not framed on the ordinary model of her sex. “When a little girl,” says Mrs. T. H. Kellogg, “I was one evening sitting on the front steps when she and her sister, Miss Powers, crossed over to our house. They went into the parlour, and I heard Mrs. Whitman ask my sister to sing for her the Mocking Bird. She appreciated my sister's beautiful singing, but on this occasion, while she was in the very midst of Listen to the Mocking Bird, suddenly a cloud of white rushed past me like a tornado, and I heard Mrs. Whitman's voice exclaiming excitedly: ‘I have it, I have it.’ It seems that the beautiful music and singing had excited in her some poetic thought, and regardless or forgetful of conventionalities, she had impulsively rushed home to put it in writing, or perhaps in poetry, before it should vanish.”

The last view which we have of her in her old age shows that time had not diminished her eccentricities. “Her dimly-lighted parlour,” says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, describing his visit to her, ‘’was always decked here and there with scarlet, and she sat robed in white, with her back always turned to the light, thus throwing a discreetly tinted shadow over her still thoughtful and noble face. She seemed a person embalmed while still alive.”

It was Mrs. Whitman's habitual practice throughout life, as we thus see, to dress in white regardless of the season of the year; and robed in this conspicuous manner, it was her custom to spend much of her time in the beautiful garden belonging to her home in Providence, where she was able to indulge in poetical musings without interruption, but not without observation. Poe, visiting Providence, and wandering from his hotel after nightfall, caught, as he slowly passed the Whitman residence, an enchanting glimpse of her white figure, half reclining upon a “violet bank”, while her face was romantically “upturned” to the [page 130:] silvery moon as though “in sorrow”. Could there have been a more poetical juxtaposition?

Poe must have known who the lady was, for writing in June, 1848, he declared that he had seen Mrs. Whitman in the garden at Providence, although not at that time personally acquainted with her. He himself asserts that the first time her name fell on his ear had been many years before while he was stopping in Lowell. The person who then mentioned it to him had emphasized her eccentricities and her sorrows. The poet afterwards averred that this casual reference had made a deep impression on his heart at once. But was this not an after-thought? When he visited Lowell on this occasion, his wife was still alive, and Mrs. Whitman was simply one of many interesting women known to him only by. reputation. As soon as practical circumstances arose to direct his gaze intently towards her as a woman at once eligible and attractive, — then, and perhaps not until then, did his mind revert, for the first time, to the conversation with her friend in Lowell. If all subterfuges are really fair in love and war, then he is to be pardoned for exaggerating, in language of supreme eloquence, the effect which had been produced on him by the eulogistic words of that friend.

Thoughts, sentiments, traits, and moods, he affirmed in the first letter which he wrote to Mrs. Whitman, were attributed to her by this friend, “‘which I knew to be my own, but which, until that moment, I had believed to be my own solely, — unshared by any human being. A profound sympathy took immediate possession of my soul. . . . From that hour I loved you.” But the very strength of this feeling, according to his own protestation, led him to avoid her society. He recalls that, in passing through Providence not long afterwards, he declined to accompany Mrs. Osgood, who was with him, on a visit to the Whitman home. “I dared neither go nor say why I could not. I dared not speak of you, — much less see you. . . . Your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in with a delicious thirst all that was uttered in my presence respecting you.”

This was in 1845, — several years before Poe met Mrs. Whitman in her own drawing-room for the first time face to face. Virginia, his wife, was still alive, and apparently with her approval, he had been ardently pursuing Mrs. Osgood. It is quite probable that [page 131:] he refused to call on Mrs. Whitman at this time, either because he was aware that the position in which he had placed both Mrs. Osgood and himself was equivocal, or because his infatuated friendship for the latter lady, — for it seems to have been no more, — had made him indifferent for the moment to the charms of other women, however great their genius might be either in his or their own estimation. Certainly his assertion that he had been nursing a secret passion for Mrs. Whitman is not likely to have deceived even her romantic and egotistic temper. Three years afterwards, (February 14, 1848), the poet's intense feeling for her having, according to his own extravagant description, grown, although it had had nothing to feed on, he received a valentine from her addressed to him as the author of the Raven. “T lost myself,’‘ he exclaims, “for many weeks in one continuous delicious dream where all was a vivid yet indistinct bliss. . . . I yielded at once to an over-whelming sense of fatality. From that hour, I have never been able to shake from my soul the belief that my destiny, for good or evil, either here or hereafter, is, in some measure, interwoven with your own.”

High-wrought as his emotions had become, if credence is to be placed in his own representations, Poe was not incited to compose an original poem as a reply to the valentine, but instead sent Mrs. Whitman the already famous lines To Helen which had been inspired by the beauty and loveliness of Mrs. Stanard. This copy was even in print, but unsigned. As no acknowledgement was made of its reception, he now enclosed an original poem, addressed To Helen, in his own handwriting, but without his signature.

“The mere thought,” he afterwards wrote, “that your dear fingers would press, your sweet eyes dwell upon characters which had welled out upon the paper from the depths of so sweet a love, filled my soul with a rapture which seemed then all sufficient for my human nature.”

Mrs. Whitman, after receiving the poet's lines, remained silent for two months, and then sent him, in her own handwriting, two stanzas of her poem entitled A Night in August. The envelope was incorrectly addressed; and it was almost by accident that the verses finally reached him in Richmond, whither he had gone. He regarded, or pretended to regard, their safe delivery, after a [page 132:] circuit full of vicissitudes, as an auspicuous fatality; for, said he, “TI was about to depart on a tour and an enterprise which would have changed my very nature, — fearfully altered my very soul, — steeped me in a stern, cold, and debasing, although brilliant, gigantic ambition, and bore me far, far away from you, sweet, sweet Helen, and the divine dream of your love.”’

Poe and Mrs. Whitman met for the first time in September, (1848), after his return to the North from Richmond. Obtaining a letter of introduction from Miss Blackwell, a common friend, he presented it in person in Providence. He had already written to Miss Blackwell, during the latter's visit to that city in June, with the probable hope that the missive would be read by Mrs. Whitman. “Do you know her?”’, he had inquired, “I feel deep interest in her poetry and character. Miss L. told me many things about the romance of her character, which singularly interested me, and excited my curiosity. Her poetry is beyond question poetry, — instinct with genius. Can you not tell me something about her, — anything, — everything you know, and keep my secret; that is to say, let no one know that I have asked you to do so?”

Miss Blackwell was evidently too shrewd to take this request as seriously intended, for, at the first opening, she gave theletter to Mrs. Whitman to read. The latter had just heard from another friend, Miss McIntosh, that the poet had recently, at Fordham, refused to talk upon any other topic but herself, when he found that his interlocutor knew her personally.

The history of modern romance contains few descriptions as vivid or as eloquent as Poe's of his first interview with Mrs. Whitman: ‘As you entered the room, pale, timid, hesitating, and evidently oppressed at heart; as your eyes rested appealing for one brief moment upon mine, I felt for the first time in my life, and tremblingly acknowledged, the existence of spiritual influences altogether out of the reach of reason. I saw that you were Helen, my Helen, the Helen of a thousand dreams, — she whose visionary lips had so often lingered upon my own in the divine trance of passion, — she whom the great giver of all good, preordained to be mine, — mine only, if not now also, then at least hereafter and forever in the Heavens. You spoke falteringly and seemed sincerely conscious of what you said. I heard no words, — only the soft voice more familiar to me than my own, and more melodious [page 133:] than the songs of angels. Your hand rested within mine, and my whole soul shook with a tremulous ecstacy. . . . And when afterwards, on those two successive evenings of all Heavenly delight, you passed to and fro about the room, now sitting by my side, now far away, now standing with your hand resting on the back of my chair, while the preternatural thrill of your touch vibrated even through the senseless wood into my heart, — while you moved thus restlessly through the room, my brain reeled beneath the intoxicating spell of your presence. . . . I grew faint with the luxury of your voice, and blind with the voluptuous lustre of your eyes.”

Two days after this spiritually tumultuous interview, Poe, while loitering in a cemetery, asked Mrs. Whitman to be his wife; but romantic as she professed herself to be, she, not unnaturally, was not ready to fall into his arms on so sudden an invitation, however ardently expressed. Nevertheless, he was not at once discouraged; at the moment of his writing his first letter to her (October 1st), his heart was still sanguine of success. “‘When I spoke to you of what I felt, saying that I loved now for the first time, I did not hope you would believe, or even understand me; nor can I hope to convince you now; butif, throughout some long dark summer night, I could but have held you close to my heart, and whispered you the strange secrets of its passionate history, then indeed you would have seen that I have been far from attempting to deceive you in this respect. I could have shown you that it was not, and could never have been, in the power of any other than yourself to have moved me as I am now moved, — to oppress me with this ineffable emotion, — to surround and bathe me in this electric light illumining and kindling my whole nature, filling my soul with glory, with wonder, and with awe.”

Forgetting for the moment these passionate words, we may calmly ask the question: Did Poe act upon the impulse of genuine feeling, or upon mere calculation, in addressing Mrs. Whitman with such expedition? His haste was probably due to the two influences combined. His first enthusiasm was sincere; at the same time, knowing that her character was highly romantic, he may have supposed that, in declaring himself, precipitancy would impress her more in his favour than deliberation; and probably it would have done so had she been a much younger woman. At a [page 134:] later date, when he had grown less hopeful of success, he seems to have been apprehensive lest she should have attributed a sordid motive to his rashness in testing her responsiveness so quickly. “T dreaded,”’ he said, ‘’to find you in worldly circumstances superior to mine. So great was my fear that you were rich, or at least possessed some property, which caused you to seem rich in the eyes of one so poor as I had always permitted myself to be, — that, on the day I refer to, I had not the courage to ask my informant any question concerning you. . . . Under no circumstances would I marry where interest, as the world terms it, could be suspected as, on my part, the object of the marriage. I was relieved next day by an assurance that you were chiefly dependent on your mother. May I, — dare I, — add, can you believe me when I say that the assurance was doubly grateful to me by the additional one that you were in ill-health and had suffered more from domestic trouble than falls usually to the lot of women.”

II.

From the very beginning of Mrs. Whitman's personal association with Poe, she was under the influence of the truculent disparagement of his character which she had been constantly hearing from the literary coterie to which she belonged, few members of which had escaped as unscathed as she had done from his critical lash. ‘How often I have heard it said of you,’‘ she remarked in a letter written about four weeks after the date of their first interview, “ ‘he has great intellectual power, but no principle, no moral sense’‘’.

Altogether justifiable was the bitterness of his reply: ‘You do not love me, or you would have felt too thorough a sympathy with the sensitiveness of my nature to have so wounded me as you have done with this terrible passage.” With manly indignation, he resented the rude, cruel, and outrageous suggestion. “That many persons in your presence have declared me wanting in honour appeals irresistibly to an instinct of my nature, — an instinct which I feel to be honour, let the dishonourable say what they may, and forbids me under such circumstances to insult you with my love. . . . With the exceptional occasional follies and excesses which I bitterly lament, but to which I have been driven by intolerable sorrow, and which are hourly committed by others [page 135:] without attracting any notice whatever, — I can call to mind no act of my life which would bring a blush to my cheek or to yours. IfI have erred at all, it has been on the side of what the world would call a quixotic sense of the honorable, — of the chivalrous. The indulgence of this sense has been the true voluptuousness of my life. . . . You ask me why men so misjudge me, why I have enemies. If your knowledge of my character and my career does not afford you an answer to the query, at least it does not become me to suggest the answer. Let it suffice that I have had the audacity to remain poor that I might preserve my independence . . . that I have been a critic, — an unscrupuously honest one, and, no doubt in many, cases, a bitter one, — that I have uniformly attacked, when I attacked at all, those who stood highest in power and influence; and that, whether in literature or society, I have seldom refrained from expressing, either directly or indirectly, the fierce contempt with which the pretensions of ignorance, arrogance, and imbecility inspire me. And you who know all this, ask me why I have enemies! Ah, I have a hundred friends for every individual enemy, but has it ever occurred to you that you do not live among my friends?”

This letter, at once full of dignity and full of feeling, was not only an answer to Mrs. Whitman's brusque aspersion, but it was also a refutation of the principal accusations of his backbiting enemies. If she had had a spark of genuine pity or affection for him, — which it would be inferred she did not have, — she would have been more softened by these poignant words than by all his burning protestations of love. Apparently, they did create some impression, for, when he saw her soon afterwards in Providence, while on his way to lecture in Lowell, she promised to reconsider his proposal, and write him before he should leave the lattercity. Her reply, which reached him there, was still indecisive. Poe, intending to return to New York by way of Providence, wrote that he would call on an appointed date (November 4th), but before that date arrived, seemingly rendered as despondent by her irresolution as he had been by the fluctuations in his wife's health, he attempted to commit suicide by swallowing a large dose of laudanum. It was not until the 7th, that he had sufficiently recovered to appear. Mrs. Whitman, perhaps mortified by his failure to keep his engagement, and doubtless aware of the true reason for [page 136:] it, declined at first to see him; but finally yielding to his importunities, consented to an interview. In the course of it, he implored her, with desperate eloquence, to marry him at once; but she seems to have again weakly contented herself with reading passages from a letter which she had received from New York reviling his character. Again he was deeply wounded, and leaving her abruptly, sent a note of renunciation. The same night he began drinking heavily, as he always did when greatly moved, and the next day called atthe Whitman home in a state of uncontrollable excitement. ‘He hailed me,” says Mrs. Whitman, “as an angel sent to save him from perdition.”’

Impressed with this romantic idea apparently for the first time, she now consented to a conditional engagement; and, on November 14, Poe left for New York under a pledge to drink no more. Was the now successful suitor in a state of blissful satisfaction? Not wholly so. ‘So kind, so true, so generous,’‘ he wrote her the very day of his departure, ‘”'so unmoved by all that would have moved one who had been less than angel, — beloved of my heart, of my imagination, of my intellect, — life of my life, soul of my soul, dear, dearest Helen, how shall I ever thank you as I ought! I am calm and tranquil, and but for a strange shadow of coming evil which haunts me, I should be happy. That I am not supremely happy even when I feel your deeplove at my heart, terrifies me. What can this mean? Perhaps, however, it is only the necessary reaction after such terrible excitements.”

Deep down in the secret closet of his own soul, the poet perhaps apprehended the early return of Mrs. Whitman's irresolution. Is this not the most probable explanation of the far from assured tone of his next letter? “Pardon me, Helen,’‘ he wrote on the 22nd, “if not for the love I bear you, at least for the sorrows I have endured. . . . My sole hope now is in you, Helen. As you are true to me or fail me, so do I live or die.”

It would seem that the same fear was predominant in the second letter which he wrote her on the same day. “Am I right in the impression that you are ambitious? If so, and if you will have faith in me, I can and will satisfy your wildest desires.

It would be a glorious triumph, Helen, for us, — for you and me. . . would it not be glorious, darling, to establish in America the sole unquestionable aristocracy, that of intellect, — to secure its supremacy, [page 137:] — to lead and control it? All this I can do, Helen, and will, if you bid me and aid me.”

Wild appeals to her love had been followed by calm appeals to her ambition, — a grosser side to touch in the hope of strengthenng his hold on her.

But the older and wiser mood sooncomes back to him; he again remembers that the sentimental appeal is the only appeal worthy of a hearing in the Court of Love, — the only one indeed that will go straight to the heart of a sublimated woman like Mrs. Whitman. “Without well understanding why,” he wrote her, “I had been led to fancy you ambitious. It was then, only then, when I thought of you, that I dwelt exultingly upon what I felt that I could accomplish in letters, and in literary influence, — in the widest and noblest field of human ambition. When I saw you, however, — when I touched your gentle hand, when I heard your soft voice, and perceived how greatly I had misinterpreted your womanly nature, — these triumphant visions melted sweetly away in the sunshine of a love ineffable, and I suffered my imagination to stray with you, and with the few who love us both, to the banks of some quiet river in some lovely valley in our land. Here, not too far secluded from the world, we exercised a taste controlled by no conventionalities, but the sworn slaves of a natural art, in the building for ourselves of a cottage, which no human being could ever pass without an ejaculation of wonder, at its strange, weird, and incomprehensible, yet most simple, beauty. Oh, the sweet and gorgeous but not often rare flowers in which we half buried it, — the grandeur of the magnolias and tulip trees which stood guarding it, — the luxuriant velvet of its lawn, the lustre of the rivulet that ran by the very door, — the tasteful yet great comfort of the interior, — the music, — the books, — the unostentatious pictures, and above all the love, — the love that threw an unfading glory over the whole. Alas, all is now a dream!”

On February 25th, he wrote again: “In little more than a fortnight, dearest Helen, I shall once again clasp you to my heart. Until then, I forbear to agitate you by speaking of my wishes, — of my hopes, and especially of my fears. You say that all depends on my own firmness. If this be so, all is safe, — for the terrible agony which I have so lately endured, — an agony known only to my God and to myself, — seems to have passed my soul [page 138:] through fire, and purified it from all that is weak. Henceforward I am strong, — this those who love me shall see, as well as those who have so relentlessly endeavoured to ruin me.”

“I will forbear to speak of my fears.’‘ It would be inferred from these words that the poet did not really expect the consummation of the conditional engagement, even should he continue permanently strictly temperate. This was because he was acutely conscious of his enemies’ schemes to destroy him in Mrs. Whitman's favorable opinion. He might give up stimulants forever, and yet he knew that these enemies would not abate one jot of their determination to thwart him in his suit.

His contemporaneous letters to Mrs. Richmond, his own reported utterances to Mrs. Hewitt, — all were in harmony with the fear intimated in this letter to Mrs. Whitman that she would never become his wife; and that the conditional engagement was practically no engagement at all. His anticipations turned out to be only too correct.

On December 20th, Poe found himself again in Providence, where he was to deliver a lecture. He now pleaded with Mrs. Whitman to marry him at once and return to Fordham. She finally yielded to his passionate urgings; but, at the same time, she rather inauspiciously decided to transfer all her property to her mother.

On the mortifying occasion when the poet was to affix his signature to the document carrying this out, he bore himself as if slightly intoxicated; but the impression of this fact was so far effaced that Mrs. Whitman consented to appoint the evening of the following Monday, December 25th, as the time for the ceremony. At noon on that day, she received a note from a friend informing her that the poet had, that morning, been seen drinking at the bar of his hotel. On this slender and irresponsible charge, which was disproved by Poe's perfect soberness when he reached the house, (Mrs. Whitman herself acknowledging that no evidence of the infringement of his promise was visible in his appearance or manner), she abruptly resolved, on the eve of the marriage, to defer it indefinitely; and in this resolution, she stubbornly persisted. “(Gathering together some papers which he had intrusted to my keeping,” she says, “I placed them in his hands, without a word of explanation or reproach, and utterly worn out [page 139:] and exhausted by the mental conflicts, and anxieties, and responsibilities of the last few days, I drenched my handkerchief with ether, and threw myself on a sofa, hoping to lose myself in utter unconsciousness. Sinking on his knees beside me, he entreated me to speak to him, — to speak one word, but one word. At last, I responded almost inaudibly ‘What can I say?’ ‘Say that you love me, Helen.’ ‘I love you.’ These were the last words I ever spoke to him.”

Such was the melodramatic termination of this famous courtship, in which, with all his infirmities, Poe had perhaps appeared to more advantage than Mrs.Whitman. Various calumnies were spread abroad by his enemies as the cause of the final rupture of the engagement; for instance, it was said that, becoming intoxicated, he had acted so violently in the Whitman drawing-room that it had been found necessary to summon the police to eject him. This slander stung his pride to the quick. “No amount of provocation,”’ he wrote her, in the last communication he ever addressed to her, ‘'shall induce me to speak ill of you, even in my own defence. If, to shield myself from calumny, however undeserved, or however unendurable, I find a need of resorting to explanations that might condemn or pain you, most solemnly do I assure you that I will patiently endure such calumnies rather than avail myself of any such means of refuting them. That you have in any way countenanced this pitiable falsehood, I do not and cannot believe, — some person equally your enemy and mine has been its author; but what I beg of you is to write me at once a few lines in explanation. . . . Your simple disavowal is all I wish. Heaven knows that I would shrink from wounding or grieving you. . . . May heaven shield you from all ill!”

To this letter Mrs. Whitman returned no reply.

Another report, which arose perhaps from a casual remark dropped by the poet in conversation with Mrs. Hewitt, was that he had deliberately intended to jilt the lady; and that he went to Providence for that purpose alone. It is to be regretted that his own language, not before the rupture of the engagement but afterwards, when, very naturally, he felt deeply aggrieved, seems to support this conclusion. Writing on January 11th, 1849, to Mrs. Richmond, several weeks subsequent to his return from Providence, he thus expressed himself: ‘I need not tell you, Annie, [page 140:] how great a burden is taken off my heart by my rupture with Mrs. W., for I had fully made up my mind to break the engagement.” He had simply permitted an emotion of pique to drown his instinctive sense of chivalry. His brief letter to Mrs. Clemm to announce the expected date of the arrival of his bride and himself at Fordham, proves the groundlessness of his own assertion. But he did not stop with this discreditable outburst of chagrin. “From this day forth,’‘ he wrote Mrs. Richmond, “I shun the pestilential society of literary women. They are a heartless, unnatural, venomous, dishonourable set, with no guiding principle but inordinate self-esteem. Mrs. Osgood is the only exception I know.”

These words were quite certainly levelled as much against the Elletts, Lynches, and Fullers, who had poisoned Mrs. Whitman's mind in judging him, as against Mrs. Whitman herself; but they undoubtedly reflected the bitterness of his feeling in recalling her. The only fact to condone their use was that they were addressed to an intimate friend in the secrecy of private correspondence.

After all, should not these words, if really intended in Mrs. Whitman's disparagement, be accepted in the spirit which Mrs. Osgood always exhibited towards him? ‘The wise and well informed,” that lady remarked, ‘know how to regard as they should the impetuous anger of a spoiled infant baulked of its capricious will, the equally harmless and unmeaning frenzy of that stray child of feeling and passion.”

After his death, Mrs. Whitman firmly refused to listen to attacks on his character; repeatedly declared that his memory was ‘dear and sacred to her”; and finally wrote a spirited vindication of his career. All this was admirable. In the secret recesses of her own heart, she, perhaps, regretted that she should have suffered to pass her only opportunity to be of lasting benefit to him in his life; and that out of a justifiable consideration for her own peace of mind, she should have turned a deaf ear to his appeals, and thus thrown him back again upon his downward course.