Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Poe as ‘Miserrimus’,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 190-205 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 190:]

11

POE AS “MISERRIMUS”

IN 1748 Thomas Morris, a nonjuring canon of Worcester Cathedral, died at the age of eighty-eight; he commemorated a life replete with disappointments through the single word “Miserrimus” inscribed on his gravestone in the cathedral.(1) Those who saw the epitaph many years later surmised the worst about the buried man, and three speculative sonnets about him were written from 1828 to 1830, one by William Wordsworth.(2) My concern will be to trace the use of the title “Miserrimus,” first as used for the poem by Wordsworth; next by his friend Reynolds, for a morbid novel praised by Poe; and finally by Richard Stoddard, for derogatory verses upon Poe after his death. In the unwinding of this curious thread, a new explanation will be offered for the strange utterance of the name “Reynolds” by the dying Poe. His grave, prepared just one hundred years after that of the unhappy Thomas Morris was, for a long time, to be equally unmarked through a peculiar accident. Surely these verifiable connections of the British and American memorials with the four authors have an arresting implausibility, characteristic of Poe's most fantastic tales.

Wordsworth's attention was drawn to the epitaph at Worcester Cathedral when he visited it briefly in December, 1827. Early in 1828 he was invited to contribute poems to Heath's: opulently illustrated new annual, The Keepsake, edited by Frederick Mansell Reynolds.(3) For the November publication of the book, the poet set to work on a sheaf of poems, one of which was the sonnet on the Worcester gravestone. It is one of the “Miscellaneous Sonnets,” always printed with the wrong date and with an incorrect capitalization of an important word: [page 191:]

A Gravestone upon the Floor in the Cloisters of Worcester Cathedral

Clearly Wordsworth assumed the iniquity of the interred, to judge by the italicized “who” and the phrases, “dared the grave to agitate,” “awful crown,” and “trampling upon his vileness.” Soon after the November publication of The Keepsake a Worcestershire antiquarian sent him a corrective paper “spoiling ... the Poem altogether,” Wordsworth wrote in a letter of December 20, 1828, but his amazement was great that the “ejection” of Morris could have produced “so emphatic and startling an Epitaph — and in such a place, just at the last of the steps falling from the Cathedral to the Cloister.” The 1857 edition was the first to print the information about the non-juror,, but only as a “conjecture” which had been dictated by Wordsworth to Miss Fenwick.

This delay is an important link in the chain, for it explains why Reynolds in 1832 still held the mistaken notion that the epitaph concerned a criminal. Wordsworth could have clarified the matter, but early in 1829 he became so irritated with the editor over publication matters that their relations were strained (Letters, 3.378 and 385). Hence Reynolds used Wordsworth's [page 192:] original conception about the man for his own novel Miserrimus, which had one printing in 1832 and two in 1833. The epigraph for the novel follows the Keepsake poem: “On a gravestone in Worcester Cathedral is this inscription — Miserrimus with neither name, nor date, comment nor text.” The first sentence sufficiently illustrates his view of the character: “The hand of the fiend was on me at my birth.”

William Godwin, creator of several similarly somber and obsessed characters, played an interesting role in the development of Reynolds's tale. Godwin's journal for June 16, 1828, records a significant fact: “Wordsworth and F R call.” It may have been in Godwin's house that the two discussed Words-worth's sonnet on the theme. The unpublished journal lists other meetings between Godwin and Reynolds at this period!(5) Consequently it is not surprising that Reynolds inscribed the book to Godwin.

A summary of Reynolds's plot might be useful for several comparisons: The chief character in this first-person narrative is the unnamed, inexplicably vicious son of a prosperous farmer. At boarding school he bullies a fellow student and stabs a peacemaker. Expelled, the narrator returns to his family, to be softened by the rustic environment. At eighteen he falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy newcomer to the districts and expects her to marry him. The suitor meets her brother — his chief school rival — and provokes a challenge to a duel. Despite the pleading of his fiancee, he meets and kills the young man the next day. After sending her a stinging letter of reproach, he leaves for the Orient where he amasses a vast fortune. A few years later he returns, to discover that the girl's family is being dispossessed. He restores their estate and the unhappy girl writes him a note expressing mingled gratitude and detestation. Then she plunges into a river in a suicide attempt which he manages to thwart. Although still in love with her, he asks for her hand simply to torment her to death. At the sight of the black draperies of the church, of two inscribed coffins, and of the newly erected monument [page 193:] memorializing her marriage to her brother's “murderer,” she succumbs to brain fever and dies after one week. After wandering for years the now penitent husband is telling the story of “Miserrimus” before entering his unmarked tomb.

The mark of Caleb Williams and Mandeville is certainly strong upon the work, as the reviews of the period were quick to observe, usually in its favor. Said The Court Journal reviewer about the “unpublished” first edition of 1832: “On the Worcester Cathedral engraving, the author has grounded a Godwinian novel. ... Some portions of the story are such as Goethe himself, in some fit of morbid enthusiasm, might have embodied in poetical prose.” The Metropolitan Magazine characterized the first 1833 edition as an “impassioned work of a man of talent ... to be compared with the best pages of Godwin” and written in his “earnest and all-absorbing manner.”(6) There were dissenters of course. The Gentlemen's Magazine could not consider any Godwinian novel without taking up the old anti-Jacobin cudgel. It termed the work “a posthumous libel, ... one of the most extravagant rhapsodies of the ultra-romantic or, it may be said, stark-mad school, ... the disgusting offspring of a depraved imagination.” This review may have been responsible for Reynolds's finally checking on the background of the interred “unknown” and regretfully indicating his error about the malefactor in the second edition of 1833.(7)

For the sake of explaining an odd mistake about its author made by Poe, I must mention the third and last novel of Reynolds, the purposeful companion to Miserrimus in its generally morbid’ tone and theme: The Parricide: a Domestic Romance (1836). The very beginning quickly established it as of the school of Godwin and of Poe: “I record the events of a long life of self-indulgence, anarchy, passion, and truculence, of which every minute has been a tempest, and every thought a wound. ... Yes, I am myself alone. ... [no] guilt is equal to my guilt.”(8) The London market had apparently been glutted with this type of fiction, for the work created no stir at all. The oddity is that another writer of the same surname, George [page 194:] William MacArthur Reynolds, in the early 1840's, saw fit to issue his own earliest novel, a sensational and paltry work called The Youthful Impostor, under the new name of The Parricide: or, The Youth's Career of Crime. This duplicity of title and author, so to speak, may have led Poe into writing of Miserrimus as being by “G. M. W. [sic] Reynolds” in November, 1844, and “by the author of Pickwick Abroad,” i.e., G. W. M. Reynolds, in January, 1846.(9)

Poe's error is understandable when we note that neither the British nor the American editions of Miserrimus gave the name of the author. However, there is no doubt that Poe knew the book well. There are five references to it in the body of his criticism and definite traces, I believe, in his creative work. The late poems “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” show the influence.(10) The first has the perhaps prescient lines concerning his deceased Virginia and his own approaching death: “And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/ Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride.” In Miserrimus the narrator, after dragging the suicide from the stream, in vain he thinks, writes of a similar necrophiliac frenzy:

The passage shows the strong, Poeesque quality of the text. As for “The Bells,” the reader will remember that each of the four sections starts with an injunction to “hear” the different types of bells. Part II begins: “Hear the mellow wedding bells,/ Golden bells!/ What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!” Reynolds has the dying bride remark, “Hear [page 195:] that village bell: how many vain associations it suggests!” (Miserrimus, p. 193). Poe, if influenced by the book, detailed the “associations” in immortal verses.

Poe's tales are full of themes that may have been confirmed, if not actually implanted by elements in the book. For example, the eyes of Ligeia, full, black strange — “Those shining, those divine orbs!” — have their counterpart in this novel. In Miserrimus we are first told, “Her eye was the organ of her eloquence” (p. 25). Toward the end, the narrator speaks of the “extraordinary loveliness of those singular eyes. Liquid, mild, and pellucid as the fawn, yet dark and penetrating, they could flash with the fire of love, or, as I too well knew, with the fire of hate ... They beamed a melancholy, at once timid, submissive, deprecating, which might have touched the heart of a fiend” (pp. 161-165). The stress upon cruelty for its own sake, as in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” is paralleled in the motto of Miserrimus: “Plus on aime une maitresse, et plus on est pres de la hair,” and in such sentences as: “That very impetuosity of character and feeling which is the source of all passionate love, is also a mine of combustible which any spark may explode into a conflagration of evil” and “Perhaps of all passions, cruelty is that which is most strengthened by indulgence; the more it attains, the more it desires” (pp. 136 and 176).

There is no need to underscore the “William Wilson” aspect of the beginning of Miserrimus, in which the narrator finds his vindictiveness at school thwarted by a fellow student, whom he kills ‘for revenge years later. “The morbid desire of vengeance” (p. 139) also motivates “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Hop Frog.” May not Miserrimus have contributed to one of the most powerful effects in “The Masque of the Red Death” through its description of the funereal bridal draperies of the church: “The walls, pews, ceiling, and floor, were covered with black crape; there was not a portion of the interior which revealed the material of which it was composed. ... Numerous flambeaux, impregnated with a sickly perfume, were scattered [page 196:] about. ... The windows too had all been carefully covered with hangings of the same lugubrious hue. ... [There was] the strange glare of the red light of the torches” (pp. 173-174). This is very much in the spirit and language of Poe.

Poe showed his awareness of the book by associating it, in four critical references, with Martin Faber by William Gilmore Simms. From 1844 to 1849, the year of Poe's death, there are five separate articles which mention the work of Reynolds. In the first, the “Marginalia” of the Democratic Review (November, 1844), he merely notes: “The author of ‘Miserrimus’ might have been. William Gilmore Simms (whose ‘Martin Faber’ is just such a work) ... ” (Harrison, 16.62-63). Poe was not the first to imply a relationship of the two novels; the critics of 1833 jumped to the conclusion that Simms was a borrower if not an outright plagiarist. In fact, in the second edition of Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal, Simms enlarged his first preface into a defense, indicating that the charge was based upon fortuitous correspondences of date, size, format, theme, narrative method, and American publisher. But his was an eminently moral work, showing how “evils” spring from “errors,” he protested. Moreover, his story was developed from a tale of eight or ten pages, first published in the Southern Literary Gazette in 1828 and elaborated in 1829 and 1832 into the novel. “The sterner, darker features of the story ... were all conceived in the first instance.(11) Simms repeated the account in a long letter of December, 1846, to Griswold.(12)

Poe greatly admired Martin Faber, whose author he calls “the Lopez [sic] de Vega of American writers of fiction.” In the rest of this review of Simms's The Wigwam and the Cabin in 1845 he notes that Martin Faber “has been said to resemble ‘Miserrimus’ — and in fact we perceive that the independent minds which originated the two stories have much in them of similarity — but as regards the narratives themselves, or even their tone, there is no resemblance whatever. ‘Martin Faber’ is the better work of the two” (Harrison, 12.248). In his third reference, an adaptation of the same review for Godey's Lady's [page 197:] Book of January, 1846, Poe mentions the allegation of imitation again and ascribes Miserrimus to the “Author of ‘Pickwick Abroad.’ “ Yet he now grants “the absolute identity of effect wrought by both.” Martin Faber “is a more forcible story,” more poorly received only because it is not the work of an Englishman (Harrison, 13.93-95).

The fourth and fifth instances of reference to Miserrimus are connected with Laughton Osborn's The Confessions of a Poet, by Himself. In Godey's Lady's Book for May, 1846, among the “Literati” Poe includes this author, whose work he terms: “fiction of power without rudeness. Its spirit, in general, resembles that of ‘Miserrimus’ and ‘Martin Faber’ “ (Harrison, 15.46). With a few changes in wording this judgment is included in the “Marginalia” of the Southern Literary Messenger of April, 1849. Considering Poe's contemptuous remarks about Osborn's work in the same magazine in April, 1835 (Harrison, 8.2-3), Griswold insidiously suggests that Osborn's wealth and social standing helped to elevate Poe's opinion.(13) Actually Griswold chose to overlook a very neutral reference which Poe made concerning another book by Osborn, in April, 1849.(14) Quite possibly a more mature Poe, rereading Confessions of a Poet, formed a different judgment on the basis of changed critical standards. He declares that it is “a book remarkable for its artistic unity. ... [No] better novel of its kind has been composed by an American. To be sure, it is not precisely the work to put in the hands of a lady, but its incidents are striking and original, its scenes of passion nervously wrought, and its philosophy [full of] ... suggestiveness and audacity. ... Its spirit, in general, resembles that of Reynolds’ ‘Miserrimus.’ “ Its protagonist, described as “self-willed and violent” from his earliest years, fights with his relatives and associates, and finally commits suicide; the Confessions are intended to warn men through his “foul example.” Poe was perfectly correct in linking the work with Miserrimus in this, one of his last printed pieces (Harrison, 16.142).

We come now to the importance of the name Reynolds in [page 198:] the last unhappy days of Edgar Allan Poe. Many biographers have followed him all along the course of his trip from. New York to Richmond, before the extremely puzzling last stage in Baltimore, between September 27 and October 3, 1849. There is no need for me to consider whether he was “cooped” and drugged the evening before the local Baltimore election of October 3, to serve as a voting “repeater.” Certainly he was taken, moribund, to the Washington College Hospital on that day and placed under the attending physician, Dr. John J. Moran. Found in a state of coma, he later became violently delirious. Before his death, the morning of October 7, he was visited by Neilson Poe, his third cousin, and possibly by others. Self-interest and self-deception can be suspected of most “observers” who furnished accounts of Poe's death. Credence is usually given to the letter which Dr. Moran wrote, on November 15, 1849, to Poe's mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. After describing Poe's delirium and general incoherence, Moran remarked: “At the end he began calling for one ‘Reynolds’ which he did through the night until three on Sunday. Then he became feeble and quiet, moved his hand, said, ‘Lord, help my poor soul!’ and expired.”(15) Almost every biographer has followed a clue given by Woodberry and has taken this to mean Jeremiah N. Reynolds, who had deeply stirred Poe's interest through his involvement with Polar and Pacific exploration.(16)

There are several discrepancies, however, in the picture of Poe as the voyager “into trackless seas and yawning chasm ... [confronting] that shrouded human figure, very far larger ... than any dweller among men” (Pym). Most biographers seem willing arbitrarily to discard other portions of Moran's testimony delivered then and repeated, with variations, in the succeeding years. Two further interpretations of the name Reynolds are possible, if indeed Poe did utter it. First, let me grant that a very strong case for its being J. N. Reynolds can be made; it certainly has been made by Aubrey Starke and Robert F. Almy.(17) Both are cautious scholars and rely chiefly on Poe's reviews of Reynolds's rather few works and on the [page 199:] opportunities that the two men had for meeting. It is true that Poe lavished praise on Reynolds's letter to the “Committee on Naval Affairs” (Harrison, 9.84-90) and his “Address” delivered in the House of Representatives, April 3, 1836 (9.306-314), from which he also derived phases of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.(18) Poe was then ignoring his jocular remarks of December, 1835, about Reynolds's preface to the Latin “life” of Washington by Francis Glass: that “meeting with” it was “an episode of the purest romance” and that “Mr. Reynolds was quizzing” the public (8.103-107). Poe's growing respect for the role of Reynolds in promoting a United States exploratory expedition led to his inclusion in the early “Autography” in the Messenger of February, 1836. However, there is no respect indicated for Reynolds's “common mercantile hand” (Harrison, 15.159). The second series on autography, in Graham's Magazine of December, 1841, again expresses scorn for his “clerk's hand,” as well as praise for his “exertions to get up the American South Polar Expedition” (Harrison, 15.243-244). In the same magazine, September, 1843, Poe again speaks of the “scandalous chicanery practiced ... to thrust from all participation in the enterprise the very man who gave it origin and who cherished it to consummation.” Finally, Poe praised Reynolds in like vein in the June 4, 1844 issue of the Columbia Spy of Pottsville, Pennsylvania.(19)

Nevertheless there is nothing in these articles to prove that Poe knew J. N. Reynolds personally. Indeed, the tone of his handwriting analysis suggests that he did not even know him as an acquaintance. Almy says cautiously, “Poe could have met Reynolds in New York” and “It seems to me that the inference — and it must remain an inference — has considerable plausibility.” Starke is also cautious, speaking of the “many opportunities for their meeting — but never proved.”

I am led to draw a different inference, which may be equally plausible, from the importance of the novel of F. M. Reynolds in Poe's criticism and creative work. Since the last reference to the American occurs in 1844 and to the English novelist in [page 200:] 1849, I propose the novelist as the person in Poe's dimming consciousness in Baltimore, for Poe was obviously aware of his own state of keen misery in the hospital. If we give credence to Moran's letter, the final statement, “Lord, help my poor soul,” may be illustrative of Poe, “miserrimus,” who had written an article about Miserrimus and its author only the preceding April. Of course, the account of Dr. Moran may be rife with erroneous memories or impressions. Harrison judiciously considers the elaboration of the letter in Dr. Moran's A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe ... an Official Account of His Death (Washington, 1885) and states: “Romantically interesting but not convincing. Judge Neilson Poe, his third cousin, who was at the hospital constantly until he died, asserted that he never regained consciousness.”(20)

Since it is a question of selecting and emphasizing the facts, we must make Poe's death call more complicated by noting a third possibility for the name Reynolds. One of Dr. Moran's memoranda of 1875 seems unequivocal: “I had sent for his cousin, Neilson Poe, having learned he was his relative, and a family named Reynolds, who lived in the neighborhood of the hospital. These were the only persons whose names I had heard him mention living in the city. Mr. W. N. Poe came, and the female members of Mr. Reynolds's family” (Works of Poe, 1884 edition, 1.cxx). No one seems to have followed up this promising lead from the chief Baltimore witness. Just what is meant by “I had heard him mention living in the city”? If Poe was in a coma or delirious all the time, he could have mentioned nothing intelligible, although the doctor's letter of 1849 also implies clear, substantial speech from Poe. I should add that the Baltimore Directory for 1845 lists sixteen persons named Reynolds.(21) Therefore, after mentioning these possibilities, we must finally leave unsettled the question of which Reynolds Poe intended at the end, if he called out at all.

To continue my present account, the word miserrimus occurs one more time in connection with this unhappy man. There is no need to underscore the role played by Rufus Wilmot Griswold [page 201:] in the systematic depreciation of Poe's virtues and merits, particularly as a critic; this was the field in which Griswold had personally suffered at the hands of Poe.(22) But the mantle of “dean of Poe's memoirs” seemed to fall upon the increasingly well-known critic, poet (or poetaster), and compiler, Richard Henry Stoddard. Like Griswold he had suffered from the whip in the hand of Edgar Allan Poe, critic and editor. From 1872 he seemed to enjoy recounting the story of how, as a young man, he had submitted to Poe's Broadway Journal of 1845 his “Ode on a Grecian Flute,” which, he admitted, was “influenced by Keats but not copied from anyone.” When he had waited many weeks, he personally called upon Poe, who assured him that it would be printed. Soon the Journal noted that the verses had been mislaid, and next asserted: “We decline to publish the ‘Ode on a Grecian Flute’ unless we can be assured of its authenticity.” The “indignant” Stoddard went to the office to demand an explanation from Poe who “gave me the lie direct, declared that I never wrote it, and threatened to chastise me unless I left him at once.” At a later date on a rainy day he had his last glimpse of Edgar Allan Poe, “pale, shivering, miserable.” Years afterward, concerning his failure to share an umbrella, Stoddard piously added, “I can never forgive myself.”(23) This account was to be retold frequently as though the upward swing of Poe's reputation could bear with it the fame of a popinjay like Stoddard.(24)

Stoddard, however, wisely and consistently left out of later memoirs of Poe the verses with which he had concluded his highly sarcastic, deprecatory article in 1853.(25) There he found only a few of Poe's poems with “the seal of immortality”; most of his work was “unreadable.” In criticism “he had a singular power of analysis,” but was the master of the “dyspeptic school,” which “confuses right and wrong, faith and morality, and leagues itself with darkness.” Stoddard insidiously excused Poe for “vices,” such as drunkenness, which were the result of his “genius's” being unrecognized. Stoddard's memorial poem restates his basic view: “In Poe's writings there is [sic] despair, [page 202:] hopelessness, and the echoes of a melancholy ... but nowhere ... conscience.” As was Stoddard's habit in criticism, the verses conclude the article, with the note: “Upon hearing of his death. Faulty they certainly are, but they say what should be said on such an occasion.”(26) Here are the lines which do no service to the reputation of either Poe or Stoddard:

Miserrimus

Stoddard clearly had the gravestone of Worcester Cathedral in mind, having learned of it from either the novel of Reynolds or the sonnet of Wordsworth.(27) Although he omitted any ascription to Poe after the first printing of the poem, he included “Miserrimus” in two collections of his own poetry.(28) Incidentally, a casual glance into Stoddard's early poems corroborates Poe's accusation of 1845, for they are often heavy with the freight of borrowed phrases and themes.(29) With regard to the value of the poem, Stoddard is strangely straightforward, for in his Recollections he wrote: “Within a day or two after the death of Edgar Allan, I penned a copy of careless verses which had more success than they deserved.” The incredible, petty spitefulness of the man is shown in his newly adding to the Grecian flute story his “consolation” that Poe's ancestors were ignoble by comparison with the eminent early Stoddards. Stoddard also asserts that Poe was constitutionally “unveracious,” but his statement that Griswold and Thomas Dunn English were extremely friendly to Poe makes one wonder about his own honesty.(30) He also alluded to the verses in an article in The Independent of February 1, 1894: “I scribbled some verses in his memory; and ... [Mrs. Osgood] was good enough to think some of it not unworthy of its theme. She died a few weeks later” (Harrison, 1.244). If true, was this a judgment upon a woman whom Poe had publicly and privately adulated?

I know of only one American comment on Stoddard's “Miserrimus” — that of the eccentric Oliver Leigh, or “Geoffrey Quarles,” in his little book Edgar Allan Poe. He scornfully quotes, “His faults were many / His virtues few.”(31) Eugene Lemoine Didier in The Poe Cult devotes a chapter to “Poe and Stoddard,” chiefly summarizing the Grecian flute story and indicating its monetary rewards to Stoddard. He makes no allusion to “Miserrimus.”(32) It is strange that few Americans took issue with the cleverly scattered canards of Stoddard, possibly because of his increasing power in the field of publishing. Even Sarah VVhitman, whose Edgar Poe and His Critics was expiation for her weakness toward the poet as suitor in [page 204:] Providence, 1848-1849, is deliberately silent about Stoddard's continuation of Griswold's contumelious role. In her work he figures only as one of the “Literati” in Mrs. Osgood's happy drawing room.(33) Even Harrison, usually ardent in Poe's defense, calls Stoddard “a keen admirer of Poe's genius, but an unsparing foe to what he considers ... Poe's moral delinquencies and mendacity” (Harrison, 1.241). It apparently required the physical as well as psychical distance afforded by England to see the role of Stoddard. Ingram, in his Life of Poe, cites a neat statement of the case from the Quarterly Review: “The last addition to the Poe biography is an ‘Original Memoir’ by R. H. Stoddard, a gentleman of New York, who denounces Griswold and then proceeds simply to surpass him in his own line; raking together such a mass of irrelevant gossip as we never read before.”(34) With this we shall leave Stoddard.

One final word is needed for the object of his pity. It is not necessary to emphasize the terrible melancholy of Poe's life, relieved by brief moments of pleasure amid his bevy of literary ladies or at childlike play with the cat and birds during Virginia's long decline. The title, if not the sentiment, “Most wretched of men” certainly applies to Edgar Allan Poe. Yet chance — certainly not justice — seemed determined to render his grave as unmarked arid unknown as that of Thomas Morris in 1748. After the small funeral party, consisting chiefly of Baltimore relatives, saw Poe's remains interred, his grave was marked only by a fragment of sandstone numbered “80” to designate the lot; this was placed by the kindly sexton George W. Spence.(35) Several years later Judge Neilson Poe ordered a proper stone for the grave, but this was utterly destroyed at the monument works by a railroad train which apparently jumped the track. The state of the grave was indicated in the October 7, 1865 resolution of the Public School Teachers’ Association: “The mortal remains of Edgar Allan Poe are interred in the cemetery of the Westminster Church without even so much as a stone to mark the spot.” Ten years later the efforts of their “committee of five” bore strange fruit in the ornate [page 205:] granite and marble monument built by “Col.” Hugh Sisson, whose establishment had never replaced the original gravestone. The stilted suggested inscriptions and the fulsome tributes given at the unveiling(36) make one feel that perhaps the most appropriate epitaph for Edgar Allan Poe would, after all, be a simple “Miserrimus.”