Text: John R. Thompson, “Chapter VI: Poe's Character,” The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 1929, pp. 37-43 (This material may be protected by copyright)

[page 37:]

But little space remains for me to speak of the outward and material man, and here I have no word to utter but in kindness, though it is almost impossible to consider him apart from that melancholy propensity which tended to make his life miserable and render him an alien from the respect and confidence of the world. I cannot now, looking back over the years which have elapsed since his death, call up the image of Poe as I knew him, without seeing him, as I once did, in a barroom, endeavoring to give a maudlin explanation of “Eureka” to a circle of ruffianly fellows who had never heard of the Newtonian system or the law of gravitation, though they had often illustrated it by gravitating to the gutter.(1)

Says Dr. Maudsley, who has recently written an [page 38:] admirable criticism on Poe's weakness, treating it as insanity:

The fanciful, speculative and abtruse reasoning of “Eureka,” hiccupped in the language of the philosophers, produced an effect similar to what we might imagine would result from a drunken reading of Dr. Johnson's sonorous introduction to his great work — in such a sentence as this:

It has always seemed to me that the case of Poe called for the exercise of a larger and more liberal charity than is ordinarily extended to the infirmities of genius. For while he moved about on this planet, struggled, suffered, aspired here, owned an American citizenship and was set down in the New York Directory as “Poe, Edgar A., editor, house Fordham,” he was at the same time an inhabitant of that shadowy realm of ideas in which the scene of his stories was laid and where the music of his verses was borne on the wind. And it was the dreamy abstraction of his character, the indifference he ever manifested for the substantial objects that surround us, [page 40:] which involved him in such a multiplicity of vexations and troubles.

There was a total incompatibility between his ideal and his bodily existence. I doubt if at any time he could have told who was Secretary of State, and he cared so little for politics that he would not go across the street to register his vote. I could never learn that he ever professed any political sentiments at all until he became an office-seeker under John Tyler and began to discern a great deal of excellence in Mr. Robert Tyler's poems. Had he lived to witness the commotion of the recent war, I fancy that as a Virginian by adoption he would have taken the side of the South, but rather from feeling than from any conviction of the justice of the cause he espoused. Few men had travelled more than Poe. He is said to have visited Greece in early manhood, the soil of all others most calculated to appeal to the sensibilities of a poet; that thence he journeyed to St. Petersburg, long before the splendid metropolis of the Czar was in the ordinary route of the foreign tourist. He dwelt some time in England, and there formed the acquaintance of many noted literary men, but so little impression was made upon him by these ramblings or by the personages with whom he was brought in contact, that it does not appear from his writings that he had ever left his native land. He had extraordinary genius, but he lacked sympathy; he was not selfish, but he did not enter warmly into the affairs of others who were ready to befriend him; he was capable of generous and chivalrous actions, but a wayward impulse made him neglectful of the inexorable duties of life. [page 41:]

In personal appearance he was singularly interesting. His bearing was erect and somewhat military, and bore the stamp of West Point; his face was pale and intellectual, and though prematurely furrowed gave no token of any habits of intoxication, and a certain sadness sat always on his brow, which was the grandest brow that ever was seen, a great dome larger than that majestic headpiece of Daniel Webster rising above the palace of the soul.

There was something pathetic in the last effort he made to retrieve the errors of his short and brilliant but unhappy career. After years of toil and excitement in New York, weary of literary antagonisms and worn down in bodily health, he came to Virginia to commence, as he said to me, “a new course in the city associated with the tenderest recollections of my childhood, with my early love, and with my first triumphs in authorship.”

I love to think of him as he appeared during the two months which immediately preceded his death, a quiet, easy, seemingly contented and well-bred gentleman, conversing for hours with an opulence of language and of thought that was his alone, projecting new enterprises in literature, and now and then reading aloud some favorite verses of Tennyson and of Longfellow with an inflection and an emphasis that made the exercise as delightful as a sonata of Mozart. I mention Longfellow because I have heard Poe more than once recite the poem commencing: “The day is done, and the darkness,”(1) with something of enthusiasm, a fact which is enough to show [page 42:] that with all his faults, envy, that most despicable trait of the literary pretender, was no part of his nature. Surely no one who saw him at that time can recur to the article of the “Edinburgh” without a feeling of indignation.

The manner of his death was as painful as it was extraordinary. On his way through Baltimore to fulfil a literary engagement with a Northern publisher he either, as some say, gave way to his besetting sin, or he was drugged. Adrift upon the streets of that large city, on the eve of an exciting municipal election, he was seized by the lawless agents of a political club, imprisoned in a cellar for the night, and taken out the next day in a state bordering on frenzy and made to vote in eleven different wards, as if in a half-pitiable, half-ludicrous, compensation for never having exercised the right of suffrage before. Cast off at the close of the polls by his vulgar and brutal tyrants of a day, he was humanely taken by strangers to the hospital, and there, in the city where his father was born, in the fortieth year of his age, he chanced miserably to die. Thus ends the drama of the life of the actress's son.

Baltimore was the only spot in America where his remains could have mingled with kindred dust.(1) In the little, narrow burial ground on Fayette Street where stands the Westminster Church, he lies by the side of his grandfather and grandmother [and wife, Virginia, and faithful “muddy,” Mrs. Maria Clemm, the mother of his Virginia.] A stone, raised by the hand of a relative, [page 43:] is to mark the place of his interment. It is to say little, but to bear his name, and that were enough.

And hundreds of years hence, when that beautiful and enlightened city of Baltimore shall have risen to the rank of London and Paris, the American visitor, and the wanderer from foreign climes, shall make a pilgrimage through avenues gleaming with marble, and by the stately walls of universities and libraries, to the six feet of earth that is made eloquent by the dust of Edgar A. Poe.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 37:]

1 Thompson's impression was gained under haste and excitement. It has been well demonstrated since by those present that the barroom, “The Alhambra,” was a favorite resort of Richmond's Bohemians, some of whom were editors and men of uncommon intellect.

In a letter to P. P. Cooke, dated Richmond, 17 October, 1848, Thompson wrote: “Poe is not in Richmond. He remained here about three weeks, horribly drunk, and discoursing ‘Eureka’ every night to the audiences of the barrooms. His friends tried to get him sober and set him to work, but to no effect, and were compelled at last to reship him! to New York. I was very anxious for him to write something for me while he remained here, but his ‘lucid intervals’ were so brief and infrequent that it was quite impossible. ‘The Rationale of Verse,’ I took, more as an act of charity than anything else, for, though exhibiting great acquaintance with the subject, it is altogether too bizarre and too technical for the general reader. Poe is a singular fellow indeed.” In this same letter Thompson acknowledges his inability to pay Cooke for contributions to the Messenger. In later letters it is also shown that Cooke had to take review books from Thompson to square his account. Thompson's reference to taking Poe's contribution “as an act of charity” meant that he was given an I. O. U. Poe, in a later undated letter to “Annie” wrote, “The S. L. Messenger, which owes me a good deal, cannot pay.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 38, running to the bottom of page 39:]

1 Poe himself stated, in 1846, in reply to a libel by Thomas Dunn English, for which Poe recovered damages in a lawsuit:

At another time, in 1848, in a letter to George W. Eveleth, Poe said, in explaining the above quotation:

And also:

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 41:]

1 Longfellow's Proem to “Waif” is also quoted at length by Poe in “The Poetic Principle.”

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 42:]

1 Thompson did not know that Poe's “actress-mother” was buried in historic St. John's Cemetery, in Richmond. A large monument now marks the spot.