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166. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 307
Dec. 31, 1876
My dear friend,
Yours of December 12 received. Thanks for the information about “Landor's Cottage,” so long sought for in vain! How many, many things [page 464:] of interest to me & to all the friends of our poet your researches have brought to light.
Gill's book is not yet out; as soon as it appears you shall receive a copy. The Household Edition of the poems, accompanied by Didier's “Memoir,” anticipates him & adds a very interesting chapter to the story of Poe's early life, for the rest of the story is briefly outlined as we already know it.(1) I fancy Gill is waiting to incorporate whatever new matter he can find in it in his own omnium gatherum. Widdleton has send me a copy of the Household Edition of the poems for the New Year. I will send it with Gill's, as soon as that is issued, which will probably be within a few days.
The portraits you send — copies of your Coleman & Remington photo — though superficially well executed, seem to me utterly divested of all characteristic expression. The eyes are vacant & wandering, the mouth nerveless, & the whole bearing & attitude of the figure stiff & conventional. How different from the engraving in your volume! I do not think anyone who had ever seen Poe would recognize this copy as even a “counterfeit presentment.” I would not pain the artist by having this opinion made public. So, let it be strictly entre nous.
Have you seen the photo in the Baltimore Memorial volume? That would be recognized at once, but so changed in expression that I would much prefer the likeness had been omitted with all that gave to it its characteristic impress of pride & nobility. A profane collegian, a great admirer of Poe's genius, wittily says, “It looks like a cross between a stage villain & a retired clergyman whose sands of life had nearly run out,” as the quack doctors say. What do you think?
The engraving from the new Household Edition is from the portrait by Osgood (Fanny's husband) in the rooms of the Historical Society of New York. It is the best from that portrait, but has something of the rigid & formal character of the painting.
Two facts which I had heard before but which I had assumed to be apocryphal are in Didier's “Memoir,” told as authentic: one, the impressive and tragic deaths of Poe's parents in the doomed theatre at Richmond; and the other the fact that Mrs. Poe, Edgar's mother, was a wife before the young law student saw and loved her!(2) Stoddard, in his letters to me, made a great point of the fact that Poe's mother was not (as Mrs. Clemm said in one of the letters I entrusted to you & quoted by me in Poe & His Critics) “herself but a child,” but was at least 6 or 7 years older than her husband. He accented the fact, apparently to show Mrs. Clemm's unreliability as an authority.
By the way, be very careful of those letters of Mrs. Clemm's, with my marginal comments appended. Do not let them pass into other hands, & someday when you are quite at leisure, copy for me the [page 465:] phrase, the lines in which she says, “You will never know how he loved you nor his agony at parting with you.” Only this & nothing more — with the date of the letter & signature.
I find that in the new “Memoir” a very prominent place is given to my letter. To my surprise, it was printed as an “Introductory Letter.” When I wrote it I did not know that Poe's parents perished in the doomed theatre at Richmond! If I had known it I could have made my allusion to Maudsley's article still more impressive.(3)
I will send you a copy of the volume if you have not already received one. Of course I gave Didier no personal details. Such as he has published were gathered from your “Memoir” & Gill's papers. Gill's book is not yet out. I fancy he is waiting to make use of such new material as he can find in Didier's narrative. But I have told you this already.
The Baltimoreans seem greatly pleased with your “Memoir,” as prepared for their Memorial volume.
But my dear MacRaven you have not yet toned down that “fierce flame” against which I so long ago remonstrated.(4)
Why not say, “unconscious of the interest she had aroused,” or “the profound impression she had left,” or, if you will permit me to arrange the story of the incident, I think I could relate it more accurately than Griswold has done, & in a manner not less interesting, & you could introduce it, if you think proper, in your completed Life! What say you? You see, Poe's wife was still living at the time, & it is not permitted under the circumstances to cherish “a fierce flame” for another lady, in “sober prose,” you know, though it may be when the memory has crystallized into poetry in after years. But there is nothing of earthly passion in the poem he sent me — is there?
I like & heartily approve the other alterations in relation to the introduction of my name, but this is one which I have looked for in vain. I know you will not overlook it now that I have reminded you of your promise.
Mallarmé has sent copies of La République des Lettres. He will send the Corbeau by Mrs. Moulton or my friend Walter Brown. He is indeed, as you say, “a noble fellow.” He says beautiful things of you, & has, I know, a most sweet & generous nature. I have just sent him some unbound sheets of my defense of Poe. He says Rose & her sister gave him a most cordial reception. She has not written to me since she saw him.
I should have sent my letter by the last mail, but I have been “under the weather,” which has been terrific!
Ever & ever your friend,
S. H. Whitman
Did I send you a copy of my article on Lathrop's “Study of Hawthorne”? [page 466:]
1. The Life and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Additional Poems, a New Memoir by E. L. Didier. (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1877).
2. Elizabeth Arnold had been married in 1802 to Charles Hopkins, also an actor. Hopkins died on Oct. 26, 1805, and his widow's marriage to David Poe, Jr., took place sometime between Mar. 14 and Apr. g, 1806. See Quinn, pp. 23-24.
3. Henry Maudsley asserted in his article “Edgar Allan Poe,” American Journal of Insanity, Oct., 1860, pp. 152-98, that Edgar had inherited infirmities of mind from his father, David Poe, and was “destitute of that faculty of reasonable insight, by which a man sees in human life something more than what is weak, sinful, and contemptible.”
4. Ingram had written in his first “Memoir” of Poe that prefaced his 1874-75 edition of Poe's Works:
“In the early summer of 1848 we find Poe delivering a lecture at Lowell, on the ‘Female Poets of America.’ ‘In an analysis of the comparative merits of the New England poetesses,’ says the Hon. James Atkinson, who attended the lecture, ‘the lecturer awarded to Mrs. Osgood the palm of facility, ingenuity, and grace; — to Mrs. Whitman, a pre-eminence in refinement of art, enthusiasm, imagination, and genius, properly so called;-to Miss Lynch he ascribed an unequalled success in the concentrated and forcible enunciation of the sentiment of heroism and duty.’ Mrs. Whitman, undoubtedly the finest female poet New England has produced, had been first seen by Poe, says Griswold, ‘on his way from Boston, when he visited that city to deliver a poem before the Lyceum there. Restless, near midnight, he wandered from his hotel near where she lived, until he saw her walking in a garden. He related the incident afterwards in one of his most exquisite poems, worthy of himself, of her, and of the most exalted passion.’
“Meanwhile the beautiful young widow lived on perfectly unconscious of the fierce flame she had aroused in the poet's heart” (I, ixxiii — ixxiv).
This passage was repeated in the long sketch of Poe's life, “Edgar Allan Poe,” that Ingram contributed to the International Review, 2 (Mar. 1875), 169, published in New York, and in the memorial volume, published in Baltimore, after the unveiling of the monument to Poe's memory on Nov. 17, 1875.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - PHR, 1979] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Poe's Helen Remembers (J. C. Miller) (Entry 166)