Text: Richard Beale Davis, “Biography and Biographer,” Chivers' Life of Poe , 1952, pp. 65-69

[page 65, continued:]

[Biography and Biographer: Fragments]

The following Letter written by Edgar A. Poe in 1848, to G. W. Eveleth, is proof positive to my mind that he did not have a spark of love for his wife. I know that we are [page 66:] in duty bound not to judge harshly of our erring brother; and this, God knows! I am as far from doing as any man that ever lived — but the evidence is too strong against him to be resisted. Here is the Letter:(126)°

— You ask me if I will not hint to you what was the “terrible evil” which caused the “irregularities so profoundly lamented.” Yes, I will do more than hint. This evil was the greatest that can befall man. Six years ago a wife, whom I loved as no man loved before, ruptured a blood-vessel in singing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially, and I again hoped. At the end of the year, the vessel broke again — I went through precisely the same scene. Again, in about a year afterward. Then again — again — again — and even once again, at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death — and at each accession of the disorder, I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive — nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank, God only knows how often and how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to drink, rather than drink to insanity. I had indeed nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure, when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can and do endure as becomes a man — it was the horrible never ending oscillation between hope and despair which I could not longer have endured without total loss of reason. In the death of what was life, I receive a new, but oh God! how melancholy an existence!

Now permit me to ask any candid man if it is in the bounds of possibility for him to believe that what is related in the above letter has any thing to do with drinking whiskey? Suppose a man's wife has ruptured a blood vessel in [page 67:] singing, has that any thing to do with his insanity? Why, if there is any thing in the world which ought to keep a man in his right senses, it is the consciousness within himself of the duties which he owes his wife in such a case. But it appears here that he went distracted in vascillating between his hopes for her life and his fears for her death! But who in the world believes a single word of it? Not a man living. But the one is no cause for the effects which we know to have taken place in the other — that is, the sickness in the wife had nothing at all to do with his drinking. He drank precisely because he loved liquor — that is all. The latter part of the letter proves what I say is so, for he was not cured by his wife's death — nor did it end the oscillation between Hope and despair or bestow on him so much as the shadow of a new existence — for he died drunk merely three years afterwards! What is anybody to make of all this?

The(127) following letter was sent to me for publication by °Mrs Mary Clemm, the mother-in-law of Mr Poe. It is from Mrs Elmira Shelton, the lady, in Richmond, to whom he was finally engaged to be married, and is, undoubtedly, one of the most beautiful, if not the very beautiful [l?] est letter that was ever written, by any woman living or dead — being all heart — all soul — the truest, most perfect revelation of her boundless love. The man who could have inspired such love as this in the heart of a woman of such superior talents, possessed qualities far above any thing for which the world has ever given him credit — proving, most positively, that he kept enshrined within his soul a tenderness akin to that of the Angels in Heaven.

There is no Art in this letter, but it is all nature — fortuituous [page 68:] intuition — as spontaneous in its unsophisticated purity, as the perfect love which inspired it — infinite love chastened(128) now by as infinite a grief. I have never yet been able to read it without shedding tears. The truth is, it is an Epistolary Elegy — a funeral Oration — a pathetic Requiem — and the triumphant victory of his affection over the female heart. A more beautiful Elegy was never written on the death of any man — a Eulogy which not only preaches the truest gospel of the qualities of its subject but makes immortal its author. It is the most perfect triumph of love over death — [making] the victory of the gr[ave] eternal loss.

Mr P. P. Cook, in an article which he published in the °Southern Literary Messenger, thus describes not only his appearance in Richmond, Virginia, but his departure from that City, for the last time.(129)

[A] large audience, we recollect, attended these lectures. Those who had not seen Edgar Poe since the days of his obscurity, came in crowds to behold their townsman then so famous. The treatment which he received thereafter seems to have pleased him much; — and he became anxious to make Richmond his permanent home. He joined the “Sons of Temperance,” and it was universally reported that he was soon to be married in the city. The lady was a widow, possessed of wealth and beauty, and was an old flame, whom he declared to be the ideal and original of his Lenore. When we last saw him, he was just starting for New York, to publish a new collection of tales.

Mr Poe was indisposed when he left Richmond — complained of chilliness and exhaustion. Still feeling badly when he reached Baltimore, he took a small quantity of spirits for relief. It was [page 69:] the first that had passed his lips for some months; but it was sufficient to rouse the passion which ruled him to his ruin. A day of wild debauchery brought on a fit of his old familiar, the delirium-tremens; and he was taken out of a gutter by the watchman next morning in a state of stupor. Having no home, no friends, and no money, they conveyed him to the common hospital; and in its wards died the author of the Raven and of Eureka.

“His good is to come. The grief is gone away, and the glory now begun.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 66:]

126 Two pieces of clippings follow.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 67:]

127 HEH, HM. 2531.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 68:]

128 Or “christened”?

129 Three pasted printed fragments follow. The whole section, including Chivers’ sentence, appears on the verso of the leaf on which the two preceding paragraphs appear on the recto.