by Paul Collins
4
The Shakespeare of America
IT IS NOT OFTEN that we can imagine ourselves in the place of Edgar Allan Poe, but there is one day we can conjure rather well: that of April 7, 1844. It was a sleepy morning in Greenwich Village, with the latest papers reporting “Nothing of the slightest consequence in the legislative proceedings yesterday”; the only excitement to be found was from the P. T. Barnum’s American Museum & Perpetual Fair a few blocks over, which advertised “MR. AND MRS. RANDALL, the largest GIANT! AND GIANTESS!! in the world.”
Poe was contentedly recovering from a hearty boarding-house breakfast—“excellent-flavored coffee, hot & strong—not very clear & no great deal of cream—veal cutlets, elegant ham & eggs & nice bread and butter”—as his wife, Virginia, mended his pants from where he’d caught them on a nail. With some time to kill, he wrote a letter to his aunt Maria about the wondrous metropolis; the letter is perhaps the chattiest and warmest he ever wrote. It is a glimpse of the man, rather than the icon.
“When we got to the wharf, it was raining hard,” he wrote of their arrival in Manhattan. “I left her on board the boat, after putting the trunks in the Ladies’ cabin, and set off to buy an umbrella and look for a boarding house. I met a man selling umbrellas, and bought one for 62 cents. Then I went up Greenwich St. and soon found a boarding house. . . . The house is old & looks buggy—the landlady is a nice chatty old soul. . . . Her husband is living with her—a fat, good-natured old soul.”
He hadn’t forgotten the cat, Catterina, they’d left back home—“I wish Kate could see it—she would faint”—and marveled at the cheap rent (“cheapest board I ever knew, taking into consideration the central situation”) and mountainous servings of cake provided by the landlady (“no fear of starving here”). It was a promising start for an ambitious writer’s great move to New York City, and he cheerily assured his aunt Maria that until they could afford to pay for her to move up to Manhattan and join them, he and Virginia would keep well.
“I feel in excellent spirits, & haven’t had a drop to drink,” he added.
With Virginia’s tuberculosis at bay for the moment (“she has coughed hardly any and had no night sweat”), they set about finding more permanent digs, settling on rooms in a farmhouse near 84th Street and Broadway—an inexpensive rural location, one so remote that two hundred acres of pasture surrounded it. Strolling through the future midtown and uptown of Manhattan, and boyishly paddling a skiff out onto the Hudson River, Poe saw that it would not remain rustic for long.
“I could not look on the magnificent cliffs, and stately trees, which at every moment met my view, without a sigh for their inevitable doom—inevitable and swift,” he predicted. “In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves.”
In fact, the Hudson River had already turned busy with treasure hunters. In the wake of the immense popularity of “The Gold-Bug,” a salvage crew announced the discovery of Captain Kidd’s wreck in thirty feet of water at the bottom of the Hudson. “A spacious diving bell has been procured, suits of sub-marine armor provided for the workmen, and apparatus for digging, scraping, &c., has likewise been prepared,” announced one New York newspaper. Some half a million dollars in stock was issued to salvage investors, and though Poe was well aware of the venture, he was too poor to buy a stake in it himself. That was just as well, as the company was run by swindlers; they planted artifacts in the river, “found” them, and ran off with a small fortune from gullible New Yorkers.
Poe, though, already had his own hoax in the works.
“ASTOUNDING NEWS! By Express, via Norfolk! THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS! SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF MR. MONCK MASON’S FLYING MACHINE!!!” roared the front page of the Sun on April 13, 1844. By their account, eight Englishmen—including well-known aeronaut Monck Mason and popular author Harrison Ainsworth—had crossed the ocean in an immense airship dubbed The Victoria. “The Great Problem is at length solved!” exulted the paper in its lengthy cover story. “The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind.”
New Yorkers were stunned, but the feat had been a long time in coming. There were claims in New York newspapers as early as 1800 that “A whole fleet of balloons is soon to proceed to America” from France. By 1835, Manhattanites were informed that a balloonist planned to pilot an “Aerial Ship” from downtown Manhattan across the ocean, and in recent months the Pennsylvania balloonist John Wise had announced yet another attempt. Still, news of a successful flight—“unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking, ever accomplished or even attempted by man”—excited enough New Yorkers that, at least by Poe’s account, “the whole square surrounding the ‘Sun’ building was literally besieged. . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper.”
It was, of course, a complete humbug.
New Yorkers did not stay duped for long: though Poe’s name appears nowhere in the story, having The Victoria land at Sullivan’s Island was a tip-off, as he’d used the same setting for “The Gold-Bug.” But coming just a week after his arrival in the city, the hoax was a fine calling card, even if Poe was slightly irritated to still find himself a footnote to Richard Locke Adams’s “Moon Hoax” years earlier in the same paper. “The success of the hoax is usually attributed to its correctness,” he pointed out afterwards. “The ‘Balloon-Story,’ which had no error, and which related nothing that might not really have happened, was discredited on account of the frequent previous deceptions, of similar character, perpetrated by the Sun.”
It was newspapers and magazines, though, where Poe would have to earn his living in New York. For despite his hopes that Charles Dickens would find him a London publisher, none was forthcoming—and nor would there ever be, as they were free to simply pirate American work.
“The want of an International Copy-right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of Magazines and Reviews,” Poe complained in an editorial. Poe certainly had himself in mind; in the autumn of 1844 he’d landed work at the New York Mirror, editing copy and writing unsigned items. “It was rather a step downward” from editing Graham’s, his boss Nathaniel Parker Willis admitted later, but it was the best job they could offer.
Penning pieces with titles like “Try a Mineralized Pavement” was hardly what Poe had foreseen when he moved, though he could take a certain droll amusement in hackwork. Stopping by a tobacco shop one evening, he found employee Gabriel Harrison struggling to pen a campaign song for the local Democratic party, and offered his assistance. “While I was waiting upon a customer,” Harrison recalled later, “he had composed a song to the measure and time of the ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ” The hastily penned lyrics (“See the White Eagle soaring aloft to the sky / Wakening the broad welkin with his loud battle cry . . .”) suited Harrison fine, though the erstwhile songwriter demurred any payment but “a pound of my best coffee.” When the grateful Harrison asked the lyricist for his name, he smiled faintly.
“Thaddeus Perley, at your service,” he replied.
It was not until later that Harrison was introduced to the same gentleman under a different name—and by then, there would be few indeed who could not recite a few lines by Edgar Allan Poe.
There was more than mere whimsy to Poe’s songwriting; as the child of a theatrical family, music remained one of his most powerful and inchoately recalled loves. “I am profoundly excited by music, and some poems,” he wrote that year to James Lowell. “Music is the perfection of the soul, or idea, of Poetry. The vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at.”
Although his hackwork and fiction paid better, Poe’s first love remained poetry.
The Romantic bards of his youth—Keats, Byron, Moore, and Coleridge—all possessed a “vagueness of exaltation” exemplified in the latter’s dreamlike “Kubla Khan,” and a musicality so pronounced that in Moore’s case he was initially famed as a balladeer. (Tellingly, Poe was unmoved by the more prosaic Wordsworth.) As a critic, Poe’s most extravagant praise went to poets, particularly Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett. Drawing upon the meter of the future Mrs. Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” Poe hit upon the opening lines of his most famous work, “The Raven”:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“ ’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
One question too rarely asked of poems is why they are poems at all; after all, if one were to remove the line breaks and rhymes from the above lines, it would remain unmistakably a work by Poe. Midnight, dreariness, the strategically unnamed old tome, the liminal state of just dropping off to sleep, the denial of a supernatural visitation: we might as easily speak of Ligeia or Roderick Usher. And as it unfolds, the raven driving the grieving narrator mad with refrains of “Nevermore” serves as the same compulsive, self-destructive agent as heartbeats or black cats do for Poe’s other increasingly frantic narrators.
But by rendering it as a poem, Poe’s favored arc of visitation, denial, and destruction is laid bare in the space of a single newspaper column; both thematically and visually, it has what Poe would later call a “unity of effect.” Even a child can spot and then anticipate the cumulative pattern of “The Raven,” a powerful repetition inexorably heightening into wild despair; when combined with the easily memorized meter, and a stylized tragic loss without any of the visceral horrors of Poe’s fictions, it is a poem that any child or adult could read.
Poe knew he had achieved something rare in “The Raven.” Unusually for him, he sent a draft to the British poet Richard Horne—whose epic poem “Orion” Poe greatly respected—to ask him his opinion of the work, and to forward it to Elizabeth Barrett. Perhaps Poe already knew what their reaction would be. His friend William Ross Wallace—who himself achieved fame with “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”—also recalled Poe reading him the still-unpublished lines, to which Wallace replied that they were “fine, uncommonly fine.”
“Fine?” Poe scoffed. “Is that all you can say for this poem? I tell you it’s the greatest poem ever written.”
New York could not have been better prepared for its arrival. “The Purloined Letter” had finally run in The Gift, where it attracted some warm notice; and a few weeks later, a new issue of Graham’s featured a generous profile of Poe by James Russell Lowell, along with an engraved portrait of the author looking oddly placid—hopeful, even. When “The Raven” first appeared in print in the January 29, 1845, issue of the New York Evening Mirror, it was the culmination of all that Poe had moved to Manhattan for: a recognition of his genius.
“We are permitted to copy (in advance of publication) from the 2d number of the American Review, the following remarkable poem by EDGAR POE,” the newspaper’s notice by editor N. P. Willis began. “In our opinion, it is the most effective single example of ‘fugitive poetry’ ever published in this country. . . . It will stick in the memory of everybody who reads it.”
Willis was right—more than he or Poe or anyone else could have imagined. “The Raven” sprouted in newspapers across the nation; one fellow poet in New York marveled how “Soon ‘The Raven’ became known everywhere, and everyone was saying ‘Nevermore.’ ” Perhaps the clearest sign of its currency was parodies appeared ranging from “The Owl” (“But the owl he looked so lonely, saying that word and that only / That a thimble-ful of whiskey I did speedily outpour”), to “The Veto” (“Once upon an evening dreary, the Council pondered weak and weary / Over many a long petition which was voted down a bore”), to a spoof that Abraham Lincoln laughed over titled “The Polecat.” Newspaper advertisements promptly took up the idea, and before the season was out an elocution book included the poem among its exercises. “The Raven” was literally a textbook example of American poetry, an honor it has held ever since.
The poem eclipsed even “The Gold-Bug” in popularity—“the bird beat the bug,” Poe mused that spring. But for all its success, it was but a poem: something that always netted less money than fiction, and which brought in nothing at all when pirated. “The Raven” earned Poe even less money than “The Gold-Bug”—just nine dollars, in fact. Yet its fame brought opportunity, for three weeks after “The Raven” appeared, the Broadway Journal announced that Poe was joining its masthead as an equal partner. Poe was to furnish one multicolumn page a week to the paper—a perfect bully pulpit.
The critic’s pen invariably brought out Poe’s worst impulses, most notably a baffling vendetta against the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe had written solicitously to him in the past to seek poems for Penn and Graham’s. But now—first anonymously, and then under his byline—he let fly at a poet who he considered unmusical and “infected with a moral taint,” cardinal sins in Poe’s view of poetry. And he had a worse accusation: that Longfellow’s “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” was plagiarized from Tennyson.
“[It] belongs to the most barbarous class of literary piracy,” Poe insisted, “that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore his least defensible and least reclaimable property, is appropriated.”
The charge was ludicrous, particularly coming from the sticky-fingered Poe, and Longfellow wisely chose not to respond. But a reader took up Longfellow’s defense under the pen name “Outis,” and Poe responded at endless length throughout his March 1845 columns. In fact, Outis may well have been Poe himself, and their “argument” a grandstanding monologue. Publisher Charles Briggs privately admitted that “Poe is a monomaniac on the subject of plagiarism,” and later added, “Poe’s Longfellow war, which, by the way, is all on one side, has annoyed a good deal.”
A calculated attack on a respected writer is an old ploy; it quickly yields a splendid borrowed heat and leaves a cold ash of ill will. But for the moment, Poe was hot—and capitalizing upon that meant lecturing. It began well enough; three hundred showed up to hear Poe declaim upon “Poets and Poetry of America,” where he dissected the leading poets in Rufus Griswold’s recent anthology of the same name, and he inevitably admired and damned Longfellow in equal measure. But when a second lecture scheduled for April 17 fell apart, Poe was caught off-balance.
“It stormed incessantly, with mingled rain and hail and sleet,” recalled an office boy from the Broadway Journal. “In consequence there were scarcely a dozen persons there, when Poe came upon the platform [to cancel the lecture]. . . . The next morning he came to the office, leaning on the arm of a friend, intoxicated with wine.”
It should have been merely a disappointing evening for Poe; instead, it was about to become a disaster.
It is a mark of how serious Poe had been in the literary ambitions of his move to New York that, until that evening, he had stayed sober for over a year, sticking instead to his much happier love of strong coffee. It had served his art well, not least by allowing him to keep a steady day job; in his editorial work he had been, as Mirror editor Nathaniel Parker Willis commented, “punctual and industriously reliable.”
But now Poe fell back into drinking, and he fell hard. A week after his canceled lecture, a local paper archly announced publication of “A treatise on ‘Aqua Pura,’ its uses and abuses, by Edgar Allan Poe”; a month later, James Lowell finally met Poe in person, only to find him “tipsy . . . & with that over-solemnity with which men in such cases try to convince you of their sobriety.” Even that pretense couldn’t hold up; Poe canceled a Ju
ly 1st NYU lecture on account of his being “dreadfully unwell,” though his mentor and fellow poet Thomas Chivers found him staggering outside a Nassau Street bar, monumentally drunk and “tottering from side to side,” while a bar patron yelled out that he was “the Shakespeare of America.”
Poe’s literary reputation had indeed never been better. That week brought the release of Tales, his first new book since 1839. Selected by publisher Evert Duyckinck, it included all of Poe’s detective stories—presented in succession, they take nearly half its pages—plus every major Poe story except for “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Ligeia.” But almost as important was its title page: “WILEY & PUTNAM’S LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BOOKS. NO II.” Designed by Duyckinck to outclass cheap pirated British books, the series would place Poe alongside later entries by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and a promising newcomer named Herman Melville—a mark of both Duyckinck’s extraordinarily good taste, and of just how far “The Gold-Bug” and “The Raven” raised the profile of the rest of Poe’s work.
It was also a vindication of Poe’s move to New York. He lived scarcely a block from Wiley & Putnam’s office on Broadway; even when he moved downtown to Amity Lane later that summer, he was only a block from both Margaret Fuller and bookseller John Bartlett. The bookshop’s location was fortuitous, as Bartlett invited Poe to author salons—and knew the writing life well enough to pile the table with bread, butter, and coffee. Along with Poe, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving were frequent and even daily customers in his shop, as were poets William Cullen Bryant and William Gilmore Simms.
With the publication of Tales, they truly welcomed Poe as one of their own. Fuller praised Tales on the front page of the New York Tribune, and Simms wondered aloud whether Poe was “too original, perhaps, to be a highly successful writer. The people are not prepared for him yet.”