by Paul Collins
Dear Madam—
Being engaged in making a collection of autographs of the most distinguished American authors, I am, of course, anxious to procure your own, and if you would so far honor me as to reply, however briefly, to this note, I would take it as a very especial favor.
Resy Yr mo. ob. st,
Edward S. T. Grey
A few weeks later, he contrived to meet her while in town, and in seeking to charm her met with an almost wildly improbable stroke of luck. Visiting the Athenaeum library, she idly asked him about an unsigned poem she’d admired in the American Review a year earlier. Had he seen it too? It was called . . . “Ulalume.”
“To my infinite surprise,” she recalled, “he told me that he himself was the author. Turning to a bound volume of the Review which was in the alcove where we were sitting, he wrote his name at the bottom.”
This was a sign, surely: and one day later, as they strolled through a local cemetery, Poe asked for her hand in marriage.
It was not quite a perfect match. Whitman’s friends included a number of writers whom Poe disliked, and she lived with a fiercely protective mother. Undeterred, Poe tried to overwhelm Helen’s doubts with torrential love letters—“Were I not poor—had not my late errors and reckless excesses justly lowered me in the esteem of the good—were I wealthy, or could I offer you worldly honors—ah then—then—how proud I would be to persevere—to sue—to plead—to kneel—to pray—to beseech you for your love—in the deepest humility—at your feet . . .”
Yet Poe still nursed affections for several other women, all with the miserable knowledge that none of them were Virginia. His despair over these lonely courtships was enough that he had simply tried to end it all in Boston. But the widower’s pleas to Helen Whitman did not go unheard; at the end of November, she said yes, and they planned a Christmastime marriage. Now it was their friends and her mother who turned dubious. “She has seemed to me a good girl, and—you know what Poe is,” editor Horace Greely fretted to his colleague Rufus Griswold. “Has Mrs. Whitman no friend within your knowledge that can faithfully explain Poe to her?”
The widow did not have to wait long to find out for herself. Three days before the wedding, Poe’s prospective mother-in-law demanded that Poe cut himself out of the Whitman family finances, and promise to stop drinking. He duly agreed, and steeled himself to the task the next morning with some wine at the hotel bar. Within hours the wedding was off—forever.
Poe instead ushered in 1849 half-relieved to not be married, half-dismayed to be unmarried, and altogether worried about his career. Toiling over Eureka and futile love letters had come at the expense of paid work; he’d earned $166 in the previous year, barely enough to cover his rent, let alone anything else. “I am about to bestir myself in the world of Letters rather more busily than I have done for three or four years past,” he promised an editor.
The unlikely vehicle for this comeback was the Flag of the Union, an illustrated Boston weekly relaunching as “a paper for the million.” Its wide circulation was not matched by critical regard. “Why do you write for that cheap-literature broad sheet?” one of Poe’s friends asked bluntly—“Does the publisher pay you well?” In fact, they did, and contemporaries like Frances Osgood and Lydia Sigourney also wrote for the Flag. But as Poe admitted, their fine literary sensibilities were lost on the venue: “whatever I send it I feel I am consigning to the tomb of the Capulets.”
Still, the Flag’s need to fill columns coaxed Poe into his most productive period since the collapse of the Broadway Journal; between February and June of 1849, he published as many new pieces of fiction as in the previous four years combined. “Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man,” he now declared amid reports of the Gold Rush. “Nor would I abandon all the hopes which lead me on for all the gold in California.”
Amid a number of trifles that he sent to the Flag of the Union, his revenge tale “Hop-Frog” showed Poe in fine form. Set in the indistinct time and place favored by his gothic fiction, it continues the theme of alcohol-fueled rage and cold-blooded murder from “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” this time through the horrifying vengeance upon a king and his councilors by a court dwarf. Maddened by forced draughts of wine, he traps his tormentors into donning flammable costumes made of tar and flax, and exults over their “fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass” as he escapes through a skylight: “I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and this is my last jest.”
It was very nearly Poe’s as well: after the Flag of the Union quietly sent letters to contributors announcing that it could no longer pay for articles, the false spring of Poe’s output was over. He turned back to his fondest mirage: his own magazine, so that he might not be tormented by these unreliable editors. His hopes were unexpectedly stoked by a timely letter from a young prospective investor, one Edward Horton Norton Patterson. There was just one catch: Patterson wanted to headquarter this new national literary powerhouse in his unprepossessing hometown of Oquawka, Illinois . . . and instead of The Stylus, he wanted the title to be the Oquawka Spectator.
“Some serious difficulties present themselves . . .” Poe suggested tactfully. “Your residence at Oquawka is certainly one of the most serious.” But Patterson was the most solid backer he’d seen in years, and Poe set off to tour the East Coast to gather subscriptions, despite his aunt Maria fretting over his health.
“Do not fear for Eddie!” he called to her as he left.
Days later, in the Philadelphia engraving room of magazine editor John Sartain, Poe burst in, looking wild and begging to be hidden. “It would be difficult for you to believe what I have to tell—that such things could be in the nineteenth century,” he babbled. “It is necessary that I remain concealed for a time. Can I stay here with you?” He’d been riding on a train, Poe explained, and heard men several seats back plotting to kill him.
“If this moustache of mine were removed I should not be so readily recognized,” he proposed. “Will you lend me a razor, that I may shave it off?”
Sartain played along, and finally coaxed the shorn author to stroll the streets and sit by the reservoir. Slowly a different story emerged. Poe had been in the local Moyamensing prison, where he’d seen a boiling cauldron and witnessed his aunt Maria having her legs sawn off—first “her feet, then her legs at the knee, her thighs at the hips, and so destroy her piecemeal, all to torture me.” Poe calmly related these hallucinations as facts. He also claimed he’d been jailed for a counterfeit fifty-dollar note. But the prison stay, Sartain suspected, was for drunkenness. It had only been a few hours, for he was recognized in the courtroom—“Why, this is Poe the poet,” they said—and then let go.
The hallucinations may have been delirium tremens—for at forty, Poe’s body was finally beginning to rebel. When he turned up a week later at the door of his fellow gothic novelist George Lippard, he was in even worse shape—wandering penniless through a local cholera epidemic, starving and wearing only one shoe. Poe collapsed into a corner of Lippard’s office, his head in his hands.
“It is no use to reason with me now; I must die,” he wrote back home in a despairing letter to his aunt Maria. “I have no reason to live since I have done Eureka.”
Lippard did his best to console him—feeding and clothing him, getting fellow writers to pitch in train fare to continue his journey. But when he helped Poe board the southbound night train, Lippard sensed something different in his old friend. “He held our hand for a long time, and seemed loth to leave us,” he recalled, “—there was in his voice, look and manner, something of a Presentiment that his strange and stormy life was near its close.”
The trip back to his childhood home of Richmond began wretchedly: he was heading into a Southern summer still dressed in the miserable black clothing that he’d worn in jail. “My clothes are so horrible, and I am so ill,” he wrote to his aunt Maria as he neared Richmond. Worse still, his poetry lectures, with which he
’d hoped to raise money while on the road, had disappeared from his valise in Philadelphia: “All the object of my trip here is over unless I can recover them or rewrite one of them,” he lamented.
But his arrival in Richmond, with just two dollars left in his pocket, was followed by a desperately needed reprieve: a fifty-dollar check from his Oquawkan benefactor. Poe cleaned up, bought himself a jaunty summer hat, and went looking for his college girlfriend. Not only was Elmira Royster still in Richmond, she had been widowed with an estate of some $100,000. She was busying herself for church one Sunday morning when, she recalled, “a servant told me that a gentleman in the parlour wanted to see me.” She went downstairs and recognized him instantly.
“Oh! Elmira, is this you?” he called out.
She would not be kept from going to church, but when he came back again later, his mind was already made up: he thought they should get married. “I laughed at it . . .” she admitted. “Then I found he was serious and I became serious.”
He became serious enough to tell a doctor that he’d stop drinking; serious enough to rewrite his lecture on “The Poetic Principle” and announce it for a local concert venue. Poe lectured a packed house; topped off with a crowd-pleasing recitation of “The Raven,” it was a sort of calling card to Richmond society. Their poet had come back home, and for his encore, he delivered a stunning surprise: on August 27, 1849, he joined the local chapter of the Sons of Temperance. Poe had become a very serious suitor indeed. When he delivered a second lecture to Richmond the next month, Mrs. Royster could be seen sitting together in the front row, watching his performance of “The Raven” and his recitations from memory of Byron, Tennyson, and—yes, even Longfellow.
September was improbably happy for Poe—the best weeks of his life, he said, though of the bittersweet sort that suited him best. He was literally trailed by his past; his little sister, Rosalie Poe, still in Richmond after being raised by a different family, now so devotedly followed him around that he took to sending her out on errands. He visited old childhood friends, surprising them with his sobriety; rambling with them through the ruins of a neighborhood home from his youth, Poe sat down on the moss-covered remains of an old bench.
“There used to be white violets here,” he muttered, and then walked inside the wrecked house. He paused out of sheer habit, one friend recalled, to politely remove his hat as he entered the destroyed parlor. Other memories flooded back to him at strange, unexpected places. Invited to address a small assembly in Norfolk, he seemed momentarily stunned by one woman’s orris root perfume.
“Do you know what it makes me think of?” he asked her. “My adopted mother. Whenever the bureau drawers of her room were opened there was the whiff of orris root, and ever since, when I smell it, I go back to the time when I was a little boy.”
By the end of September, it was rumored that Poe and Elmira were engaged, and at the very least they had reached a cautious understanding; first, though, business was to call him away. There was still The Stylus to consider, and his aunt Maria in New York to consult about the nuptials; he had also landed a lucrative offer of one hundred dollars to stop off in Philadelphia to edit the poems of a piano manufacturer’s wife. So he bade a melancholy farewell to Elmira—“He was very sad, and complained of being quite sick,” she recalled—stopped by a doctor’s office, and then took a steamer from the Richmond docks in the small hours of September 27.
Nobody is quite sure what happened next. On October 3rd, Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, a Baltimore literary friend of Poe’s who had been the first to publish “Ligeia” a decade earlier, received this urgent note:
Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849
There is a gentleman, rather worse for the wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.
Yours, in haste,
Jos. W. Walker
Snodgrass raced over to a nearby saloon and found Poe glassy-eyed and semiconscious—“utterly stupefied with liquor”—and in his oblivion his clothing had been robbed or pawned and replaced by a thin and soiled outfit. It had been rainy and in the fifties that weekend, and “the atmosphere partook sensibly of a spongy character” as one local put it; Poe might well have also have suffered from exposure. Refused help by Poe’s local relatives, Snodgrass checked him in to Washington College Hospital. “So insensible was he,” he wrote, “that we had to carry him to the carriage as if a corpse.”
At 3 A.M. on October 5, Poe trembled violently, his body drenched in sweat; when he came to the following afternoon, his doctor could get little coherent from him except the half-right notion that he “had a wife in Richmond.” Dr. John Moran told his delirious patient that soon he might recover to see his family and friends.
“At this he broke out with much energy,” Dr. Moran reported, “and said the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow his brains out with a pistol.”
For the next two days, Poe alternated between uneasy dozing and such violent delirium that two nurses had to restrain him. On Saturday evening, Dr. Moran reported, “he commenced calling for one ‘Reynolds,’ which he did through the night up to three on Sunday morning.” Reynolds might have been the polar explorer Jeremiah Reynolds, whom Poe had drawn upon for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—and whose hollow-earth theories ventured that Antarctica might hold the portal to a hidden realm.
It was an apt invocation for a guide to the underworld. At five that morning, Edgar Allan Poe met the fate anticipated in his poem “To Annie”:
Thank Heaven! the crisis—
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness,
Is over at last—
And the Fever called ‘Living’
Is conquer’d at last.
He was buried the following afternoon with scarcely a dozen people in attendance, and that included the undertakers. One witness scoffed that the ceremony “did not occupy more than three minutes, [and] was so cold-blooded and un-Christianlike as to provoke on my part a sense of anger.” When it was over, his body was left in an unmarked grave.
Word of Poe’s death spread quickly. On the morning of his funeral, the Baltimore Sun failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it.” By the following day similar reports had run up the coast to New York. Even the harshest obituary, in the New York Herald—“he had few or no friends,” it claimed—acknowledged that Poe was a genius, with speech “almost supra-mortal in its eloquence,” and invested with a grandly Romantic persona: “He was at all times a dreamer—dwelling in ideal realms—in heaven or hell—peopled with creatures and the accidents of his brain.” Within a week, plans were afoot for a collected edition of his works, to be edited by the Rev. Rufus Griswold.
Poe’s anthologist, in fact, was none other than the author of that friendless Herald obituary. Yet he had, by some accounts, been handpicked by Poe himself. The choice was hardly surprising: with his 1842 Poets and Poetry of America, and the 1845 volume Prose Writers of America, Griswold was one of America’s most influential anthologists. He’d known Poe for nearly a decade, to mixed results; though Poe described Griswold as “a gentleman of fine taste and sound judgment” in 1841, and he’d praised Poe as “highly imaginative” and “eminently distinguished,” they’d also mortally offended each other at times. It hardly helped that, after Poe left Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1842, Griswold had taken his place. But the two reached a wary truce born of pragmatism, and Griswold’s appreciation of Poe’s talent was tangible: he’d given Edgar more space in an article on “Tale Writers” than to Cooper, Hawthorne, or even Washington Irving. For Poe, leaving his collected works in Griswold’s hands was personally awkward, but a canny business decision.
“Poe was not my friend—I was not his—and he had no right to devolve upon me this
duty of editing his works,” Griswold complained to James Russell Lowell later that month. “He did so, however, and under the circumstances I could not well refuse compliance with the wishes of his friends here.”
Griswold worked swiftly: along with collecting reminiscences by Poe’s contemporaries Lowell and N. P. Willis, he placed newspaper ads to put out a call for copies of manuscripts and correspondence with Poe. Lost and unpublished work quickly turned up: Griswold’s copy of Poe’s final poem, “Annabel Lee,” immediately appeared in print, while the Poe household’s sometime nurse, Marie Shew, proved to have inspired the posthumously published poem “The Bells.” Its hypnotically repetitive lines of “From the bells, bells, bells, bells . . .” would soon join “The Raven” as a public favorite. More letters, stories, poems, and marginalia poured in; scarcely three weeks after Poe died, six clerks were already at work setting copy for the New York publisher J. S. Redpath.
The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, assembled at astonishing speed since his death on October 8, arrived in bookstores by January 10, 1850. Published into two green clothbound volumes—the first labeled Tales, and the second Poems and Miscellanies—they mark Poe’s ascension into the canon of world literature. In life, Poe had never maintained a relationship with any one magazine, genre, or publisher long enough to build up a consistent audience; it is conceivable that no one admirer or critic had ever seen a majority of his complete writings. James Russell Lowell’s comment on Poe’s criticism applied just as readily to the rest of his work: “He has squared out blocks enough to build an enduring pyramid, but has left them lying carelessly and unclaimed in many different quarries.”
Gathered together into two volumes totaling a thousand pages, the breadth of his accomplishments at last became apparent. Yet Griswold’s personal criticisms of Poe left George Graham—who had employed both men as editors—fuming in print that Griswold “was not Mr. Poe’s peer,” and that his focus on Poe’s poverty and drinking “looks so much like a breach of trust.” Graham would find more to dislike when Griswold edited a third volume with Poe’s criticism and “literati” sketches later that year; its biographical preface repeated many of the worst accusations against the man, whether true or not—claiming that Poe had been expelled from UVA, that he had been subject to “brutish drunkenness,” that he contracted debts he could not pay.