by Paul Collins
“To think of that villain Griswold dragging before the public all my poor poor Eddie’s faults,” an outraged Maria Clemm wrote, “and not to have the generosity of speaking one word of his good qualities. . . . did you ever feel as if you wished to die? as if you wished to shut out the world and all that concerns it? It is thus I feel.”
Much of Griswold’s biography was unobjectionable; many of its inaccuracies came from Poe’s own tall tales. But in tiresomely emphasizing Poe’s flaws through his correspondence, Griswold also engaged in a secret campaign of slander. So subtly as to even escape Aunt Maria’s detection, he’d rewritten Poe’s letters, inserting both base ingratitude and the occasional fawning praise of Griswold himself. “You so perfectly understand me,” he has Poe enthuse: “ . . . I can truly say no man’s approbation gives me so much pleasure.” It took the better part of a century to scrub Griswold’s rather pathetic defacements from Poe’s correspondence.
Yet Griswold’s worst transgression against Poe’s family was a contractual one. There is no record of Poe having left a will; if he died intestate, his estate should have descended to his sister, Rosalie. Instead, it was Aunt Maria who negotiated away Poe’s rights to Griswold—and scarcely even received anything in return. Though the books included a note from her thanking Griswold for publishing the books “for my benefit,” Maria Clemm was only paid in copies, which poverty compelled her to sell. One of the first people to step up to help her out was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—the very poet who was so often the target of both Poe’s admiration and bewildering vitriol.
Longfellow understood Poe quite well, though. As a Harvard professor of poetry and linguistics who lived comfortably and was respected by the literary establishment—who had, in short, the life that Poe longed for—he intuited Poe’s envy just as well as he understood his genius. Unlike Griswold, he had long forgiven it: “The harshness of his criticisms,” Longfellow wrote, “I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.”
Griswold, alas, was not so kind. And yet for all his betrayals of Poe’s life, his editing of Poe’s art was perfectly serviceable for the era—so much so that one might say that Poe’s wisdom in entrusting his fame to him proved entirely justified. Even J. M. Daniel, a critic so hard on Poe that they’d once nearly dueled, was moved to this prophesy after reading the Works: “While people of this day run after such authors as Prescott and Willis . . . their children, in referring back to literary history, will say, ‘This was the time of Poe.’ ”
The common notion is that Poe’s name was blackened for generations after his death; it is one any publisher will find amusing, given the sale of tens of thousands of copies of Works during that time. Poe’s personal failings, both real and imagined, probably had as little effect on his readership as it had on his heroes Byron and Coleridge. By 1860, he was so entirely embraced by the American public that a weekly “Raven Club” literary salon was held in Washington, D.C., by various senators and judges; even President Buchanan showed up for one meeting. Not to be outdone, Lincoln’s presidential campaign biography that year boasted that he read three authors for pleasure: Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe. In particular, Abe was “pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe’s tales and sketches, in which the problem of the mystery is given, and wrought out into everyday facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is said that he suffers no year to pass without the perusal of this author.”
It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his “prose poem,” Eureka. “The Raven” was indeed Poe’s most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms—but as art it is distinctly backward-looking. Poets still find kinship in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but one would be hard-pressed to find many who claim Poe as a profound influence. It is a mastery of narrative voice—and above all, the creation of the detective story—that made Poe an author that Lincoln and the world at large placed beside Shakespeare.
Yet it was indeed a fellow poet, Charles Baudelaire, who would prove Poe’s greatest advocate abroad. After first coming across his work in France in 1847, Baudelaire felt that he had discovered the work of a blood brother. “I felt a singular excitement,” he later explained. “ . . . I found poems and stories which I had thought about, but in a vague, confused, and disordered way, and about which Poe had been able to treat perfectly. . . . The first time I opened one of his books I saw, to my amazement and delight, not only certain subjects which I had dreamed of, but sentences which I had thought out, written by him twenty years before.”
Poe could well be called the adopted son of France. Through Baudelaire’s tireless volumes of translation in the 1850s and 1860s, Poe’s poetic creed of beauty for its own sake spoke to a rising generation of bohemians and Decadent poets; his science fiction deeply moved Jules Verne, who wrote his novel The Sphinx of the Ice Fields as a continuation of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and dedicated it to Poe. It was also Baudelaire’s edition that reached Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote the introduction to the 1861 Russian edition of Poe’s works, just as he was on the cusp of creating his own masterpiece of tortured narration in Notes from Underground.
The most peculiarly ardent audience for Poe’s work, though, would also prove to be its most influential. “The character and works of Poe have ever been held in reverence by the metaphysical minds of the Scottish universities,” reported one newspaper in 1875. It was the fall of that year that the University of Edinburgh enrolled a young Arthur Conan Doyle. In Poe’s tales of Dupin, the medical student found the artistic catalyst for his training in physical observation and diagnosis. The result was one of the great literary creations of his time: Sherlock Holmes.
“If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument,” Doyle later mused, “it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids.”
In fact, a more modest campaign to Poe’s memory was coming to pass in the autumn of 1875. Rumors circulated for years that Poe was left in a potter’s field, and in 1860 his aunt Maria wrote to Poe’s Baltimore cousin Neilson Poe after hearing even worse: “A lady called on me a short time ago from Baltimore. She said she had visited my darling Eddie’s grave. She said it was in the basement of the church, covered with rubbish and coal. Is this true?” It wasn’t, but Dr. Snodgrass, who’d tried in vain to save Poe in his final days, grimly scolded in 1856 that the truth was “bad, and discreditable enough to his relatives, not to say the city in which he died.” A new church had already been built over much of the graveyard, and he warned that Poe’s lonely grave might indeed soon be lost: “It is quite probable that the bones of ‘Poor Poe’ will be collected among the remains of the friendless and the unknown, and removed beyond recognition, for nothing but a couple of pine boards were placed at his grave, in lieu of a tombstone.”
Fate itself even seemed to intervene: when Neilson Poe finally ordered a headstone, a locomotive crashed into the stonemason’s studio and dashed it to pieces. And then, with the Civil War about to begin, that and a great many other plans rather went to the wayside. By the time that Aunt Maria died in 1871, and was buried next to Poe, his grave still remained unmarked. In the end, the rescue of America’s dark and romantic poet would have to come from—schoolmistresses.
“They are to hold a meeting and arrange a literary entertainment,” reported the Baltimore Sun in 1865, on the “schoolma’ams” working to buy “a suitable monument in this city to the memory of the late Edgar A. Poe.”
A decade of collected pennies, appeals to patrons, and gamely staged fundraisers later, they had their marble monument. A prominent spot in the graveyard presented itself as a resting place for both Poe and his aunt Maria, but that meant their bodies had to be moved. The sexton was an old hand in such matters, having also buried Poe t
he first time around. But the cheap coffin hadn’t stood up well; as the dirt was cleared away, the top corner collapsed, and its occupant indulgently gave his public one last ghastly fright: “Nothing remained inside the coffin but the skeleton,” reported the local newspaper—before adding, in a touch worthy of Poe, that “some hair yet attached to the skull, and the teeth, which appeared all white and perfect, were shaken out of the jaws and lay at the bottom of the coffin.”
He was gently moved into the new plot, and his monument unveiled on a chilly November day in 1875. A school holiday was called in the city, and over a thousand Baltimoreans spilled out of an assembly hall near the graveyard; spectators crowded onto porches and leaned out of the windows of surrounding houses. Along with Baltimore’s schoolteachers, a tall and gray-bearded eminence could also be spotted in the crowd—Walt Whitman, now some three decades from the brash young Brooklyn printer whom Poe had published in the Broadway Journal. Joining him were those in whom the living memory of Poe still survived: his cousin Neilson, his old schoolmate Joe Clarke, and John Latrobe—one of the judges in the Saturday Visiter contest that had given Poe his first real break in 1833.
The man Latrobe recalled in his speech was not the gloomy poet of legend, but a hard-working and imaginative craftsman: meeting Edgar for the first time, he’d found the young man busy planning his “Hans Pfaall” lunar hoax, and eager to explain the conceit of a shoemaker flying to the moon in a balloon. “He ascended higher and higher, until, at last, he reached the point in space where the moon’s attraction overcame that of the earth,” the old editor mused over Poe’s explanation of the passenger compartment suddenly flipping over. “The speaker had become so excited, spoke so excitedly, gesticulating much, that when the turn-upside-down took place, and he clapped his hands and stamped his foot by way of emphasis, I was carried along with him . . . he apologized for his excitability, which he laughed at himself.”
The assembly proceeded to the new grave that would come to serve as a burial place for Edgar, Virginia, and Aunt Maria, reuniting the peculiar household that been Poe’s sorrow and solace in life. There they read aloud his final poem, “Annabel Lee”—and in its last lines, the farewell of an artist finally at rest:
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea—
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Notes
As this is a brief biography, I will spare readers reference to facts already commonly covered in standard works of Poe scholarship (see the appendix of “Selected Further Readings”). However, for material that is unusual or even unique to this volume, I note the sources below.
1. The Child of Fortune (1809–1827)
Among numerous examples of advertisements for theatrical benefits for the Poes, see The Repertory (Boston) for September 18, 1807; March 11, 1808; and March 18, 1808; and The Democrat (Boston) for February 3, 1808; April 20, 1808; March 4, 1809; and April 19, 1809. Examples of benefits for three other colleagues can be seen in the Boston Mirror for March 11, 1809; April 15, 1809; and April 29, 1809.
An example of Ellis & Allan’s wares can be seen in their Richmond Enquirer ad of October 18, 1811; the Manhattan that the Allans returned to from abroad can be glimpsed in that day’s New York Commercial Advertiser of July 2, 1820. Numerous examples of academy ads are in the Richmond Enquirer of December 27, 1826.
William Mavor’s The English Spelling Book (1803) is quoted regarding Poe’s textbooks, and the example of “capping” comes from “Capping Verses” in The Living Age (October 1886).
Rev. Bransby’s recollection of Poe may be found in William Elijah Hunter’s Athenaeum article “Poe and His English Schoolmaster” (October 19, 1878). Numerous biographies quote Poe’s “William Wilson” in describing Bransby’s school, yet Hunter makes it clear that “the Dr. Bransby of the tale, with the exception of his name, is quite as much a product of Poe’s imagination as is the schoolhouse itself.”
2. Manuscript Found in a Bottle (1827–1838)
Although accounts of Poe considering joining the Greek revolution have always been regarded as rather fanciful, the Essex Register of May 28, 1827, does indeed note that a Greek Committee in Boston was about to send volunteers and supplies to the conflict.
To my knowledge, the possibility of “A Fragment” being by Edgar has not been previously noted in Poe scholarship. Edgar and Henry Poe’s writings in the short-lived North American magazine of 1827 certainly remain a tantalizingly obscure area of study, not least because of the scarcity of the publication itself. The issues noted in this chapter contain “The Happiest Day” (September 15, 1827), “Dreams” (October 20, 1827), and “A Fragment” (November 3, 1827), and can be found on microfilm. The one book on the subject is itself now old and uncommon, but Hervey Allen’s Poe’s Brother: The Poems of William Henry Leonard Poe (1926) remains useful, particularly as it includes plates reproducing the articles.
Scandalized readers needing reassurance of the legality of Poe’s peculiar marriage may find it in pages 398–400 of The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia (1819).
3. The Glorious Prospect (1838–1844)
The rising interest in puzzles by periodicals during Poe’s time has never received its scholarly due; still, a sense of the genre at the time can be gleaned from such collections as The London Riddler; Or, the Arts of Teasing Made Easy (1830), and by looking back to such predecessors as Jonathan Puzzle’s The Labyrinth (1753). A number of Poe’s cryptograms and other puzzles were gathered by Clarence S. Brigham in Edgar Allan Poe’s Contributions to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (1943); they can be readily found today on the eapoe.org website.
One of Poe’s ciphers—from his final puzzle column at Graham’s Magazine, which he claimed he couldn’t be bothered to run the solution to—went unsolved until 2000, when the Toronto software engineer Gil Broza cracked it. Deciphered, and bedevilled by some printing errors in the original, it proved to be a pun on sun/son and air/heir:
It was early spring, warm and sultry glowed the afternoon. The very breezes seemed to share the delicious languor of universal nature, are laden the various and mingled perfumes of the rose and the -essaerne, the woodbine and its wildflower. They slowly wafted their fragrant offering to the open window where sat the lovers. The ardent sun shoot fell upon her blushing face and its gentle beauty was more like the creation of romance or the fair inspiration of a dream than the actual reality on earth. Tenderly her lover gazed upon her as the clusterous ringlets were edged by amorous and sportive zephyrs and when he perceived the rude intrusion of the sunlight he sprang to draw the curtain but softly she stayed him. “No, no, dear Charles,” she softly said, “much rather you’ld [sic] I have a little sun than no air at all.”
Though some wondered whether Poe wrote the source text, I find that it previously appeared in the Baltimore Sun of July 4, 1840; and that it was in turn based on a widely reprinted poem (“Nuptial Repartee”) that first appeared in the June 21, 1813, Morning Herald of London. A manuscript in the hand of Hester Thrale (i.e., Hester Lynch Piozzi) in Harvard’s library hints that she may be the true author.
As for the gym Poe visited, the story of its colorful owner Samuel Barrett might be lost to history altogether were it not for an account within the obituary of his wife, Mary Barrett; it can be found in the Daily Picayune (New Orleans) for January 18, 1888.
James Curtis’s The Murder of Maria Marten (1827) is explored further in my November 2006 article for The Believer, “The Molecatcher’s Daughter”; Patricia Cline Cohen details the role of the New York Herald and James Gordon Bennett in her 1999 study The Murder of Helen Jewett.
An account of claims by Captain Kidd’s would-be sister ran in the Times-Picayune (New Orleans) on August 4, 1842; the amusingly opportunistic ad for the “Gold Bug” lottery appears in the Baltimore Sun for August 14, 1843.
4. The Shakespeare of America (1844–1847)
> Life in the city is summarized at the start of the chapter through the April 6, 1844, issue of the New York Tribune; the slower pace of life in Fordham can be gathered from the Herald headline from October 20, 1844, GREAT PLOUGHING AND SPADING MATCH AT FORDHAM.
Examples of newspaper stories on transatlantic ballooning that ran before Poe’s hoax can be found in the New York Commercial Advertiser of February 8, 1800, the Southern Patriot (Charleston, SC) of May 12, 1825, and the Baltimore Sun for January 10, 1840; May 4, 1840; and June 15,1843.
The “discovery” and subsequent fraud allegations around Captain Kidd’s treasure can be found in the Brooklyn Eagle for July 2, 1844; July 5, 1844; and January 3, 1848; it can also be read of in “The Kidd Humbug—Its Explosion” in the Southern Patriot (Charleston, SC) for July 22, 1847. The Evening Mirror (New York) item for January 8, 1845, on the venture may have been written by Poe himself—and as an editor there, if he didn’t write about the Kidd hunters, he certainly knew of them.
Poe’s stint at writing a campaign song is recalled in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of November 17, 1875, and in “Edgar Allan Poe: Reminiscences of Gabriel Harrison, an Actor, Still Living in Brooklyn” in The Book Lover (Vol. 1, Winter 1899–1900).
Maria Clemm’s overdue back taxes are revealed in a published notice in the Baltimore Sun of January 9, 1846, while the New York Tribune of February 14, 1846, carried news of the extra letter carriers hired for Valentine’s Day. The work among Fourier colonies by Mrs. Gove can be seen in the March 15, 1845, issue of the Weekly Herald (New York).