tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33011837165644625732023-11-15T08:50:27.425-08:00The World of Edgar Allan PoeThe truth was stranger than his fictionUndinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.comBlogger254125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-20926589334278302352016-12-24T05:00:00.000-08:002016-12-24T05:00:03.947-08:00Merry Poemas!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VOr9At6Riuc/WDzoS62WzRI/AAAAAAAAIgU/of7WPy9ou24TVuZ3tjvgh-YJrjEYglsmACLcB/s1600/poe%2Bgin.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VOr9At6Riuc/WDzoS62WzRI/AAAAAAAAIgU/of7WPy9ou24TVuZ3tjvgh-YJrjEYglsmACLcB/s400/poe%2Bgin.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I have a fondness for "Raven" parodies--19th century writers found them irresistible--and this one is particularly suited for the holiday season. I first found this ode to the more sinister side to Christmas puddings in the humor publication "Tit-Bits" on December 23, 1882, but it continued to be republished in newspapers and magazines at least until early the next century.<br />
<br />
The happiest of holidays to you all!<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Listen, all ! I tell what happened on the night of Christmas Day, <br />
After I'd been eating pudding in a very reckless way. <br />
Just as Christmas Day was dying, as I on my bed was lying, <br />
When to slumber I was trying, when I'd just begun to snore, <br />
I became aware of something rolling on my chamber floor— <br />
Of a most mysterious rumbling, rolling on my chamber floor. <br />
Only this and nothing more! <br />
<br />
Partly waking, partly sleeping, all my flesh with horror creeping, <br />
I could hear it tumbling, leaping, rolling on my chamber floor; <br />
Underneath the bedclothes sinking, I betook myself to thinking <br />
If it might not be a kitten that had entered at the door; <br />
"Yes," said I, "it is a kitten, entered at the open door. <br />
This it is and nothing more." <br />
<br />
Presently my heart grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, <br />
"Cat," said I, "or kitten, kindly stop that rolling on the floor." <br />
But it was most irritating, for the sound was unabating. <br />
On my nerves for ever grating was the rolling on the floor; <br />
Till at last I cried in anguish, "Stop that rolling I implore;" <br />
And a voice said, "Nevermore." <br />
<br />
This convinced me of my error, up I rose in greatest terror, <br />
Certain that 'twas not a kitten that had spoken just before; <br />
Then into the darkness peering, shivering, wondering, doubting, fearing, <br />
I could dimly see a pudding rolling on my chamber floor; <br />
I could see a big plum pudding rolling on my chamber floor; <br />
May I see it nevermore! <br />
<br />
From its mouth a vapour steaming, while its fiery eyes were gleaming, <br />
Gleaming fiercely bright, and seeming fixedly to scan me o'er; <br />
Soon it rolled and rumbled nearer, and its aim becoming clearer, <br />
I could see that it intended jumping higher than the floor; <br />
Yes, it jumped upon my chest, and when in pain I gave a roar, <br />
All it said was, "Nevermore."</blockquote>
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<br />
<blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Though my back was nearly broken, this reply so strangely spoken. <br />
Seemed to me to be a token that it wished for something more; <br />
So my thoughts in words expressing, I began my sins confessing, <br />
Saying I had eaten pudding many a time in days of yore, <br />
But although I'd eaten pudding many a time in days of yore, <br />
I would eat it nevermore. <br />
<br />
Still in spite of my confessing, that plum pudding kept on pressing, <br />
Pressing with its weight tremendous ever on my bosom's core. <br />
Till I cried, "O, monster mighty, in my work I'm often flighty. <br />
But, if you will now forgive me, I'll work hard at classic lore!" <br />
At the end of this vacation I'll work hard at classic lore, <br />
Quoth the pudding "Nevermore." <br />
<br />
" Be that word our sign of parting, pudding!" then I shrieked, upstarting, <br />
" Get thee back — get off my stomach, roll again upon the floor!" <br />
Thus I struggled, loudly screaming, till I found I had been dreaming. <br />
Dreaming like a famous poet once had dreamt in days of yore; <br />
But although 'twas like the poet's dream he dreamt in days of yore. <br />
May I dream it nevermore!</blockquote>
<br />
<i>[Note: Many thanks to <a href="http://hauntedohiobooks.com/" target="_blank">Chris Woodyard </a>for bringing this poem to my attention.]</i>Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-9543532731251094712015-11-13T04:49:00.000-08:002015-11-13T04:49:07.540-08:00Poe and Ludwig IIA lesser-known bit of Poeana is that that most romantic and perplexing of "mad kings," Ludwig II, was a passionate admirer of Poe. More than that, Ludwig deeply identified with Poe, seeing the poet as a kindred spirit. His perceived parallels with Poe fascinated the troubled monarch. (Rather eerily, Ludwig was not to know that, like his idol, he too would suffer a mysterious and hotly-debated death--and when one remembers that Rufus Griswold used the pen-name "Ludwig" for his infamous obituary of Poe, it is hard not to feel a bit creeped out.)<br />
<br />
One of our main sources--in English, at any rate--for Ludwig's sense of kinship with Poe comes from an interview he gave to the American journalist Lew Vanderpoole. Vanderpoole's account of this meeting, "Ludwig of Bavaria: a Personal Reminiscence" appeared in Lippincott's Magazine for November 1886. <br />
<br />
<blockquote>
The adjustment of the estates of three of my French ancestors, who died in Rouen about eight years ago, necessitated my going to Bavaria. As the three deaths, being almost simultaneous, resulted in unprecedented complications, it was manifest, from the very first, that audience must be had with the Bavarian king. So, in leaving France, I bore with me, to Ludwig, a letter of introduction from M. Gambetta, which fully explained my mission and requested the king to facilitate my endeavors as far as possible. Arriving in Munich, I sent my letter to his royal highness, expecting, of course, to be turned over to the tender mercies of some deputy, after his usual custom. To my surprise, Gambetta's letter resulted in my being requested to wait upon the king at the royal palace the next morning at ten o'clock. Punctual to the second, I was shown into a beautifully-decorated sitting- room, where the monarch joined me after a brief delay.<br />
<br />
To others he may have always been brusque, morose, and taciturn, but no one could have been more affable and gracious than he was that morning. He examined my papers with the most courteous interest, and weighed the whole matter with as much thoughtful consideration as if it had been something of vital concern to him. Waiving several Bavarian customs, for my convenience, and setting me straight in every possible direction, he was about ending the interview, when he suddenly caught sight of something which prolonged my audience with him for two of the most delightful hours which were ever owed to royal clemency. Leaving France, as I did, a day earlier than I had intended, in my haste I accidentally packed with my legal documents the proof-sheets of a paper which I had been writing for Figaro on Edgar Allan Poe. The proofs were left unnoticed with the other papers until the whole package was opened and spread out on the king's table. Until then his manner had been quiet and gentle, almost to effeminacy; but the moment he saw Poe's name be became all eagerness and animation. His magnificent eyes lit up, his lips quivered, his cheeks glowed, and his whole face was beaming and radiant.<br />
<br />
"Is it a personal account of him?" he asked. "Did you know Poe? Of course you did not, though: you are too young. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am. Just for a moment I thought I was in the presence of someone who had actually known that most wonderful of all writers, and who could, accordingly, tell me something definite and authentic about his inner life. To me he was the greatest man ever born, -greatest in every particular. But, like many rare gems, he was fated to have his brilliancy tarnished and marred by constant clashings and chafings against common stone. How he must have suffered under the coarse, mean indignities which the world heaped on him ! And what harsh, heartless things were said of him when death had dulled the sharpness of his trenchant pen ! You will better understand my enthusiasm when I tell you that I would sacrifice my right to my royal crown to have him on earth for a single hour, if in that hour he would unbosom to me those rare and exquisite thoughts and feelings which so manifestly were the major part of his life."<br />
<br />
His voice softened into a low monotone-almost a wail-as he approached the end of his sentence, and his head kept settling forward until his chin rested upon his breast. He kept this attitude, in dead silence, for several minutes, his face wearing an expression of the most intense sorrow. Suddenly arousing himself, he glanced at me in startled surprise, as if he had for the moment forgotten my presence. Then his eyes beamed pleasantly, and he laughed-clear, merry, ringing laugh-at being caught in a day-dream.<br />
<br />
"Will you be good enough to let me read, what you have written?" he asked. "I see that it is in French, the only language I know except my own." </blockquote>
<blockquote>
I handed him the proofs, and watched him as be read them. As the paper was chatty and gossipy, rather than critical, he seemed to enjoy it. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
"I see by this that you, also, are fond of Poe," he said, handing the proofs back to me; "and so I will tell you of a little fancy which I have cherished ever since I first began reading the works of your great fellow-American. At first, because of my respect for his genius and greatness, the lightest thought of what I am going to tell you would make my cheeks bum with shame at my presumption. After a time, I would occasionally write out my fancy, only to burn it, always, as soon as finished. Eventually I confided it to two trusted and valued friends; and now, in some unaccountably strange way, moved, perhaps, by the sympathy born of our common interest in Poe, I am going to take you into my confidence in this particular, stranger though you are. What I have to say is this : I believe, for reasons which I will give you, that there is a distinct parallel between Poe's nature and mine. Do not be misled by assuming that I mean more than I have said. I but compared our natures: beyond that the parallel does not hold. Poe had both genius and greatness. I have neither. He had, also, force and strength, so much of both that he could defy the world, sensitive and shrinking as be was. That I never can do. Not that I am a coward, as the word is generally understood, because pain and death can neither shake nor terrify me. Yet any contact with the world hurts me. The same as Poe's, my nature is abnormally sensitive. Injuries wound me so deeply that I cannot resent them : they crush me, and I have no doubt that in time they will destroy me. Even the laceration my heart received from indignities which I suffered as a child are still uneffaceable. A sharp or prying glance from the eyes of a stranger, even though he be only same coarse peasant, will annoy me for hours; and a newspaper criticism occasions me endless torture and misery. The impressionable part of me seems to be as sensitive as a photographer's plate : everything with which I come in contact stamps me indelibly with its proportions. My impulses, it can be no egotism to say, are generous and kindly; yet I never, in my whole life, have done an act of charity that the recipient did not in some way make me regret it. People disappoint me; life disappoints me. I meet some man with a fine face and fine manner, and believe in the sincerity of his smile. Just as I begin to feel certain of his lasting love and fidelity, I detect him in some act of treachery, or overhear him calling me a fool, or worse."<br />
<br />
Arising, he began to walk slowly up and down the room.<br />
<br />
"Apparently," he continued, after a brief silence, "there is no place in the economy of life except for one kind of man. If one would be respected, he must be coarse, harsh, and phlegmatic. Let him be anything else, and friends and foes alike unite in declaring him eccentric. Much as I despise the gross, sensual creatures who wear the form and receive the appellation of man, I sometimes regret that I am not more like them, and, so, more at ease. They plunge into excesses with no more concern than a duck feels in plunging into a lake. With me the thought, or rather the dread, that I may some day so far forget myself as to debase and degrade myself, according to the common custom of man, is in itself sufficient cause for the most excruciating torture. When I look upon men as they average and see the perfect nonchalance with which they commit this, that, or the other abuse from which I would recoil with utter repugnance, I wonder if, after all, they are not really to be envied. My condition is as much of a puzzle to me as it possibly can be to you. Logically, there is no reason for it. My father and mother were neither abnormally sensitive nor excessively moral. So far as I am able to ascertain, they regarded things in life very much as every one else does. It was the same, I believe, with the parents of Poe. Things he has written prove to me that he felt the same disgust for whatever demoralizes that I have always felt, only he saw how the world would behave towards him if he did not seem in sanction and approve of its rottenness. I do not blame him. His way was wisest. Deceit is best in such a case, if it can only be assumed. With his sensitiveness were associated force and defiance,-two traits which I seriously lack. Perhaps, though, he could endure the world more easily than I can, because his childhood was less dreadful than mine. All through my infancy things were done which stung and wounded me. Not that I was treated more harshly than children commonly are, but because my nature was so unlike that of children in general that the things which never disturbed them were offensive to me. I soon learned that companionship meant pain, and that I could never know or feel anything like content unless I held myself aloof from every one. This, for a man, is hard enough to do; for a child it is next to impossible. I was forced to subject myself to the will of harsh, unfeeling teachers, and to the society of those who, scarcely more than animals themselves, accredited me with no instincts finer than their own. Most of the studies thrust upon me seemed dull, stupid, and worthless : because they so jarred upon me that my understanding faculties were dulled and blunted with pain, I was declared half-witted. For hours I would sit and dream beautiful day-dreams; and that won for me similar epithets. It is a misfortune to be organized as I am; yet I am what I am because a stronger will and power than mine made me so. In that lie my so]e solace and comfort for having lived at all. If my reading and observation have not been in the wrong direction, much of the phenomenon which is called insanity is really over-sensitiveness. It is often hinted, and sometimes openly declared, that I am a madman. Perhaps I am; but I doubt it. Insanity may be self-hiding. An insane man may be the only person on earth who is not aware of his insanity. Of course I, for such reasons, may not be able to comprehend my own mental condition, except in an exaggerated and unnatural way. But I believe myself a rational being. That, though, may be proof of my insanity. Yet I doubt if any insane person could study and analyze himself as I have done and still do. I am simply out of tune with the majority of my race. I do not enter into man's common pleasures, because they disgust me and would destroy me. Society hurts me, and I keep out of it. Women court me, and for my safety I avoid them. Were I a poet, I should be praised for saying these things in verse; but the gift of utterance is not mine, and so I am sneered at; scorned, and called a madman. Will God, when he summons me, adjudge me the same?" </blockquote>
<blockquote>
With tearful eyes, he pressed my hand, smiled, and left the room. The learned doctors have already declared Ludwig of Bavaria insane, and kindlier judgment from those who loved him would very likely be counted wasted sympathy by the world.</blockquote>
<br />
<i>[Note: As a postscript, <a href="http://www.annmarieackermann.com/poe-toaster-might-a-bavarian-group-be-responsible/" target="_blank">here is an intriguing blog post</a> theorizing that the "Poe Toaster" had a connection to King Ludwig.]</i>Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-9588533936227565512015-08-31T10:38:00.003-07:002015-08-31T10:38:37.735-07:00The Poisoning of Edgar and Virginia Poe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-udm8bHYB0gw/VeSQ9MTLbtI/AAAAAAAAFkM/BIE982qG8YQ/s1600/poe%2Bstreet.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-udm8bHYB0gw/VeSQ9MTLbtI/AAAAAAAAFkM/BIE982qG8YQ/s400/poe%2Bstreet.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Rene Van Slooten, one of the more original and insightful Poe scholars out there, has an interesting article about how analysis of Edgar and Virginia's hair shows that the couple (particularly Virginia) had been poisoned with various toxic substances (largely from illuminating gas) during the years they lived in New York City. <br />
<br />
Van Slooten goes on to suggest that this environmental poisoning was responsible for at least some of Poe's health problems and notoriously erratic behavior during this period. Although Van Slooten does not mention this, I found myself wondering if this poisoning contributed to Virginia's early death.<br />
<br />
As that popular blogging saying goes, <a href="http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/edgar-allan-poes-vehement-year-in-new-york-was-he-poisoned/2015/08/31" target="_blank">read the whole thing.</a>Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-8782311542735240272015-05-11T15:12:00.000-07:002015-05-11T15:12:29.560-07:00If the Truth Be Told, Most Books About Poe Give Me a Similar Urge<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4vEXbhSW-xE/VVEo4uDcTLI/AAAAAAAAFHc/Fp9FqXGQiTA/s1600/lloyd%2Bmagon%2Bpoe%2Bfan%2Blogansport%2Btribune%2B1%2B9%2B1911.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4vEXbhSW-xE/VVEo4uDcTLI/AAAAAAAAFHc/Fp9FqXGQiTA/s400/lloyd%2Bmagon%2Bpoe%2Bfan%2Blogansport%2Btribune%2B1%2B9%2B1911.JPG" width="336" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Logansport Tribune, January 9, 1911</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-73292972385639569202015-03-03T05:06:00.000-08:002015-03-03T05:06:13.158-08:00Today's PSA For the Historically IlliterateTo All You Nincompoops Who Have Been Posting This on Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr as a Genuine Photo of Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln:<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ipRifDNMmCQ/VPWvyrBFVhI/AAAAAAAAE4M/0Po1n6dJN40/s1600/fake%2Bpoe%2Band%2Blincoln.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ipRifDNMmCQ/VPWvyrBFVhI/AAAAAAAAE4M/0Po1n6dJN40/s1600/fake%2Bpoe%2Band%2Blincoln.jpg" height="640" width="361" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
This photo is a fake. F.A.K.E. It was never even intended to be seen as legitimate. It originates from the book "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," which, (though a chilling number of people seem unaware of this,) was meant to be <i>satire. </i>Poe and Lincoln never even met. Please stop making fools of yourselves and stripping me of whatever minuscule shred of hope for the human race I have left. After all, I can only drink so much therapeutic gin.<br />
<br />
That is all.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-43962099920062446772014-08-17T07:22:00.000-07:002014-08-17T07:22:45.479-07:00Yet Another Reason Why the Internet is a Poe Blogger's Hell<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Rxd_UHVRLU/U_C44M2G0OI/AAAAAAAAEIs/waS4eY6UWrg/s1600/poe%2Bnatural%2Bsciences.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Rxd_UHVRLU/U_C44M2G0OI/AAAAAAAAEIs/waS4eY6UWrg/s1600/poe%2Bnatural%2Bsciences.JPG" height="361" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The above photo is one I have been seeing all over the internet lately, particularly on Twitter. It is always described, without reservations, as a daguerreotype showing Poe at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, circa 1842. (He is supposedly the seated fellow with the impressive set of whiskers.)<br />
<br />
Such dogmatism ignores the fact that this attribution was made only in recent years, and has very little to back it up. The man in the photo was first identified as Poe by Benjamin J. McFarland and Thomas Peter Bennett in their article "The Image of Edgar Allan Poe: A Daguerreotype Linked to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia." (Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 147, 1997.)<br />
<br />
This daguerreotype was first published in 1937. We do not know for certain who took this picture, who any of the men in the image are, or even exactly when it was taken. In 1950, the magazine "Frontiers" published the photo, suggesting that Poe might be the standing man in the top hat. (The only evidence proposed for this theory was the fact that Poe "was in Philadelphia in the period," and "he wrote a small book on shells." They gave the date of the photo--again, on no evidence--as 1838.)<br />
<br />
McFarland and Bennett, through a detailed analysis of the daguerreotype, presented a well-reasoned case that the image was taken at the Academy by Paul Beck Goddard, "an early Philadelphia experimental daguerreotypist" sometime after the summer of 1842, most likely during the winter of 1842-43.<br />
<br />
It is in the identification of the seated man as Poe--which, after all, is the only reason the daguerreotype is of general interest today--that their arguments begin to falter. Their theory that this is Poe rests on these statements:<br />
<br />
*Poe knew a number of men who were part of Philadelphia's scientific society, such as Academy member Dr. John K. Mitchell, conchologist Isaac Lea, who was one of Poe's publishers, and poet Henry Hirst, who mounted specimens for the Peale Museum.<br />
<br />
*Poe's name appeared on the byline of the scientific work "The Conchologist's First Book." (Although McFarland and Bennett admitted that this book was essentially written by others.)<br />
<br />
*Poe had "a populist scientific bent," who may have been "America's first enduring science journalist." <br />
<br />
Surely, the authors argue, these "associations and Poe's own measure of fame" "opened the Academy's doors for Poe; his interest in science and new technology provided a motive for him to be involved with the process [of daguerreotyping.]" In short, Poe "could have been in Goddard's photo."<br />
<br />
McFarland and Bennett then went on to a forensic analysis of the daguerreotype. To make a long story (or journal article) short, they did a side-by-side visual comparison of the "McKee" daguerreotype of Poe from ca. 1843 with the Academy daguerreotype (direct superimposition of the two images could not be done,) and decided, by golly, the two looked alike.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7H9jhOODePo/U_C5HwgW5SI/AAAAAAAAEI0/4oq_s4xxmcw/s1600/enlarged%2Bpseudo%2Bpoe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7H9jhOODePo/U_C5HwgW5SI/AAAAAAAAEI0/4oq_s4xxmcw/s1600/enlarged%2Bpseudo%2Bpoe.jpg" height="400" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Enlargement of the Academy daguerreotype, <br />showing the Man Who Would Be Poe. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eesTi0Z7xXM/U_C5H7qPPKI/AAAAAAAAEI4/S_aI_1FyBlE/s1600/mc%2Bkee%2Bdag%2Bpoe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eesTi0Z7xXM/U_C5H7qPPKI/AAAAAAAAEI4/S_aI_1FyBlE/s1600/mc%2Bkee%2Bdag%2Bpoe.jpg" height="400" width="248" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The "McKee" daguerreotype of Poe.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
That's all this comes down to: Two people looking at an old daguerreotype and saying "Gosh, that might be Edgar Allan Poe!" Were they right? Who knows? Unfortunately, the Academy daguerreotype is too indistinct to make any sort of solid identification possible. I personally do not see much of a resemblance between Poe and the "Academician," but others may disagree. My point is, McFarland and Bennett's theory that this is a long-lost photograph of Edgar Allan Poe is just that--a theory, and in all honesty should always be presented as such. I can't prove that it's not Poe, but they certainly can't prove it <i>is.</i> The daguerreotype is merely one of many "Poe" photos or paintings that are either questionable or downright bogus. (See Michael Deas' "The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe" for an entertaining rundown on all the many fake Poe images that have appeared over the years.)<br />
<br />
I realize that this is a minor matter compared to the numerous blood-curdling frauds and libels that are continually perpetrated against Poe (hi, Lynn Cullen!) but it still annoys me.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-31802416371648357322014-02-13T04:49:00.000-08:002014-02-13T04:49:29.691-08:00A Birthday Bash, in Every Sense of the Word<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<blockquote>
I do not like thee, Griswold, R.,<br />
I hate thee near, I hate thee far.<br />
I hate the bios that you write,<br />
I hate them day, I hate them night.<br />
Your poetry gives me the chills,<br />
And dreadful, dreadful bouts of ills.<br />
I'm through now with this birthday puff,<br />
Of you, of you, I've had enough!</blockquote>
<br />
For the past two years now, we here at World of Poe have marked the anniversary of the birth of Rufus Wilmot Griswold with, I hope, all the honor and ceremony the day deserves. (The earlier posts can be found <a href="http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2012/02/neglected-anniversary.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-gift-for-dr-griswold.html" target="_blank">here</a>.) Even though I have largely put this blog on hold, I could hardly ignore mention of that <strike>accursed</strike> notable day <strike>when that miserable lying hack was foisted upon an undeserving planet</strike> in 1815.<br />
<br />
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Griswold's birthday deserves to be a national commemoration. So many of America's holidays have become controversial or "politically incorrect." Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, even Christmas are meaningless, or actually offensive, to one segment or another of our population. What this country needs is a special day where we can all unite as one.<br />
<br />
What better choice than Griswold's birthday? I am calling upon the President and members of Congress to make February 13 an official Day of Hate, when all Americans, no matter what their social, religious, or political views may be, can come together to express our shared disgust and contempt for the man. For one day, we can put our many differences aside, and recognize that we are all brothers and sisters on at least that one issue.<br />
<br />
I really should get the Nobel Peace Prize for this one.<br />
<br />
On to the 2014 collection of tributes:<br />
<br />
"[Griswold's memoir of Poe was the most] atrocious iniquity since the days of Cain."<br />
-Edmund Gosse, quoting Rosalie Poe<br />
<br />
"...[A] busybody of letters...a failed poetaster fattening on the writings of others as does a moth eating Gobelin tapestries."<br />
-Daniel Hoffman, "Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe"<br />
<br />
"We refer to no less a character than the Rev. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, D.D., a person so notorious in this community that to trace a calumny to him, suffices effectually to disprove of it."<br />
-"New York Tribune," December 15, 1855<br />
<br />
"...[A] man of fickle fancies, of violent temper, which often fell upon his dearest friends, of monstrous vanity, and of ungoverned passions."<br />
-Mary Clemmer, writing in the "Independent," 1871<br />
<br />
"I could not have loved such a man...I came to pity him, because he was his own worst enemy."<br />
-Mary Clemmer quoting poet Alice Cary, who was deeply dismayed by rumors that she<br />
and Griswold had been romantically involved.<br />
<br />
"...[H]is favorite pastime of character assassination."<br />
-Frances Winwar, writing in the New York Times, November 30, 1941<br />
<br />
"Griswold's talents were small potatoes, indeed."<br />
-Margurite Young, writing in the New York Times, July 31, 1977<br />
<br />
"He takes advantage of a state of things which he declares to be 'immoral, unjust and wicked,' and even while haranguing the loudest, is purloining the fastest." - Joel T. Headley<br />
<br />
"The fires of truth are gathering round, closer and closer, hemming in to consume him--this serpent-biographer."<br />
-James Wood Davidson, speaking of Griswold in a letter to George W. Eveleth, May 28, 1866<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New Albany Ledger, January 9, 1856</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"New York Courier," February 6, 1856</td></tr>
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<br />
"He [Neilson Poe] told me something about Griswold which I was very glad to hear. That malignant scoundrel went to So. Carolina, and there married a lady for her wealth. Almost immediately after the marriage, he found that her property was not of the extent, or in the position, he supposed, so he applied for a divorce to a New York court. The decree was granted, and he re-married straightway. The lady appealed, the former decree was reversed, and a suit for bigamy instituted against the Rev. Rufus, who, luckily for him, died before it came to trial. This was Poe’s defamer! I suppose Griswold’s biographers will keep that little incident in the dark."<br />
-William Hand Browne, letter to John H. Ingram, August 17, 1875<br />
<br />
“Nor do I consider Mr. Griswold competent, with all the opportunities he may have cultivated or acquired, to act as his judge,-- to dissect that subtle and singularly fine intellect, to probe the motives and weigh the actions of that proud heart. His whole nature-that distinctive presence of the departed which now stands impalpable, yet in strong outline before me, as I knew him and felt him to be--eludes the rude grasp of a mind so warped and uncongenial as Mr. Griswold’s.”<br />
-George R. Graham, "The Late Edgar Allan Poe," "Graham's Magazine," March 1850<br />
<br />
"Most of the associations of this man in private life are too vile to place before refined readers...Had Griswold lived in Othello’s time, no one could have disputed with him the position of 'mine ancient,' honest Iago."<br />
-Poe biographer William Gill, "Laurel Leaves," 1875<br />
<br />
"The following pertinent anecdote, related to us by Mr. Graham, well illustrates the character of Poe’s biographer. Dr. Griswold’s associate in his editorial duties on “Graham’s” was Mr. Charles J. Peterson, a gentleman long and favorably known in connection with prominent American magazines. Jealous of his abilities, and unable to visit his vindictiveness upon him in profria persona, Dr. Griswold conceived the noble design of stabbing him in the back, writing under a nom de plume in another journal, the 'New York Review.' In the columns of the 'Review' there appeared a most scurrilous attack upon Mr. Peterson, at the very time in the daily interchange of friendly courtesies with his treacherous associate. Unluckily for Dr. Griswold, Mr. Graham saw this article, and, immediately inferring, from its tone, that Griswold was the undoubted author, went to him with the article in his hand, saying, 'Dr. Griswold, I am very sorry to say I have detected you in what I call a piece of rascality.' Griswold turned all colors upon seeing the article, but stoutly denied the imputation, saying, 'I‘ll go before an alderman and swear that I never wrote it.' It was fortunate that he was not compelled to add perjury to his meanness, for Mr. Graham said no more about the matter at that time, waiting his opportunity for authoritative confirmation of the truth of his surmises. He soon found his conjectures confirmed to the letter. Being well acquainted with the editor of the 'Review,' he took occasion to call upon him shortly afterwards when in New York. Asking as a special favor to see the manuscript of the article in question, it was handed to him. The writing was in Griswold’s hand. Returning to Philadelphia, Mr. Graham called Griswold to him, told him the facts, paid him a month’s salary in advance, and dismissed him from his post, on the spot."<br />
-William Gill, "The Life of Edgar Allan Poe"<br />
<br />
"Under a show of impartiality, he is a judge, who leans against the prisoner at the bar. Edgar A. Poe is the arraigned poet, offering no plea, no excuse, no palliation for the 'deeds done in the body'--but standing mute, stiff and motionless, at the bar-his glorious eyes quenched forever, and his fine countenance overspread with the paleness of death; and the Rev. R.W. Griswold, a Radamanthus, who is not to be bilked of his fee, a thimble-full of newspaper notoriety. Laboring to be very perpendicular, ostentatiously upright, lest peradventure he might be suspected of a friendly inclination toward the memory of a man who had trusted him on his death-bed; with no measure about him--above or below--to compare himself with, or to steady himself by, he leans backward, with a simper and a strut, such as you may see every day of your life in little, pompous, fidgety men, trying to stand high in the world, in spite of their Creator."<br />
<br />
"While pronouncing a judgment upon the dead body of his old associate, who had left the world in a hurry, and under a mistake, which the Reverend gentleman took the earliest opportunity of correcting--by telegraph--at a penny a time, for a newspaper, and in such a way, as to leave it doubtful whether, in his opinion, Edgar A. Poe had ever had any business at all here, and whether on the whole, it were not better for himself, and for the world, that he had never been born--with that millstone round his neck, which had just fallen off--he seems to take it for granted that all this parade of sympathy will not be seen through--that, when he lifts the handkerchief to his eyes, and snuffles about poor Poe, and his melancholy want of principle--the ancient grudge still burning underneath this show, will be forgotten--and that he, at least, will have credit for whatsoever Poe had not. Peradventure he may find it so; for most assuredly, the reverse of the proposition is true. Whatsoever Edgar A. Poe had--that Mr. R. W. Griswold had not."<br />
-John Neal, "Edgar A. Poe," "Daily Advertiser," April 26,1850<br />
<br />
"It is a pity that so many of these biographies [in "Graham’s Magazine"] were entrusted to Mr. Griswold. He certainly lacks independence, or judgment, or both.”<br />
-Edgar Allan Poe, letter to James Russell Lowell, October 19, 1843<br />
<br />
"No lie was too great for Griswold, no slander too outrageous."<br />
-website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore<br />
<br />
"I puff your books, you know, without any regard to their quality.” <br />
-The Reverend gentleman himself, showing a rare moment of honesty in a letter to publishers Ticknor & Co., July 10, 1842<br />
<br />
And to show how popular my proposed holiday would be, here is a mere brief sample of the outpouring of admiration for Reverend Griswold that can be found every day in the Twitterverse:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The Baltimore Ravens giving play calling to Jim Caldwell is like Edgar Allan Poe making Rufus Wilmot Griswold his literary executor.<br />
— Dustin Parkes (@dustinparkes) <a href="https://twitter.com/dustinparkes/statuses/280401069442469888">December 16, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Rufus Wilmot Griswold was a jerk. Hey all you people making <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Poe&src=hash">#Poe</a> movies, there's your bad guy!<br />
— Sheairs Creative (@poeheadcom) <a href="https://twitter.com/poeheadcom/statuses/128923349383512064">October 25, 2011</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Critic, writer, friend and enemy of <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23EAPoe&src=hash">#EAPoe</a>. Much maligned, sexually confused, abusive, harsh, malicious. At <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Expo&src=hash">#Expo</a>.<br />
— George O'Har (@georgeohar) <a href="https://twitter.com/georgeohar/statuses/73489884953853952">May 25, 2011</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Wondering why on earth would someone believe anything said or written by Rufus Griswold. He was clearly no good: he even had an evil name!<br />
— Patricia Llaneza (@PattyLlaneza) <a href="https://twitter.com/PattyLlaneza/statuses/253214756079562752">October 2, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23LIT307E&src=hash">#LIT307E</a> Funny thing is Griswold was more like a Poe character than Poe was. Griswold was insane and highly unethical.<br />
— Chuck Caruso (@jcdarkly) <a href="https://twitter.com/jcdarkly/statuses/398675016604459008">November 8, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Researching Poe for a term paper. Man, <a href="https://twitter.com/RufusWGriswold">@RufusWGriswold</a> was one helluva DICK when it came to slandering his legacy. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23lit307E&src=hash">#lit307E</a><br />
— Timothy Merritt (@timothymerritt) <a href="https://twitter.com/timothymerritt/statuses/401162611418361857">November 15, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<a href="https://twitter.com/RufusWGriswold">@RufusWGriswold</a> "Man,I can't wait to read that Rufus Griswold anthology" <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SaidNoOneEver&src=hash">#SaidNoOneEver</a>. :)<br />
— Edward St.Grey (@EdwardStGrey23) <a href="https://twitter.com/EdwardStGrey23/statuses/224342846356987905">July 15, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
I love the fact that Thomas Dunn English & Rufus Wilmot Griswold languish in obscurity while the object of their hatred Poe is immortal<br />
— Paisano (@Paisano) <a href="https://twitter.com/Paisano/statuses/272732807535656960">November 25, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
I HATE Rufus Griswold! He is a terrible poet, critic.. just terrible at everything! <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23writer&src=hash">#writer</a><br />
— Edgar Allan Poe (@Chatt_eallenpoe) <a href="https://twitter.com/Chatt_eallenpoe/statuses/327218312880721921">April 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
RT: <a href="https://twitter.com/EighteenOhNine">@EighteenOhNine</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23EdgarAllanPoe&src=hash">#EdgarAllanPoe</a> is the god of literature. Rufus Griswold is a stupid bitch that talked shit about Poe in his obituary.<br />
— Rev Rufus W Griswold (@RufusWGriswold) <a href="https://twitter.com/RufusWGriswold/statuses/316034714546864128">March 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Damn you, Rufus Griswald.<br />
— BiasedGirl (@BiasedGirl) <a href="https://twitter.com/BiasedGirl/statuses/384587632270798849">September 30, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Fuck Rufus Wilmot Griswold !! ;]<br />
— Oshwe Jahrastafari (@Oshwe) <a href="https://twitter.com/Oshwe/statuses/425197034631868416">January 20, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
Is there anyone whose heart does not warm from reading these eulogies of Doctor Griswold? Come on, everyone, let's make this national--nay, <i>worldwide--</i>holiday happen!<br />
<br />
<i>[P.S. Go visit <a href="https://twitter.com/RufusWGriswold" target="_blank">the Reverend himself</a> on Twitter and send some generous, sincere birthday abuse his way. Tell him Undine sent you.]</i>Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-75776557504216349942014-01-29T08:49:00.001-08:002014-01-29T08:49:29.703-08:00Poe Libel of the DayBehold, as the city of Boston presents the<a href="https://www.suffolk.edu/news/23978.php" target="_blank"> Rufus Griswold Biography of memorial statues</a>.<br />
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After all these years, the Frogpondians have finally gotten their revenge on him.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-48920570304911784172014-01-19T04:18:00.000-08:002014-01-19T04:19:30.967-08:00Happy Birthday, Edgar!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
For this year's Poe Birthday Tribute, I am reprinting two articles published around the time of the Poe Centenary. The first is "The Fame of Poe" by John Macy, which appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly" for December 1908. The second is "Poe and the Hall of Fame" by James Routh. It was published in the "Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia" for January 1911. I do not agree with everything said in these essays--far from it--but they do make some valid points, and generally stand as a good overview of how Poe was regarded a century after his birth. As I have mentioned before, I like to think of this blog as a place where old Poe articles go to die, so since they do not seem to have ever been reprinted anywhere, I'm giving them a new home.<br />
<br />
Of course, to celebrate the anniversary of Poe's birth, the most appropriate thing to do is to read his works, rather than merely reading <i>about</i> them. That is the only way we can ever hope to understand the real man.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
No man more truly than Poe illustrates our conception of a poet as one who treads the cluttered ways of circumstance with his head in the clouds. Many another impoverished dreamer has dwelt in his thoughts, apart from the world's events. And of nearly all artists it is true that their lives are written in their works, and that the rest of the story concerns another almost negligible personality. In the case of Poe the separation between spiritual affairs and temporal is unusually wide. His fragile verse is pitched above any landscape of fact; his tales contain only misty reflections of common experience; and the legendary personage which he has become is a creature inspired in other imaginations by his books, and not a faithful portrait of the human being who lived in America between 1809 and 1849. The contrast between his aspirations and his earthly conditions, between the figure of romance he would fain have been and the man in authentic records stripped of myth and controversy, is pitiful, almost violent.<br />
<br />
This poet with a taste for palaces and Edens lived in sprawling cities that had not yet attempted magnificence. This bookish man, whom one images poring over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, owned no wonderful library, not even such a "working" collection as a literary man is supposed to require, but feasted on the miscellaneous riches that fell now and then upon the arid desk of the hack reviewer. This inventor of grotesque plots had no extraordinary adventures, none certainly that make thrilling anecdote. Capable of Chesterfieldian grace of style, and adept in the old-fashioned southern flourish of manner, he left few "polite" letters, and those few are undistinguished. To follow Poe's course by the guide of literary landmarks is to undertake a desolate journey.<br />
<br />
As his artistic self is apart from things, so it is apart from men. In his criticisms, it is true, he is found in open and somewhat controversial relations with the writers of his time and vicinity. As editor, he had dealings with the world of authors and journalists. But his acquaintance among the "Literati" includes no man of letters who is now well remembered, and implies no possibility of flashing exchange between his imagination and another as brilliant. He never met his intellectual equal in the flesh) except Lowell, whom he saw only once. Irving in Sunnyside was not nearer than Irving in Spain. Not a friend was qualified to counsel or encourage Poe in his work; not a neighbor in art was competent to inspire him. He was the flower of no group of writers, but stands alone, original, aloof, all but exotic.<br />
<br />
The isolation of Poe from the best minds of his day is not well understood by those who have not a correct geographical conception of America in 1840. One of the most authoritative English reviews expressed surprise that a recent book on Boston omitted from the chapter devoted to litterateurs the name of Poe, who was born in Boston and was the finest of American poets. The intellectual life of the only Greater Boston that has produced literature was as remote from Poe as was Victorian London, and he was the only important critic in America who understood the relative magnitudes of those two centres of light. His caustic opinions about the Bostonians, which seem more discerning to us than they did to our New England fathers, are witness to his detachment from the only considerable movement in American literature of those dim provincial times.<br />
<br />
Whatever influence contemporaneous thought exerted on Poe came from books and not from men, not from experience with the world. Though a few reflections of his contacts with life, such as the English school in "William Wilson," are to be made out in his stories, and though in some of his essays a momentary admiration or hostility of a personal nature slipped a magnifying lens beneath his critical eye, yet the finger of circumstance is seldom on his pages, the echoes of human encounter are not heard in his art.<br />
<br />
The nature of Poe's disseverance from life is one of the strangest in the annals of unworldly men of books. He was not among those who, like Lamb, transfigure petty and dull experience, or those who combat suffering with blithe philosophies like Stevenson; he was not a willful hermit; nor was he among those invalids who, in constrained seclusion, have leisure for artistry and contemplation. He was a practical editor in busy offices. He no doubt thought of himself, Mr. Poe, as urbane and cosmopolitan. He had knocked about the world a little. For a while he was in the army. He was effective and at ease upon the lecture platform. He meditated rash adventures in foreign lands until he apparently came to believe that he had really met with them. At his best, he was reserved and well bred, aware of his intellectual superiority. Sometimes, perhaps when he was most cast down and hard driven, he met the world with a jaunty man-of-the-world swagger. After he left the Allans, he was on the outskirts of social groups, high or low. His love for elegant society unfitted him for vagabondage. His lack of worldly success, if no other limitation, forbade his entering for more than a visit the circles of comfort and good breeding. But no matter what his mood or what his circumstance, it did not affect the quality of his work or the nature of his subjects. When he wrote he dropped the rest of himself.<br />
<br />
And, with respect to him, artistic biography may well follow his example, and documentary biography may confess its futility. No biographer thus far has succeeded in making very interesting the narrative portions of Poe's career. It is a bare chronicle of neutral circumstance, from which rises, the more wonderful, an achievement of highly-colored romance, poetry of perfect, unaccountable originality, and criticism the most penetrating that any American writer has attained.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it is his criticism, an air of maturity and well-pondered knowledge of all the literatures of the Orient and the Occident, which makes it seem the more singular that he owed nothing to universities and scholarly circles. The Allans took him to England when he was six years old and put him in a school where he learned, it is fair to suppose, the rudiments of the classics and French. He went one term to the University of Virginia, and a few months to West Point. Though one institution was founded by Jefferson and the other by the United States government, it is no very cynical irreverence to withhold from them gratitude on Poe's behalf. The most significant record of his life at "the University " is that which shows him browsing idly in the library. His most profitable occupation at West Point was writing lampoons of the instructors and preparing the volume of verses for which he collected subscriptions from his fellow cadets. He was not at either institution long enough to receive whatever of culture and instruction it had to offer. He was self-taught. He read poetry when he was young, and began to write it. As a military cadet he had precocious and arrogant critical opinions. At twenty-four he appears with a neat manuscript roll of short stories under his arm, which cause the judges of a humdrum magazine contest to start awake.<br />
<br />
From this time to the end he was a hard-working journalist and professional story-teller. He pursued his work through carking, persistent poverty, amid the distractions of inner restlessness and outward maladjustments. His poverty was not merited punishment for indolence or extravagance. He was industrious, entitled to better wage than he received. He was not an obscure genius, waiting for posterity to discover him, but was popular in his own day. His books, however, had no great sale, for his pieces appeared in the magazines, some of them more than once, and the demand for his work was thus satisfied with more profit to the magazine publishers than to the author.<br />
<br />
He lived laborious days and he lived in frugal style. He spent no money on himself, but handed his earnings to his mother-in-law. Whatever else was sinful in the sprees which have been over-elaborated in the chronicles, their initial cost was not great. When he went into debt, the lust he hoped to gratify with the money was the insane desire to found a good magazine. His appetites were mainly intellectual. His wildest dissipation was the performance of mental acrobatics for the applause that he craved.<br />
<br />
He spent weeks making good his challenge to the world to send him a cryptogram that he could not decipher. When he reviewed a book, he examined it to the last rhetorical minutia. Griswold's opinion, that "he was more remarkable as a dissector of sentences than as a commenter upon ideas," is a mean way of saying that he was given to patient scrutiny. Mrs. Browning put it more generously when she said that Poe had so evidently "read" her poems as to be a wonder among critics. Poe had a mania for curious, unusual information. His knowledge was so disparate and inaccurate that several critics in sixty years have discovered, with the aid of specialists* that he lacked the thoroughness which is now habitual with all who undertake to write books. But Poe's knowledge, such as it was, implies much reading. And much reading and much writing are impossible to an idle, dissipated man.<br />
<br />
This clear-headed, fine-handed artist is present and accounted for at the author's desk. His hours off duly, abundantly and confusedly recorded, do not furnish essential matter for large books. If one enters without forewarning any life of Poe, one feels that a mystery is about to open. There seem to be clues to suppressed matters, suspicious lacunas. The lives are written, like some novels, with hintful rows of stars. A shadowy path promises to lead to a misty midregion of Weir. But Weir proves to be a place that Poe invented. He himself was the first foolish biographer of Poe. The real Poe (to take an invidious adjective from the titles of a modern kind of biography) is a simple, intelligible, and if one may dare to say it, a rather insignificant man. To make a hero or a villain of him is to write fiction. <br />
<br />
The craving for story has been at work demanding and producing such fiction. The raw materials were made in America and shipped to France for psychological manufacture. The resulting figure is an irresponsible genius scribbling immortality under vinous inspiration, or turning neuropsychopathic rhymes. Before paranoia was discovered as a source of genius, wine received all the credit. But Poe could not write a line except when his head was clear and he was at the antipodes of hilarity. The warmth of Bohemia, boulevard mirth, however stimulating to the other mad bards of New York and Philadelphia, never fetched a song from him. He was a solemn, unconvivial, humorless man, who took no joy in his cups. If on occasion he found companions in riot, they were not cafe poets. Once, when the bottle was passing, and there were other poets present, he so far forgot himself as to say that he had written one poem that would live ("The Raven"), but this expression of pride does not seem unduly bacchanalian. One could wish that the delights of stein-on-the-table friendship had been his. He needed friends and the happier sort of relaxation. But what record is there of the New York wits and journalists visiting Fordham of an evening to indulge in book-talk and amicable liquor? The chaste dinners of the Saturday Club in Boston were ruddy festivals of mutual admiration beside anything that Poe knew.<br />
<br />
The unromantic fact is that alcohol made Poe sick and he got no consolation from it. But before this fact was widely understood, long before there was talk of neuropsychology and hydrocephalus, when even starvation was not clearly reckoned with, it was known in America that Poe drank. This fact became involved with a tradition which has descended in direct line from Elizabethan puritanism to nineteenth-century America. According to this tradition, poets who do nothing but write poetry are frivolous persons inclined to frequent taverns. The New England poets, to be sure, were not revelers, but they were moral teachers as well as poets. The American, knowing them, saw Poe in contrast, as the Englishwoman in the theatre contrasted the ruin of Cleopatra with "the 'ome life of our own dear Queen." And Poe, always unfortunate, offers a confirmatory half-fact by beginning to die in a gutter in Baltimore — a fact about which Holmes, the physician, can make a not unkindly joke. Besides, what can be expected of a poet who is said- to have influenced French poets? We know what the French poets are, because they also wrote novels — or somebody with about the same name wrote them. Alas for Poe that, in addition to his other offences against respectability, he should have got a French reputation and become, not only a son of Marlowe, but a son of Villon and brother of Verlaine.**<br />
<br />
And Poe, meanwhile, with these brilliant but somewhat defamatory reputations, lived, worked, and died in such intellectual solitude that Griswold could write immediately after his death that he left few friends. It is the unhappy truth. Those who promptly denied it, Graham and Willis, showed commendable good nature, but were both incapable of being Poe's friends in any warm sense. Whether they were at fault or Poe, the fact is that Poe distrusted one and was contemptuous of the other.<br />
<br />
What writer besides Poe, whose life is copiously recorded and who lived to have his work known in three nations, has left no chronicles of notable friendships ? Think how the writers of England and France, with some exceptional outcasts, lived in circles of mutual admiration! Think how in America the New Englanders clustered together, how even the shy and reserved Hawthorne was rescued from a solitude that might have been morbid for the man and damaging to his work, by the consciousness that in Cambridge and Concord, in the rear of Fields's shop, were cultivated men who delighted to talk to him about his work, whose loyalty was gently critical and cherishing. Lafcadio Hearn — who has been compared to Poe —had friends whom he could not alienate by any freak of temper. And those friends encouraged him to self-expression in private letter and work of art.<br />
<br />
Some such encouragement Poe received from J. P. Kennedy, a generous friend of young genius, and from the journalist, F. W. Thomas, whose admiration for Poe was affectionate and abiding. But among his intimates were few large natures, few sound judgments, to keep him up to his best. Long after his death, Poe was honored in Virginia as a local hero. The perfervid biography of him by Professor Harrison, of the University of Virginia, contrives to include all the great names and beautiful associations of the Old Dominion. But during his life Poe was not a favorite of the best families of Richmond. As well think of Burns as the child of cultivated Edinburgh, or of Whitman as the darling of Fifth Avenue. At the height of his career in New York, between the appearance of "The Raven" and the time when poverty and illness claimed him irrecoverably, Poe appears as a lion in gatherings of the literati. But, among them, his only affectionate friends were two or three women.<br />
<br />
To the intellectual man who has no stalwart friends, who consumes his strength in a daily struggle against poverty and burns out his heart in vain pride, there remains another refuge, a home warmed with family loyalty, full of happy incentive to labor, able perhaps to cooperate with the genius of the household. Such refuge was not given to Poe. No man ever had a more cheerless place in which to set up his work-table. His wife was a child when he married her, and was still young when she died of lingering consumption. His aunt and mother-in-law, who no doubt did her best with the few dollars which "Eddie" put into her hands, was an ignorant woman and probably had no idea what the careful rolls of manuscript were about, beyond the fact that they sometimes fetched a bit of money. Poe would have been excusable if he had sought and found outside his home some womanly consolation of a finer intellectual quality than his wife and aunt were able to afford. His writings are graced with poetic feminine spirits that suggest vaguely the kind of soul with which he would have liked to commune. But he never found such a soul. He made several hysterical quests after swans, but they turned out geese, if not to him, certainly to the modern eye that chances to fall on their own memorials of the pursuit. None was of distinguished mind, and all were either innocent or prudent. If Poe, with his Gascon eloquence and compelling eye, rushed the fortress of propriety, nothing serious came of the adventure and nothing serious remains, — only trivial gossip, silly correspondence, and quite gratuitous defences. It is a Barmecide feast for hungry scandal.<br />
<br />
What has just been written may seem a negative and deprecating comment on Poe's story. But it gives truly, I believe, the drab setting in which his work gleams. And by depressing the high false lights that have been hung about his head, we make more salient the virtue that was properly his, the proud independence of mind, the fixity of artistic purpose, the will which governed his imagination and kept it steadily at work in a poor chamber of life, creating beautiful things. However much or little we admire Poe's work, we must understand as a fact in biography that, from the first tales with which he emerged from obscurity to the half philosophical piece with which, the year before his death, he sought to capture the universe and astound its inhabitants, his writings are the product of an excellent brain actuated by the will to create. He was a finical craftsman, patient in revision. He did not sweep upward to the heights of eloquence with blind, undirected power. He calculated effects. His delicate instrument did not operate itself while the engineer was absent or asleep. Deliberate, mathematical, alert, he marshaled his talents; and when he failed, failed for lack of judgment, not for want of industry.<br />
<br />
To labor for an artistic result with cool precision while hunger and disease are in the workshop; to revise, always with new excellence, an old poem which is to be republished for the third or fourth time in a cheap journal; to make a manuscript scrupulously perfect to please one's self, — for there is to be no extra loaf of bread as reward, the market is indifferent to the finer excellences, — this is the accomplishment of a man with ideals and the will to realize them. Let the most vigorous of us write in a cold garret and decide whether, on moral grounds, our persistent driving of our faculties entitles us to praise. Let us be so hungry that we can write home with enthusiasm about the good breakfast in a bad New York boarding-house; and after it is all over, let us imagine ourselves listening earthward from whatever limbo the moralists admit us to, and hearing a critic say that we have been untrue, not only to ourselves, but to our art. For so Dr. Goldwin Smith's ethical theory of art disposes of Poe, Poe who was never untrue to his art in his slenderest story, or lazy-minded in his least important criticism.<br />
<br />
This confident man, who will measure the stars with equal assurance by the visions of poetry and the mathematics of astronomy, and set forth the whole truth of the universe in even, compact sentences such as no man can make by accident, lacks bedclothes to cover a dying wife — except the army overcoat which he had got at West Point sixteen years before. Says Trollope, the most self-possessed day-laborer in literature, "The doctor's vials and the ink-bottle held equal places in my mother's rooms. I have written many novels under many circumstances; but I doubt very much whether I could write one when my whole heart was by the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing herself into two parts, and keeping her intellect by itself, clear from the troubles of the world and fit for the duty it had to do, I never saw equalled. I do not think that the writing of a novel is the most difficult task which a man may be called upon to do; but it is a task that may be supposed to demand a spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with a troubled spirit killed Sir Walter Scott."<br />
<br />
If Poe's work consisted of brilliant fragments, disconnected spurts of genius, the relation between his labors and his life as it is usually conceived would be easy to trace. His biography furnishes every reason why his work should be ill thought and confused; it does not sufficiently credit him with sturdy devotion to his task. That must be his merit as a man, and the ten volumes establish it. His tales may be "morbid," and his verses "very valueless." They required, to produce them, the sanest intelligence continuously applied. On Poe's uneventful and meagre life there has been built up an apocryphal character, the centre of controversies kept awhirl by as strange a combination of prejudices and non-literary interests as ever vexed an author's reputation. Some of the controversies he made himself and bequeathed to posterity, for he was a child of Hagar.***<br />
<br />
But the rest have been imposed on him by a world that loves art for talk's sake. Since he was a Virginian by adoption and in feeling, he has been tossed about in a belated sectionalism. Southerners have scented a conspiracy in New England to deprive him of his dues, even to keep him out of the Hall of Fame because he was not a northerner. Englishmen and Frenchmen, far from the documents, have redeemed his reputation from the neglect and miscomprehension of the savage nation where he had the misfortune to be born. Only last year Mrs. Weiss's "Home Life of Poe" threatened to become an international issue. It was to certain British admirers of Poe the banal and slanderous voice of America against the greatest of American writers. As has been said, the very newest fashion in biography, the pathological, makes Poe a star case and further confuses the facts. Echoes of neuropathological criticism find their way to American Sunday papers which serve Poe up as a neurotic, with melancholy portraits and ravens spreading tenebrous wings above the columns of type.<br />
<br />
If Poe's spirit has not forgotten that in its earthly progress it perpetrated hoaxes, courted Byronic fame, advertised itself as an infant prodigy, made up adventures in Greece and France which its earthly tenement did not experience, took sardonic delight in mystifying the public, it must see a kind of grim justice in the game the world is playing with its reputation. Nevertheless, it is unfitting that a man who did little worth remembering but write books, who lived in bleak alleys and dull places, should be haled up and down the main streets of gossip; that a poet who was, as one of his critics says, all head like a cherub, should have volumes written about his physical habits.<br />
<br />
The reason for Poe's posthumous misfortune it is worth while to examine, for an understanding of it is necessary as an introduction to any of the lives of Poe, and it lies at the very heart of the institution of biography. We have seen that Poe was a friendless man. Griswold so affirmed just after Poe had left, amid shadowy circumstances, a life that was none too bright to the eye of the moralist nor clear to the eye of the world. And Griswold proved his assertion, for he was by his own declaration not Poe's friend, and yet he was the appointed biographer and editor of the collected works. There is no other relation so strange, so unfortunate, in literary history as this<br />
<br />
Griswold was an editor and anthologist of no mean ability. Upon one of his collections of poetry — now an interesting museum of antiquity where archaeologists may study the literature of ancient America — Poe made acerbating, and no doubt discriminating, comments in a lecture. The report of the lecture angered Griswold. Poe's printed commentary is favorable, and we do not know just what he said in the lecture. He apologized to Griswold, for he was alert to the advantage of his own appearance in later clusters of literary lights which Griswold might assemble. Once, after an absence from his office in Graham's Magazine, he returned to find Griswold at his desk. He resigned immediately, so the story goes, in one of his costly outbursts of pride. Yet he thought Griswold was his friend. He borrowed money from him, and when, the year before his death, he left New York for Richmond he wrote to Griswold appointing him literary executor. Griswold's letter in which he accepted the office must have been friendly, for there is something like unwitting testimony on this point. When Poe read the letter in Richmond, a young girl, Susan Archer Weiss, was with him and noted that he was pleased.<br />
<br />
After Poe's death Griswold published a severe but not untrue article in the Tribune, the famous article signed " Ludwig." Willis and Graham came to Poe's defense in good spirit. Griswold, rather piqued than chastened, prefixed to the third volume of Poe's work his memoir, since unnecessarily suppressed. And long afterward appeared his letter to Mrs. Whitman, written just after the Tribune article. In that letter he says, " I was not his friend, nor was he mine." Therein lies Griswold's perfidy, and not in the memoir itself. For when, coming from one of the later lives of Poe, one turns in a heat of indignation to Griswold, one finds nothing very bad and little that is untrue. Griswold merely emphasized the wrong things, and in so doing he became a monster among biographers. Through him, the Muse of Biography violated one of the important laws of her dominion. This law prescribes that the best of a man's life shall be told fully, and told first.<br />
<br />
When a man dies, his letters and papers are put into the hands of one who loves and admires him, or who at least has no reluctance to celebrate him. The work of the first biographer is thrown to the world, where it undergoes scrutiny and correction. The mark of commentators in time turns it gray, but the original ground is white. The thousands of human stories together make a vast whiteness. In the midst of this background a black official portrait, even though the blackness be lines of fact, becomes a libel. The Devil's Advocate occupies the place where God's Advocate is expected to speak. If the champion tells a dark tale, people think the truth must be darker still, for does not the champion put the best possible face on his hero? Proper tone is impossible to restore. Injustice is done irrevocably. What the friend admits the world doubly affirms.<br />
<br />
The life-story that grows brighter with time is very rare. Joan of Arc is metamorphosed from a witch to a saint. Machiavelli is proved after centuries to have been not very "machiavellian." Bacon, another upholder of legal autocracy, is seen at last to have been a just and generous man, and not the figure which rising Puritanism made of him at the moment of his death and its triumph. But these are restorations of characters that flourished before the age when official biographies are looked for within a year or two of a man's death. Of the recently dead we are not yet scientific enough to tell the whole truth. The rights of friendship are recognized, and its duties taken for granted. If its support is withdrawn the structure is awry. One has only to remember Henley's protest against Balfour's Stevenson, Purcell's life of Cardinal Manning, and Froude's Carlyle, to be reminded how strong is the obligation upon the friend, or the one holding the friend's office, not to emphasize the hero's blemishes.<br />
<br />
Yet Henley said nothing against Stevenson except that Balfour's portrait was too sugary to be a true image of a man. Purcell only showed that Manning played politics, disliked Newman, and was anxious about what posterity should think of him. Froude, so far as we can discover, now that we no longer make Carlyle an object of that kind of hero worship which he thought was good for us, said nothing damaging at all. He only protested too much in his prefaces that he was doing the right thing to draw Carlyle as he was. Yet, as late as 1900, I heard an editor of Carlyle say that Froude had blackened the Master.<br />
<br />
Such men as Carlyle and Stevenson and Manning settle back amid any biographic disturbance. They knock malicious or incompetent biographers off their feet, and burst the covers of little books. It is the poor fellow with an unheroic soul that the biographer can confine and distort. It is the man of a middling compound of virtue and sin who can be sent down for a half century of misrepresentation by the hand of a treacherous friend. Biography, especially when it deals with the artist who has no part in the quarrels of creeds and politics, is wont to bear its hero along "with his few faults shut up like dead flowerets." Griswold startles the peaceful traffic by turning and running against the current of convention.<br />
<br />
Later biographers have not served Poe by falling foul of Griswold. For he had the facts and is an able prosecuting attorney. And much harm has been done, too, by emotional souls who, as Mark Twain says of Dowden's Shelley, " hang a fact in the sky and squirt rainbows at it." The error of Griswold, and of Poe's defenders, is an error of spirit, the delusion that Griswold's "charges" are momentous. After Griswold the story of Poe becomes a weaving and tangling of very small threads of fact. Every succeeding biographer has to take his cue from a powerful man who cannot be disregarded; and each biographer, in order as a faithful chronicler to do his part to straighten the story out, must put rubbish in his book. Even Mr. Woodberry, whose Life is incomparably the best, shows the constraint imposed on him by wearisome problems, and loses his accustomed vitality and his essential literary enthusiasm.****<br />
<br />
It is too much to hope that the nebular Poe will be dispelled and the Poe of controversy be laid. Perhaps one should not hope for this, because it may be that, even as the Shakespeare myth is a necessary concomitant of the poet's greatness, the mythic Poe is a measure of his fame, and to attempt to destroy it may have the undesirable effect of seeming to belittle Poe. Nevertheless Poe's centennial year, falling in an age of grown-up judgments, affords a good occasion for the world to cease confounding his magnificent fame with petty inquisitions and rhetorical defenses. If sudden cessation is impossible, we can at least hope that more and more the trivialities of his life may recede, and the supreme triumph of his art stand forth unvexed and serene.<br />
<br />
[Following are the footnotes to Macy's article.]<br />
<br />
* A special student of one abstruse subject assures me that, in that subject, Poe is the only modern writer of general culture who knows what he is talking about. As this specialist has not yet published his researches, I will not say what the subject is.<br />
<br />
** The biographer's province ma; extend far enough into literary criticism to note a curious confusion of literary judgments with biographic. Colonel Higginson, in bis Life of Longfellow, says that" Poe took captive the cultivated bat morbid taste of the French public." The words " but morbid " are not only a singular indictment of France, but a more singular indictment of America, for Foe took captive the American reading public before France heard of him. Let us deliver Poe's work, if we cannot deliver his life, from provincial controversy. But even his work, accepted, individual, indisputable, is troubled by another biographic question — his debt to one Chivers. Chivers could not write poetry. Poe could. The debt is evident.<br />
<br />
*** As late as 1895. fifty years after the event, Thomas Dunn English, writing from the uncontroversial atmosphere of the House of Representatives to Griswold's son, shoved that he still regarded as alive a quarrel almost as comic as Whistler's quarrel with Ruskin, though far less witty.<br />
<br />
****I am sorry that I cannot see the revised edition of Mr. Woodberry's Life of Poe before sending this paper to press. No one who has not labored through the Poe bibliography can appreciate how fine and sound is Mr. Woodberry's work of twenty-five years ago. No doubt the revision has resulted in an ultimately satisfactory life of Poe.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
Poe has at last been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Like Chinese tea that has been boxed and marked according to quality as "First chop," "Second chop" and so on, Poe has been inspected and labeled, and may now be supposed to pass current as strictly "First chop." That this consummation has been so long delayed may be accounted one of the strangest phenomena of literary history. The explanation is still far from being wholly clear. It may be worth while, therefore, before turning away from so important an event, to look once more at the facts of Poe's posthumous fame, a fame that has encountered such perverse, and to the minds of his fellow alumni of Virginia, as it appears, such inexplicable hindrances. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The usual explanation of the antipathy that many undoubtedly feel towards Poe is that it is due to a series of actions executed by New England critics, actions which the milder defenders of Poe call prejudice, the more radical, conspiracy. As this theory has been repeatedly advanced, and is in many quarters implicitly accepted, it may be well to observe at the outset that it rests on foundations that are flimsy, if not wholly imaginary. Emerson called Poe "that jingle man." Are we to suppose that he was maliciously attacking Poe? The idea is exquisitely absurd. Nor was it likely that Emerson was merely repeating the ideas of others; his original independence of thought was not less vigorous than his honesty. Henry James referred to Poe's "very valueless verses." His phrase may have been tempted into extremes by the lure of alliteration: but Mr. James is not given to partisanship. Baudelaire, the French disciple of Poe, whose moral character was to Poe's as black is to light grey, inspired no prejudice in New England. Why should partisan prejudice be supposed to operate against the master when it does not attack the disciple? Most conclusive of all, though, is the fact that the same ballot that first excluded Poe from the Hall of Fame also excluded the New York novelist Cooper and the New England-New York poet Bryant, and included Lee! There was plainly no sectional prejudice at work. No, some other motive than sectional prejudice must be sought in explaining the opinions of the sturdy fellow countrymen of Longfellow, of Whittier, and of Hawthorne. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Let us then look for a moment at the facts. Upon inspecting the literature about Poe written since his death, two facts become at once plain: first, that, except in the writing of a small minority of New England critics, Poe's literature has always been accepted as of the highest rank; second, that his personal character was, about the time of his death, generally assigned to the lowest rank, and that the public at large, unsatisfied with the verdict, have been discussing the matter with increasing interest ever since. These facts can be well illustrated by figures. The number of editions of a writer's work or of a part of his work is a fair index to popularity. By way of adopting a standard by which to measure popularity, we may take Longfellow, the most popular American poet, and compare the frequency of Longfellow editions with the frequency of Poe editions. The result is given in a table: </blockquote>
<blockquote>
1902-1905 inclusive.... Poe: 45 Longfellow: 68<br />
1906-1909 inclusive...Poe: 39 Longfellow: 75 </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The greatest number of Longfellow editions for any year of the second period (25) appeared in 1906, in anticipation of the Longfellow centenary in 1907. The Poe centenary in 1909 seems to have had no influence upon the number of editions. Poe then in 1902 was almost as popular an author as Longfellow. Since then the editions of his works have decreased in number while the editions of Longfellow have increased. The decrease may perhaps be explained as due to other causes than a decreasing vogue; for one thing, Poe's works do not lend themselves to exploitation in picture books, as do Longfellow's. But it is plainly wrong to suppose that the recognition of Poe's work is just coming into its own. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The other fact, that the personal interest in Poe as a man is increasing, may be similarly illustrated. Here again we may take Longfellow for comparison. The following table gives the articles that have been printed in popular magazines about the two authors. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Before 1882... Poe: 25 Longfellow: 104<br />
1882-1886 inclusive ...Poe: 21 Longfellow: 73<br />
1887-1891 inclusive...Poe: 9 Longfellow: 10<br />
1892-1896 inclusive...Poe: 18 Longfellow: 17<br />
1897-1901 inclusive...Poe: 26 Longfellow: 12<br />
1902-1906 inclusive...Poe: 25 Longfellow: 13<br />
1907-Dec. 1, 1910...Poe: 60 Longfellow: 27 </blockquote>
<blockquote>
During the last of these periods, that from 1907 to the present, both the Poe and the Longfellow centenary celebrations occurred. Both show an increase in public interest for this period, but the increase is much greater in the case of Poe. The Longfellow centenary brought out twelve articles, the Poe thirty-six. These figures bear out the contention that Poe's writing is not more recognized to-day than heretofore, but that Poe the man is being more and more discussed, and that such discussion was increasing before the Hall of Fame controversy, beginning in 1900, stirred the whole matter up afresh. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The explanation of this phenomenon is not difficult, though in many details the matter is obscure. There has been, from the time when Poe sprang into fame to the present moment, a continuous and unrelenting discrimination made between the man and his work. The work has, with the exceptions mentioned, always been praised, the man violently attacked and as violently defended. During Poe's lifetime, he was highly praised. Tennyson called him the most original American genius, Victor Hugo the "'Prince of American literature." Lowell said that he might be "the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works" in America, if he did not sometimes mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand. Even Griswold the notorious, repeating after Poe's death one of his short sketches of that author printed in the "Poets and Poetry of America." speaks of his "brilliant articles," says "His poems are constructed with wonderful ingenuity, and finished with consummate art," finds him one of the few magazine writers "who have any real skill in literary art." and quotes Willis concerning "The Raven:" "It is the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country, and is unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative life." Can this be the Griswold we are taught to picture with horns and tail, the arch-fiend of the anti-Poe cult? </blockquote>
<blockquote>
There have, it is true, been dissenters besides Emerson and James, who have esteemed Poe's writing but little. An anonymous reviewer of the Stedman and Woodberry edition, writing in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1896, naively concludes that "Poe was far from being the literary mountebank he is generally pictured." John Macy, writing for the same magazine, December, 1908, attacks the French idea, presumably that of Barine and Lauvriere, that Poe was an "irresponsible genius scribbling immortality under vinous inspiration, or turning neuropsychopathic rhymes." Even Mr. Woodberry, the admirably impartial and sympathetic biographer of Poe, is doubtful about the moral effect of his writings. Baudelaire called Poe the martyr of a raw democracy; to which Mr. Woodberry replies [Atlantic Monthly, Dec, 1884] that a cult that flowered into the Fleurs du Mai must have had a foul root, and that he prefers raw democracy, even though the root in question be Poe. This illogical doctrine is repeated by Professor Barrett Wendell. Side by side, though, with Professor Wendell's treatment of Poe should be set his own remark, in finishing the "Book" in which he has discussed, among other writers, Irving, Cooper and Poe: "By the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the literary impulse of the Middle States [Irving, Cooper and Poe, understand] had proved abortive. For the serious literature of America we must revert to New England."(!) More significant is a recent opinion expressed in the Edinburgh Review [Jan., 1910]. In the palace of imaginative literature is one haunted room. Some shun it, others are attracted. But it has a spell for all. It is the antechamber to the unknown. And above the door is the name of Poe. "His works will not always be approved, but we believe that they will always be read." </blockquote>
<blockquote>
These slightly or more markedly negative criticisms of Poe's writing are, however, exceptional. Moreover they are explainable. There is in Poe's work an alloy of melodrama, that pet vice of most great writers. This the average reader sees and readily understands, precisely as he understands the humor of George Ade's fables, or the morality of the "Psalm of Life," or the carefully emphasized sensations of the Sunday press. The finer qualities of Poe, the delicate satire, the heart-wringing pathos half hidden from a world he contemptuously despised, the exquisite workmanship, like that of a fine worker in mosaic, these and many other virtues are caviar to the general reader. And even by the reader of naturally good taste Poe is often misinterpreted and so made repulsive. Notice, for example, the illustrations by Mr. Frederick Coburn, contemplate the loathsome cadaver in a state of semi-putrefaction with the skin sunken and the black cat crouched upon its head: there you see the objection that many intelligent persons raise toPoe. That the "Black Cat" was a profound study of a mental state escapes such persons just as the fact fails to appear in the grossly carnal conception of Mr. Coburn. As has been observed, however, these objections are rare. For the most part Poe, as a writer, has been frankly admired. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
As a man he has been regarded with different sentiments. Perhaps Poe was himself in some measure responsible for this. Drunkenness even Puritan New England might have forgiven; New England, at precisely this time, was raving over the philosophy of the opium fiend Coleridge. But most of the persons whom Poe attacked could not forgive being called charlatan. And that was what Poe called them. "As a literary people," he wrote, "we are one vast perambulating humbug." Again, "Chicanery is, with us, a far surer road than talent to distinction in letters." He then refers to bribery and blackmail between critics and publishers to puff literary reputations, indulges in a few such phrases as "unadulterated quackery," "blustering arrogance," "bare-faced plagiarism," and ends with a few direct allusions: "Mr. Bryant is not all a fool. Mr. Willis is not <i>quite</i> an ass. Mr. Longfellow <i>will</i> steal [plagiarize], but, perhaps, he cannot help it (for we have heard of such things) and then it must not be denied that <i>nil tetigitquod non ornavit</i>." Amusing? Of course, it is amusing; and doubtless in good part true. That is precisely what they could not forgive. That it was in part true is evidenced by Lowell's strictures upon the grossly inflated reputations of most writers of the day. The real trouble probably lay in the fact that Poe never met but one man who was intellectually his equal; that was Lowell, and he only saw Lowell once. Most of the others he despised and ridiculed, and they naturally hated him in return with deadly enmity. And many of them were in places of power or influence. That Poe went too far with his irresponsible satire in other ways cannot be denied. For example, on one occasion he promised to read a poem in Boston, failed to write it in time, palmed off on the audience "Al Araaf" written many years before, and then under the influence of the champagne supper that followed, confessed the whole thing. The audience was polite, but disgusted. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Poe's victims, though, had their revenge; they gratified to the full that lowest of human motives, the desire to "get even." Not only were all his foibles paraded forth and his virtues studiously ignored but the deliberately coined falsehoods set afloat have floated ever since, so that the mariner upon literary seas still encounters from time to time that strange and sinister flotsam and jetsam of scandal. And not only did Poe's enemies repeat these things, they taught their successors who never knew Poe to repeat them. The more Puritanic swallowed such statements with gusto, because they fell in with their predilections. For example, a writer in the Nation for March 25, 1875, writes, apparently in good faith: "He quarreled with every one who had a less indiscriminate admiration of him than Mr. Ingram has; was adopted by a wealthy man, whose money he wasted at wine and cards, and whose affections he alienated by all sorts of misconduct, and who finally forbade him his house. He attacked every literary man of eminence greater than his own with virulent and senseless abuse [this ineffable old donkey saw none of the wit or satire], and, though poor, had that sublime contempt for earning money which Mr. Ingram would call philosophic, perhaps, but which common-sense people in America call shiftlessness." There is the crux of the matter. He was shiftless; he was not a common-sense person. In addition to this defect there was a "Satanic" streak in Poe. While his Puritan contemporary Bryant was following Wordsworth, Poe was learning how to write by reading the "Satanic" Byron and Shelley. On the whole there was in him, his critics thought, something sinister. They also suspected him of being a hypocrite, and, like the virtuous people that Mark Twain mentions, gravely concluded that he was all the greater hypocrite for concealing the fact that he was one. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
This view of Poe was easily carried abroad, and the Edinburgh Review, in April, 1858, expressed the conviction that he was "one of the most worthless persons of whom we have any record in the world of letters." He was, according to this writer, idle, improvident, drunken, dissipated, treacherous, and ungrateful; he, in fact, combined "all the floating vices which genius had hitherto shown itself capable of grasping." Again, "The lowest abyss of moral imbecility and disrepute was never attained until he came." But why quote more of such stuff. Suffice it to say that these views had little effect upon Europe, and that the British instinct for fair play was proof against such perversions. In France, it is true, as late as 1897, was heard an echo of this, in an article by Arvede Barine, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1897. Poe, he says, when publicly denounced for drunkenness, "lied with the maladroitness of the criminal who loses his head when he finds himself discovered." Frenchmen, however, know Poe's own writings as few know them; and both the man and his work are certain of honest criticism at their hands.<br />
This, in general outline, is the history of Poe's posthumous career. With the death of the last of his personal enemies, the personal abuse has ceased; and the false traditions to which it gave rise are rapidly disappearing before the rising light of truth. Among the symptoms of this we have the recent acceptance of the poet by the Hall of Fame. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
There is one other curious tradition of Poe which, though not directly connected with this subject, should perhaps not be passed over. In the article by Mr. Barine just mentioned, the vagueness of some of Poe's poetry is explained as due to alcoholism of the neuropsychopathic type. This view is repeated without dissent by M. Lauvriere in his book, "Edgar Poe." The vagueness is a feature of style learned from Shelley, whose usage Poe elsewhere follows. Moreover it was a conscious and intentional thing, as the poet explained in one of his letters. When he saw fit to be precise in his writing he surpassed in scientific accuracy of detail almost any writer of our language. Poe had enough of bona fide failings to answer for; but neuropsychopathic degeneration in his writing was not one of them. If this alcoholism was a pathological thing, it never, so far as can be determined, gave rise to any literary symptom. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
At the present time Poe's fame seems secure. Though not evidenced by a great profusion of popular editions, the permanent respect he commands is evidenced by the continual reappearance of his work in standard forms, in large library editions, at least three of which have recently appeared in this country, in collections of standard literature designed for the class room, in the appearance of editions of a part or the whole of his works, copiously in England, Germany, and France, and less copiously in Sweden, in the Czechish country, in Italy, Denmark, Greece, South America, and Australia. In five representative collections of world literature in English, German, and Italian, Poe is the only author who appears in all five.<br />
Abroad, curiously enough, they frequently do not regard Poe as exactly American. Mr. Esme Stuart, writing in the English review, Nineteenth Century for July, 1893, finds him half English. In France they had adopted his tales at least three years before his death, and even at that early date were quarreling in the law courts over the right to publish them. Baudelaire a year or two later discovered in Poe the embodiment of his own literary ideas, and thereafter devoted much of his life to translating his works. Even the sections of America, now that prejudice against the man has disappeared, are contending for his glory. Boston claims his birth-place, Baltimore his paternal family, Virginia the credit for such early training as he did not acquire in England; while New York, as his home at the height of his fame, confidently regards him as a New Yorker. Truly Poe is, to-day, all things to all men, despite the fact that during most of his life he was homeless and often friendless. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
The other persons who were elected to the Hall of Fame at the last election were Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Fenimore Cooper, Phillips Brooks, William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, Andrew Jackson, John Lothrop Motley, Roger Williams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances E. Willard. Among the electors with whom the choice rests are, as alumni of the University of Virginia will recall with interest, two Virginians, Edwin A. Alderman, President of the University, and Richard Heath Dabney, historian and Dean of the Graduate School of the University. </blockquote>
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<br />Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-63890509279959722982013-10-30T07:34:00.000-07:002013-10-30T07:34:23.076-07:00Halloween With EdgarWhat is Halloween without Edgar Allan Poe? What is Edgar Allan Poe without absurd, insulting apocryphal stories about his drinking habits?<br />
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This little anecdote made the rounds of the newspapers during October of 1893. Consider the combined Halloween/booze elements as something of a Poe Apotheosis.<br />
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<br />Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-2434590928818692042013-10-07T04:55:00.000-07:002013-10-07T04:55:43.123-07:00An Early Poe Memorial PoemThe following poem appeared in the "New York Tribune" a few weeks after that paper published Rufus W. Griswold's infamous obituary of Poe. These lines are clearly a direct rebuttal to Griswold's libelous eulogy. <br />
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While these anonymous verses may not be great poetry, they do stand as a heartfelt tribute to the deep effect that Poe's work had on many of his contemporaries--even ones who, like this unknown poet, probably never laid eyes on the man. On this, the anniversary of Poe's death, it's good to remember that despite the popular current-day legend, there were many people in his time who loved Poe and mourned his passing. There have always been those of us who "feel in Poe we had a friend."<br />
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<blockquote>
It is not true, "the Poet had no friends."<br />
There's not a hamlet nor a way-side cot<br />
Throughout the land, where misery has dwelt,<br />
But furnished him a friend--warm, heart-felt friend.<br />
'Tis true they did not swell the air with praise<br />
And loud-toned, fulsome acclamation,<br />
(Like purse-made friends, who never tell the heart<br />
Their friendship,) for his soul seemed theirs--<br />
His lips and pen their speaking oracles--<br />
His harp, their tale of wrong and suffering.<br />
There's not a spirit crushed by time and grief,<br />
And silent in its heart-wrecked misery,<br />
(A looker-on, midst homage ill-deserved,)<br />
But feels in Poe he had a friend, and Poe<br />
A friend in him.<br />
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There is a class of men who feel some wrong<br />
In every freak of circumstance and chance--<br />
But these were not his friends. His were the souls<br />
Who, through the live-long day and darkling night,<br />
Conjure no wrong--but writhe with it, and pride,<br />
Till, broken-down in spirit, Death relieves.<br />
It may have been that on thy youthful brow,<br />
Shaded by curls and love, and in the eye<br />
Nature had written Genius--Child of Song!<br />
If this--and dark obscurity were his,<br />
We have a key to wrongs most exquisite;<br />
And in the wreck of hopes, when cheeks have paled<br />
And curls lie matted o'er the sunken eye,<br />
No wonder we should see Poe's world-sick friend <br />
Striving in silence to let the soul go free.<br />
It may have been that chilling poverty<br />
Had stepped between his heart and her he loved,<br />
Changing his crimson hopes to dark despair,<br />
Freezing the morning of his look and life--<br />
If so--I pledge you he became Poe's friend <br />
For lending him his Annabel, and song.<br />
Ah! many a friend, around the grave of Poe,<br />
Will help to plant the willow o'er his head,<br />
Shading his harp and him, low sleeping there;<br />
And with a lynx-eyed jealousy, will watch<br />
And shield from weaker pens his memory.<br />
His was a heart too big for mortal frame;<br />
And in that soul that, rearing up dark things<br />
For men to stare at, turned his gaze to Heaven,<br />
When o'er the quiet Earth deep twilight hang,<br />
Shading the face of nature (that the light<br />
Her sleep might not disturb,) we see a star<br />
That rises in the firmament of thought<br />
So far above its fellows, that we start<br />
To know it had a habitation here,<br />
And fear 'tis sacrilege in hearts like ours<br />
To feel we are Poe's Friends!<br />
-Chicago, Oct. 1849</blockquote>
Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-67344555834331738792013-09-22T07:27:00.001-07:002013-09-22T07:27:43.141-07:00PSAThis is just to give a heads-up that I've enabled comments on this blog, in the unlikely event that anyone wishes to communicate with me.<br />
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The house policy is simple: No spam, no trolls, no jerks. Which probably means that my first action as site moderator will have to be to block myself.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-80197721780020705212013-08-14T08:27:00.002-07:002013-08-14T08:35:47.695-07:00That Motley DramaIn case you missed the news, <a href="http://www.auctionflex.com/showlot.ap?co=67908&weid=0&weiid=12021415&archive=y&keyword=poe&lso=timeleftasc&pagenum=1&action=Print&lang=En" target="_blank">a "newly-discovered" MS. of "The Conqueror Worm"</a> sold for $300,000 at auction the other day--<i>before</i> it had even been authenticated.<br />
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Considering the really quite frightening number of Poe forgeries (many still undetected) out there, this seems like quite a financial gamble. I have to admit, it would amuse the hell out of me if this turned out to be another example of <a href="http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2009/09/caveat-emptor.html" target="_blank">Charles Hamilton's Law</a>.<br />
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But then, I'm evil.<br />
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I'll update this post if and when the manuscript is fully vetted.<br />
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P.S. Anyone else remember this little debacle, described here by the Poe Society of Baltimore?<br />
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<br />Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-69216255799348539542013-06-10T07:09:00.000-07:002013-06-10T07:09:27.132-07:00Why Does the World Hate Me?I just came across <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1476702918/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_m9CTrb0SN4MKR" target="_blank">this upcoming novel.</a> From the descriptions, it sounds like a complete stinker, even by the usually abysmal standards of Poe fiction.<br />
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I don't think I can even bring myself to read this thing when it comes out. I just can't bear to plow through another idiot book that utterly trashes the poor man, especially with the knowledge that readers who don't know any better will assume it's based on some kind of fact. I do not have the stomach for it anymore. And this myth about the Poe/Frances Osgood "love affair" is like something out of a horror movie: No matter how many times you think you've killed the beast<i>, it keeps coming back to life.</i><br />
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Lynn Cullen, you've put me in a very bad mood today.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-58694107810007931602013-03-23T06:49:00.001-07:002013-03-23T06:49:59.110-07:00Another Day, Another Utterly Bogus Poe Quote<br />
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/760742-every-poem-should-remind-the-reader-that-they-are-going" target="_blank">Read this,</a> and let's all weep together.<br />
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<br />Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-48301658582832197102013-03-13T08:07:00.000-07:002013-03-13T08:07:00.275-07:00Edgar Allan Poe, Insurance Salesman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As part of my ongoing efforts to have the two most peculiar blogs on the Internet, <a href="http://strangeco.blogspot.com/2013/03/newspaper-clipping-of-day.html" target="_blank">over at the sister site</a>, I've posted an advertisement from 1890 where they used "The Bells" to nag people into buying fire insurance.<br />
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You never know where Poe will turn up next.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-74318950784570350802013-03-04T06:04:00.000-08:002013-03-04T06:04:00.820-08:00The Fever Called Blogging<br />
In what I can only assume was a moment of madness, I started a new blog: <a href="http://strangeco.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Strange Company</a>. I’m not sure how to describe it—it’ll have no particular theme other than chatting about incidents and people from history that happen to appall/interest/amuse me. In other words, it’ll probably be an incoherent mess. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yeah, Edgar's agreed to come along for the ride.</td></tr>
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I don’t intend to give up on this blog altogether, but I’m in the mood for finding new ways to make a pest of myself, and thought I’d give this new project a whirl. If any of you decide to take a look, I hope you find something you feel is worth a few moments of your time. I’m kicking things off with the story of a nameless, legless man who became one of Nova Scotia’s most famous mysteries.<br />
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See you!<br />
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<object height="315" width="420"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/OLCHZyaBEHQ?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param>
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<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OLCHZyaBEHQ?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="420" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-60811738741078370452013-03-01T06:00:00.000-08:002013-03-01T06:01:41.573-08:00Poe and Charles Dickens<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_OgGscnZwSo/UD0YAezmYnI/AAAAAAAABhc/3nvw5ciLFL4/s1600/dickens2.jpg" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal;"><img alt="Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5781803893162140274" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_OgGscnZwSo/UD0YAezmYnI/AAAAAAAABhc/3nvw5ciLFL4/s400/dickens2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 294px;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Poe and Dickens were two very different writers. They spent their lives in </span>separate<span style="font-size: 100%;"> countries, only met on two brief occasions, and their known correspondence is scanty and impersonal. However, their careers still intersected in various significant ways--which seems only fitting for two of the most renowned writers of the 19th century.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Poe’s interest in Dickens’ work began very early. In his first published mention of the English author, a review of “Watkins Tottle and Other Sketches” in the June 1836 issue of the “Southern Literary Messenger,” he referred to Dickens’ stories as “old and highly esteemed acquaintances.” He went on to describe the author as a “far more pungent, more witty, and better disciplined writer of sly sketches, than nine-tenths of the Magazine writers of Great Britain.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">In the November “Messenger” Poe said “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” (which had just appeared in a pirated American edition) “fully sustained” his earlier glowing opinion of Dickens. “The author possesses nearly every desirable quality in a writer of fiction, and has withal a thousand negative virtues…we can only express our opinion that his general powers as a prose writer are equaled by few.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Poe gave a brief review of “Nicholas Nickleby” in the December 1839 “Burton’s Magazine.” He called it perhaps Dickens’ best work to date, declaring boldly, “Charles Dickens is no ordinary man, and his writings must unquestionably live.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Two years later, Poe reviewed “Master Humphrey’s Clock” and “The Old Curiosity Shop” for the May 1841 issue of “Graham’s Magazine.” As befitted his increased maturity as a critic, Poe’s analysis was more detailed and judgmental than his earlier reviews. When taking note of the somewhat muddled aspects of the works, he went so far as to suggest that “…the rumors in respect to the sanity of Mr. Dickens, which were so prevalent during the publication of the first numbers of the work, had some slight, some very slight foundation of truth.” He suspected that some of the narratives “were probably sent to press to supply a demand for copy,” and asserted that “Mr. Dickens did not precisely know his own plans when he penned the five or six first chapters of the ‘Clock.’”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">When focusing on “The Old Curiosity Shop,” Poe wrote a lengthy paragraph itemizing its various shortcomings, including the complaint that Dickens endowed his characters “with a warmth of feeling so very rare in reality. Above all, we acknowledge the death of Nelly is excessively painful; that it leaves a most distressing oppression of spirit upon the reader, and should, therefore, have been avoided.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">It’s very interesting indeed to observe a tender-hearted Poe chastising Dickens for his grimness.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Although Poe found many minor details to criticize, he saw much to praise in the work’s overall conception. He wrote, “The plot is the best which could have been constructed for the main object of the narrative.” The depiction of love between grandfather and grandchild was “indeed most beautiful. It is simple and severely grand. The more fully we survey it, the more thoroughly are we convinced of the lofty character of that genius which gave it birth.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">He went on to extol the “imagination” and “originality,” displayed in “The Old Curiosity Shop.” “[Imagination] is the one charm all potent, which alone would suffice to compensate for a world of more error than Mr.Dickens ever committed.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">In the May 1 issue of the “Saturday Evening Post,” Poe examined the first few installments of “Barnaby Rudge,” which was then being published as a serial. His predictions for how the story would play out were not terribly accurate. (He would later blame this on Dickens’ shortcomings as a novelist: “We did not rightly prophesy,” he later wrote in his most delightfully Poeish manner, “yet, at least, our prophecy </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">should have been right</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">.”)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The February 1842 “Graham’s” contained Poe’s long, highly detailed, and not altogether flattering analysis of the now-completed “Rudge.” Obviously realizing his criticisms might be unpopular, he defended himself in advance with the ingenious assertion that fault-finding was the highest form of flattery:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">“Those who know us will not, from what is here premised, suppose it our intention, to enter into any wholesale </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">laudation</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> of ‘Barnaby Rudge.’ In truth, our design may appear, at a cursory glance, to be very different indeed. Boccalini, in his ‘Advertisements from Parnassus,’ tells us that a critic once presented Apollo with a severe censure upon an excellent poem. The God asked him for the beauties of the work. He replied that he only troubled himself about the errors. Apollo presented him with a sack of unwinnowed wheat, and bade him pick out all the chaff for his pains. Now we have not fully made up our minds that the God was in the right. We are not sure that the limit of critical duty is not very generally misapprehended. </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">Excellence</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> may be considered an axiom, or a proposition which becomes self-evident just in proportion to the clearness or precision with which it is </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">put</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">. If it fairly exists, in this sense, it requires no farther elucidation. It is not excellence if it need to be demonstrated as such. To point out too particularly the beauties of a work, is to admit, tacitly, that these beauties are not wholly admirable. Regarding, then, excellence as that which is capable of self-manifestation, it but remains for the critic to show when, where, and how it fails in becoming manifest; and, in this showing, it will be the fault of the book itself if what of beauty it contains be not, at least, placed in the fairest light. In a word, we may assume, notwithstanding a vast deal of pitiable cant upon this topic, that in pointing out frankly the errors of a work, we do nearly all that is critically necessary in displaying its merits. In teaching what perfection is, how, in fact, shall we more rationally proceed than in specifying what it is </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">not</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">?”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Although Poe had many flattering comments about the completed work, he faulted Dickens’ handling of the plot, as well as the general construction of the novel.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The names of Dickens and Poe were next linked through a minor literary guessing-game. In October 1842, "American Notes," Dickens’ account of his visit to the United States, was released. His critical, if not mocking, views of the country unsurprisingly caused American publications to return his disparagement, with interest. One of the most vigorous rebuttals to Dickens’ work was a pamphlet called “English Notes,” which was published under the pseudonym of “Quarles Quickens” two months later. For all its patriotic fervor, it was an inferior piece of work, and soon vanished nearly without a trace. It was forgotten by all except the most passionate collectors of Dickensiana until 1912, when an eccentric literary scholar named Joseph Jackson attributed the authorship of “English Notes” to Poe, largely on the basis that Poe first published “The Raven” under the name “Quarles.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">As so often happens when researchers fall in love with their own theories, Jackson was forced to essentially turn to writing fiction to support his argument. In March of 1842, Poe and Dickens met in Philadelphia, where the former secured the latter’s promise to help him secure an English publisher. Jackson took this snippet of fact to assume that, when Poe failed to hear from Dickens for some months afterwards, he became so embittered that, a la Griswold, he was inspired to take a savage literary revenge for this presumed neglect. When Poe did hear from Dickens in November, the Englishman apologized for his delay in answering and proved that he had tried—albeit unsuccessfully—to find Poe a publisher. Unfortunately, it was too late to recall the insulting pamphlet. However, Dickens’ reference to Poe as an “unknown writer” so offended Poe personally that he used the name “Quarles” when publishing “The Raven” as a way of publicly showing Dickens what he really thought of him.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">To summarize what was a long and rather tiresome debate: Jackson claimed to see in “English Notes” similarities with Poe’s known writings that eluded virtually everyone else except—as one observer suggested—book dealers and collectors hoping to increase the value of their otherwise worthless copies of “English Notes.” (One notable exception is Poe biographer Mary E. Phillips. In her 1926 “Edgar Allan Poe: The Man,” she expended many characteristically rambling and incoherent pages in arguing that Poe did indeed write “English Notes”--and several other relevant anonymous articles besides. Unfortunately, all she proved was that as a historian, she had a good deal more energy than sense.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Although the idea that Poe was the author of “English Notes” has long been dismissed, it is true that at one point Poe fancied he had a grudge against Dickens. In January 1844 a review of Rufus Griswold’s anthology “Poets and Poetry of America” appeared in London’s “Foreign Quarterly Review.” The anonymous critic thought little of the collection as a whole, and personally offended Poe by suggesting he was a mere imitator of Tennyson. For someone with Poe’s obsession about plagiarism, this slur on his own originality was extremely irritating.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Poe believed Dickens was the author. He wrote James Russell Lowell that it was denied that Dickens wrote the review, “but, to me, the article affords so strong internal evidence of his hand that I would as soon think of doubting my existence.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">We now believe that Poe was wrong in his assertion that Dickens was responsible for the article that so outraged him (although the author was likely Dickens’ close friend John Forster.) In any case, whatever Poe may have privately thought about the Englishman, it did not affect his critical acumen. He remained as supportive of Dickens’ writings as ever.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Soon after Poe moved to New York in the spring of 1844, he sent a series of seven “letters” to the “Columbia Spy,” published under the title “Doings of Gotham." In his May 27 "letter" Poe compared Bulwer-Lytton's upcoming visit to America with Dickens' tour two years before. “The Gothamites,” he wrote sardonically, “not yet having made sufficient fools of themselves in their fete-ing and festival-ing of Dickens, are already on the </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">qui vivi</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> to receive Bulwer in a similar manner. If I mistake not, however, the author of ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ will not be willing ‘to play Punch and Judy’ for the amusement of the American rabble…When I spoke of Bulwer’s probably refusing to do what Dickens made no scruples of doing, I by no means intended a disparagement of the latter. Dickens is a man of far greater genius than Bulwer.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">The most famous link between these two literary giants is suggested by Poe’s final review of “Barnaby Rudge.” He regretted that the title character’s pet raven was not used to its fullest. “Its croaking might have been </span><span style="font-size: 100%; font-style: italic;">prophetically</span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> heard in the course of the drama. Its character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Yes, it is generally acknowledged that Dickens’ ghastly, grim, and ancient Grip, prone to croaking “Nobody” at ominous moments, provided a germ of suggestion for Poe’s even more famous bird--one of the most felicitous examples in literature of one great artist unwittingly providing inspiration to another.</span><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wseTOJrHTzE/UD0ZZN0XQAI/AAAAAAAABho/TswUw2GN9cQ/s1600/Grip.jpg" style="font-size: 100%; font-style: normal;"><img alt="Barnaby Rudge Grip Raven Poe dickens" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5781805417610297346" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wseTOJrHTzE/UD0ZZN0XQAI/AAAAAAAABho/TswUw2GN9cQ/s400/Grip.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 306px;" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">It is curious that the Poe/Dickens connection essentially ended there. Poe never reviewed Dickens’ subsequent writings again, and there is no evidence he read them. It is as if, after “The Raven,” he had no further interest in his contemporary.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">On Dickens’ side, his attitude was even more unfortunately indifferent. He seemed unfamiliar with Poe’s body of work, and while his personal attitude towards Poe was far from unfriendly, he showed no interest in pursuing their brief acquaintance.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 100%;">Perhaps, however, Dickens had a deeper regard for Poe than we know. It was said that during his second visit to America in 1868, he took the trouble to look up Poe’s ever-beleaguered aunt/mother-in-law Maria Clemm, and “generously entreated her acceptance of one hundred and fifty dollars with the assurance of his sympathy.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 85%;"><i>(Image of Dickens via <a href="http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?483484">NYPL Digital Gallery</a>; Barnaby Rudge and Grip by Fred Barnard c. 1870 via Wikipedia.)</i></span></div>
Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-57036351448733679912013-02-27T06:00:00.000-08:002016-11-28T18:32:11.489-08:00In Which I Realize That This Blog Would Probably Be Greatly Improved By a Few Posts About New Hampshire Glass Blowers<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ata2OLdYdHc/URAlrB91ixI/AAAAAAAACJY/b2aTwMCmbiE/s1600/Poe+search.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ata2OLdYdHc/URAlrB91ixI/AAAAAAAACJY/b2aTwMCmbiE/s400/Poe+search.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Every so often, Edgar makes the dreadful mistake of Googling himself.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Yes, it's time for yet another peek at some of the internet searches that have led people to my humble little corner of cyberspace:<br />
<br />
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1. <i>did edgar allan poe and albert einstein ever meet</i><br />
<br />
Edgar Allan Poe: 1809-1849. Albert Einstein: 1879-1955. <br />
<br />
2. <i>the tell tale heart: edgar allan poe decide how he wanted to ____ his readers beore [sic] he decided what</i><br />
<br />
Our public education system at work.<br />
<br />
3. <i>productive Quotes to think about while at work</i><br />
<br />
You’ll never find them here.<br />
<br />
4. <i>75 fun facts about edgar allan poe</i><br />
<br />
Because what says “fun!” like Edgar Allan Poe?<br />
<br />
5. <i>you cant have exqusite [sic] beauty without some weirdness</i><br />
<br />
You can’t write a Poe blog without some of that, either.<br />
<br />
6. <i>is it true or false edgar allan poe was son of a nobleman</i><br />
<br />
See what I mean?<br />
<br />
7. <i>if you had $50 dollars to spend what would you buy poe</i><br />
<br />
Anything his little heart desired.<br />
<br />
8. <i>Could edgar allan poe have sex?</i><br />
<br />
Hey, what kind of joint do you think I'm running here?<br />
<br />
9. <i>edgar allan poe syphilis symptoms</i><br />
<br />
Go ask Dr. Tanner about this one.<br />
<br />
10. <i>edgar allan poe with first wife</i><br />
<br />
I’d be more curious to know who the second one was.<br />
<br />
11. <i>did edgar allan poe live in providence rhode island in 1848?</i><br />
<br />
No. He just made a few brief visits. On a related note, you wouldn't believe how many people come to this blog searching for the "Edgar Allan Poe house" in Providence. I'm not sure if they're thinking of Sarah Helen Whitman's home (which still exists,) or if some idiot of a tour guide has spread the word Poe actually resided in the city.<br />
<br />
12. <i>did rosalie mackenzie poe marry</i><br />
<br />
No. And she didn't live in Providence either.<br />
<br />
13. <i>how to draw turkey</i><br />
<br />
Put out some tasty food for turkey. That’ll draw him<i>.</i><br />
<br />
14. <i>edgar allan poe married virginia clemm</i><br />
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Yes, I do believe he did.<br />
<br />
15.<i> poe theme recipes</i><br />
<br />
Bon-Bon? The Duc De L'Omelette? Hamabel Lee? The Tell-Tale Heartichoke? Wines and Spirits of the Dead? The Fall of the House of Pies? The Purloined Lettuce? The Angel Food Cake of the Odd? The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pimento? Burger King Pest?<br />
<br />
I think what I need is a nice nap. One that lasts three or four years, perhaps.<br />
<br />
16. <i>stoddard glass blowers photo</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.peachridgeglass.com/2012/01/staddard-glass-updated-information-from-michael-george/">This</a> is the best I can do. We aim to please here at World of Poe.<br />
<br />
17. <i>edgar allan poe house in lewistown, pa</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://lewistownsentinel.com/page/content.detail/id/516040.html">Fuggetaboutit.</a><br />
<br />
18. <i>jon lippard</i><br />
<br />
My guess is he's a glass blower living in Lewistown, PA. And he's probably excellent at drawing turkeys.<br />
<br />
19. <i>did edgar allan poe die on a bench</i><br />
<i><br />
</i> John Cusack, you've got a hell of a lot to answer for.<br />
<br />
20. <i>and in a sieve ill thither sale</i><br />
<br />
Finally, some productive quotes to think about while at work!<br />
<br />
21. <i>was virginia clemm murdered</i><br />
<br />
No, but questions like this may wind up being the death of me.<br />
<br />
22. <i> was edgar a poe the father of marie louise shew's son henry b.1849</i><br />
<br />
Forget the nap. Can someone just show a little mercy and knock me unconscious with a brick?<br />
<br />
Let me--not a moment too soon--end this post by quoting the most horrifying words anyone ever typed into a search engine:<br />
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<i>comparing justin bieber to edgar allan poe</i>Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-75186146560404307422013-02-25T06:00:00.000-08:002013-02-25T06:00:03.425-08:00Marginalia: Freemasons, Sarah Helen Whitman, a Premature Burial, and How the Heck Did the Raven Cast That Shadow, Anyway?<br />
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<br />
The following comes from an interview with a painter named John Arnold that appeared in the “Boston Herald” around the time of Poe’s Centenary. It is of some interest because the latter paragraph, at least, is all so much balderdash. From all the available evidence—including the stories Sarah Helen Whitman herself gave out—after their tentative engagement was broken, Poe stalked out of her life for good. They never saw each other again, and their only subsequent contact was an extremely cold, formal letter he wrote her discussing the best ways they could put a public air of dignity over the end of their relationship—a letter she never worked up the nerve to answer. (In truth, rather than asking her to “reconsider her decision,” Poe gave every indication that he felt he was well rid of Mrs. Whitman.) And, of course, Whitman herself once privately admitted that what she felt for Poe was admiration and fascination rather than love.<br />
<br />
I am mildly curious if Arnold was simply giving a garbled recollection of Whitman’s reminiscences, or if this is a fairly accurate summary. Her descriptions of her relations with Poe underwent decided shifts and embellishments over the years—especially when she thought she was speaking “off the record”—and this may well be another example. If so, it is just additional evidence the “Seer of Providence” tended to talk through her hat. Or, rather, her ether bottle.<br />
<blockquote>
“I became acquainted with Mrs. Whitman in 1868, the year before I painted her portrait. She came to my studio and said she desired that I should paint her portrait. She wanted an original sketch and one differing from that which Thompson had painted. From the hour of that first interview until she died, we were great friends. As our acquaintance grew more confidential, Mrs. Whitman told me a good deal of Poe. She said that they were very much in love with one another, but he was addicted to drink which made her cautious as to completing their alliance. She said that she had implored and then made Poe leave off drinking. This was accomplished by exacting a promise of abstemiousness. For a while I believed and so did Mrs. Whitman that Poe was keeping his word. This illusion was dispelled when one night he came to her home in this city under the influence of liquor. <br />
<br />
Mrs. Whitman was deeply shocked by Poe's disregard of the promise he had given her and summarily broke the engagement. Poe was very much affected by her decision. He went immediately to New York, where he wrote to her and asked her to reconsider her decision and permit him to see her. Mrs. Whitman in recalling this momentous incident in her life said to me one evening that Poe pleaded hard and that for a while she did waver, but feeling that it was impossible she could not give her consent for the renewal of their engagement. Deeply as she loved him, she said, she could not give her happiness into the keeping of a man who had so little will power.”</blockquote>
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*****</div>
<br />
The following column by E. J. Edwards appeared in the “Washington (D.C.) Herald” on December 2, 1913, under the title “Capt. Wagner’s Recollections of Edgar A. Poe." These “recollections” are the usual vague, generic material found in so many articles about Poe, and I would not bother reprinting them if not for the odd comment in the first paragraph. Although Poe made sly references to Freemasonry in “The Cask of Amontillado,” I do not know of any credible claim that he was affiliated with the Craft, let alone that he was “prominently identified” with the Utica home. (Although this blog gets a startling number of hits from people linking Poe and Masonry.) I have found several contemporary references to Wagner--he was, unsurprisingly, a prominent Freemason. However, I have no other evidence that he even knew Poe.<br />
<br />
I find it quite hard to believe Poe had any genuine ties to the Masons, (particularly given his published mockery,) but as this is a unique statement, I just pass it along as a curiosity. (Note: The “lady of Providence” was, of course, Sarah Helen Whitman.)<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
“I presume that very few persons are now living who ever saw, certainly very few who ever talked with, Edgar A. Poe." said Capt. Frederick C. Wagner to me. "In his day he was a very prominent citizen of New York and was well known to the Masonic fraternity of the United States by his prominent identification with the establishment of the great Masonic home at Utica, N.Y. I am fortunate enough to be able to recall many meetings of Poe and several interesting conversations which I had with him at one time or another,” he went on.<br />
<br />
Having said this to me, Capt. Wagner took a wallet of the kind used for carrying small papers or documents from an inner pocket, and opening it, after some searching among the papers, took a half sheet of what used to be styled commercial note paper. He showed me the date. It was in September, 1859. With a delicacy, the reasons for which I afterward appreciated, Capt. Wagner concealed the name of the writer of the communication. I saw it was in a woman's handwriting. The paper was somewhat faded and the ink was beginning to turn. The communication had reference to some business matter, as I saw after I had read the first paragraph of the letter.<br />
<br />
"That letter," said Capt. Wagner, "was written to me by a friend of my family, a lady of Providence, RI, who wanted me to execute a business commission for her. It was a lady to whom Edgar A. Poe was once engaged to be married.<br />
<br />
"She had great admiration for Poe's genius and for him as a man, but there came a day when she had visible evidence that Poe could not control his appetite, and for that reason the engagement was broken.<br />
<br />
"I knew the circumstances at the time. But I did not then know that Poe occasionally yielded to the temptations of indulging in spiritous drink. I was speaking of this to a friend who knew Poe well and who admired him greatly, and he told me that Edgar, as he called Poe, was to be pitied rather than censured. He said that the trouble with Poe was that if he swallowed even a small amount of liquor it instantly affected him--set his brain in a whirl--and that this was due to some physical weakness. He said that Poe's only safety was in absolute abstinence. Frequently when he was thought to be greatly overcome by liquor it was really the case that he had swallowed only a moderate amount of whisky or brandy.<br />
<br />
"I never saw Poe when he gave the slightest indication that he was not fully himself. I used occasionally to meet him at some one of the monthly receptions, which were given by the Cary sisters, Alice and Phoebe at their home in Seventeenth Street, New York. If there ever was what the French call a literary salon in New York, these receptions of the Cary sisters could be thus described. We used to see George William Curtis, dignified and yet cordial, frequently the center of a merry group, a very handsome man who had just gained his first reputation as an author. Occasionally Parke Godwin would stroll in, a heavy, thick set man, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant. There was romantic association with Mr. Godwin, since he was known as a lad to have sat upon the knee of Aaron Burr, and when a young man at Princeton to have met and talked with Burr in the cemetery, where Burr had gone to look at the grave of his father, once president of Princeton. Horace Greeley used to come in, dressed like a gentleman, without any eccentricity of costume, and Anne Stevens [Ann S. Stephens], who then had a great reputation as the author of ‘Fashion and Famine,' a novel which almost vied in popularity with 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' And sometimes Edgar A. Poe came in, not at all affected in his manner, dreamy and often sad eyed, rejoicing, apparently, in the common tribute that was paid to him even then, because his genius was recognised, although the feeling was that its greater recognition would not come till after his death, which was the fact. My recollections of Edgar Allen [sic] Poe are among the most pleasant of any of those of my young manhood in New York City."</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
*****</div>
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“I don‘t see anything very irrelevant in the last stanza and that Hartford Review man was a fool to think that he could. There might be more ways than one fixed so that the lamplight streaming on the Raven would cast a shadow on the floor within the room.”<br />
-George W. Eveleth, letter to Edgar Allan Poe, June 9, 1846<br />
<br />
“What you say about the blundering criticism of ‘the Hartford Review man’ is just. For the purposes of poetry it is quite sufficient that a thing is possible--or at least that the improbability be not offensively glaring. It is true that in several ways, as you say, the lamp might have thrown the bird’s shadow on the floor. My conception was that of the bracket candelabrum affixed against the wall, high up above the door and bust--as is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some of the better houses in New-York.”<br />
-Edgar Allan Poe, letter to George W. Eveleth, December 15, 1846<br />
<br />
The question of how, precisely, literature’s most famous Raven managed to maneuver the “lamp-light o’er” to throw “his shadow on the floor,” is one that has puzzled many other readers besides the “Hartford Review” critic. An unknown poet in the “Wichita (KS) Daily Eagle” for May 7, 1899 offered his own solution to the mystery:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
How distinctly I remember, late one evening last November,<br />
I was sitting on a barrel that the moonlight gloated o'er;<br />
‘Twas an empty cider barrel and was useful now no more<br />
Worthless, now, forevermore.<br />
<br />
As a few lone stars were blinking I betook myself to thinking.<br />
And I thought of that old raven Edgar Poe has told about.<br />
That was quite a high old raven Mr. Poe has told about.<br />
I kept thinking, thinking, thinking, as those stars kept blinking, blinking.<br />
And the more I thought about it I was more and more in doubt<br />
Edgar's logic knocked me out.<br />
<br />
And I found no explanation to that curious situation:<br />
Here's the lamp upon the table and the raven on the door,<br />
And the lamplight o'er him streaming threw his shadow on the floor.<br />
Think of where the lamp was sitting and you cannot help admitting<br />
‘Twas an awful crooked shadow to have ever reached the floor.<br />
‘Twas a hump-backed, cross-eyed shadow<br />
If it ever saw the floor.<br />
<br />
So I thought a clear solution to that shadow's dire confusion.<br />
And my only strong conclusion was that Edgar had the snakes.<br />
I am sure he had been drinking and he must have had the snakes.<br />
So perhaps the raven sitting on the cornice, never flitting,<br />
With its fiery eyes a-burning into Edgar's bosom's core<br />
Was the whiskey he'd been drinking just before he fell to thinking<br />
Of his lovely lost Lenore.<br />
It was bug-juice, evermore. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Or perhaps the maiden, deeming such a fellow too demeaning,<br />
Had preferred to share the fortunes of the friends who'd gone before,<br />
And had perished broken-hearted, as fair maids have done before.<br />
Maybe he disgraced and slighted till she felt her life was blighted,<br />
And her lonely soul, benighted, wandered to a fairer shore.<br />
Maybe Edgar's drinking killed her, as it has killed girls before.<br />
It was benzine, evermore.<br />
<br />
Get 'most anybody frisky on a quart or two of whisky,<br />
And he'd think he saw some shadows, or some ravens, or some floors,<br />
And the lamps would get befuddled, and the shadows awful muddled,<br />
And he'd see some crazy raven perched on forty-'leven doors.<br />
And he wouldn't know a shutter from a dozen lost Lenores.<br />
<br />
It is my profound opinion that if Poe had kept dominion<br />
O'er his brains and o'er his reason, as they used to be of yore<br />
That if he had been less frisky and had guzzled down less whisky<br />
He'd have never seen that raven on the bust above the door.<br />
Very likely that same evening he'd been on a bust before<br />
And got sober--Nevermore.</blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<br />
To end on a considerably more ominous note, the following appeared in Oregon’s “Daily Morning Astoria” on December 19, 1889. I believe that here we have the “How Did Poe Die?” tale to end them all:<br />
<br />
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<br />Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-52044387174493721062013-02-20T06:00:00.000-08:002013-02-20T06:00:08.212-08:00Who Was W.B. Tyler?Poe often wrote about his fascination with cryptography, most notably in a series of articles published in “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger” and “Graham’s Magazine.” As a result, he was often bombarded with ciphers sent by readers eager to test his puzzle-solving abilities.<br />
<br />
Poe published the most curious of these challenges in “Graham’s” in December of 1841. A W.B. Tyler, whom Poe described as “a gentleman whose abilities we very highly respect,” sent in the following letter:<br />
<br />
DEAR SIR:<br />
<br />
I should perhaps apologise for again intruding a subject upon which you have so ably commented, and which may be supposed by this time to have been almost exhausted; but as I have been greatly interested in the articles upon "Cryptography," which have appeared in your Magazine, I think that you will excuse the present intrusion of a few remarks. With secret writing I have been practically conversant for several years, and I have found, both in correspondence and in the preservation of private memoranda, the frequent benefit of its peculiar virtues. I have thus a record of thoughts, feelings and occurrences, — a history of my mental existence, to which I may turn, and in imagination, retrace former pleasures, and again live through bygone scenes, — secure in the conviction that the magic scroll has a tale for my eye alone. Who has not longed for such a confidante?<br />
<br />
Cryptography is, indeed, not only a topic of mere curiosity, but is of general interest, as furnished an excellent exercise for mental discipline, and of high practical importance on various occasions; — to the statesman and the general — to the scholar and the traveller, — and, may I not add "last though not least," to the lover? What can be so delightful amid the trials of absent lovers, as a secret intercourse between them of their hopes and fears, — safe from the prying eyes of some old aunt, or it may be, of a perverse and cruel guardian? — a billet doux that will not betray its mission, even if intercepted, and that can "tell no tales" if lost, or, (which sometimes occurs,) if stolen from its violated depository.<br />
<br />
In the solution of the various ciphers which have been submitted to your examination, you have exhibited a power of analytical and synthetical reasoning I have never seen equalled; and the astonishing skill you have displayed — particularly in deciphering the cryptograph of Dr. Charles J. Frailey, will, I think, crown you the king of "secret-readers." But notwithstanding this, I think your opinion that the construction of a real cryptograph is impossible, not sufficiently supported. Those examples which you have published have indeed not been of that character, as you have fully proved. They have, moreover, not been sufficiently accurate, for where the key was a phrase, (and consequently the same character was employed for several letters,) different words would be formed with the same ciphers. The sense could then only be ascertained from the context, and this would amount to a probability — generally of a high degree, I admit — but still not to a positive certainty. Nay, a case might readily be imagined, where the most important word of the communication, and one on which the sense of the whole depended, should have so equivocal a nature, that the person for whose benefit it was intended, would be unable, even with the aid of his key, to discover which of two very different interpretations should be the correct one. If necessary, this can easily be shown; thus, for example, suppose a lady should receive from her affianced, a letter written in ciphers, containing this sentence, "4 5663 967 268 26 3633," and that a and n were represented by the figure 2, — e, m, and r by 3, — i by 4, — l by 5, — o, s, and v by 6, — u by 7, — w by 8, — and y by 9; a moment's inspection will show that the sentence might either be "I love you now as ever," or "I love you now no more." How "positively shocking," to say the least of it; and yet several of the ciphers that you have published have required a greater number of letters to be represented by one character, than any to be found in the example before us. It is evident, then, that this is not a very desirable system, as it would scarcely be more useful than a lock without its key, or with one that did not fit its wards.<br />
<br />
I think, however, that there are various methods by which a hieroglyphic might be formed, whose meaning would be perfectly "hidden;" and I shall give one or two examples of what I consider such. A method which I have adopted for my own private use, is one which I am satisfied is of this nature, as it cannot possibly be solved without the assistance of its key, and that key, by which alone it can be unlocked, exists only in my mind; at the same time it is so simple, that with the practice in it which I have had, I now read it, and write it, with as much facility as I can the English character. As I prefer not giving it here, I shall be compelled to have recourse to some other plan that is more complicated. By a CRYPTOGRAPH, I understand — a communication which, though clearly ascertained by means of its proper key, cannot possibly be without it. To most persons, who have not thought much upon the subject, an article written in simple cipher, (by which I mean with each letter uniformly represented by a single distinct character,) would appear to be an impenetrable mystery; and they would doubtless imagine that the more complicated the method of constructing such a cipher, the more insoluble — to use a chemical expression — would be the puzzle, since so much less would be the chance of discovering its key. This very natural conclusion is, however, erroneous, as it is founded on the supposition that possession must first be obtained of the key, in order to unravel the difficulty, — which is not the case. The process of reasoning employed in resolving "secret writing" has not the slightest relation to the form or description of the characters used, but refers simply to their succession, and to a comparison of words in which the same letters occur. By these means any cipher of this nature can be unriddled as experience has fully shown. A very successful method of avoiding detection, would be to apply the simple cipher to words written backwards and continuously. This, I conceive, might be called a perfect cryptograph, since from the want of spaces, and consequently the impossibility of comparing words, it would utterly perplex the person attempting to discover its hidden import, and yet with the help of the key, each letter being known, the words could easily be separated and inverted. I give a short specimen of this style, and would feel much gratified with your opinion of the possibility of reading it.<br />
<br />
, † § : ‡ ] [ , ? ‡ ) , [ ¡ ¶ ? , † , ) ¡ , § [ ¶ , : ¶ ! [ .§ ( , † § ¡ || ( ? ? , * * ( ¡ ( [ , ¶ * . [ § ¡ ¶ § ¡ .¶ ] ¿ , † § [ <br />
? ( § [ : : ( † [ . ( * ; ( || ( , † § ¡ ‡ [ * .: , ] ! ¶ † || ] ? * ! ¶ † § ¶ || , * ( † ¡ ( , ? ‡ § ( ¡ ¡ ¶ [ ¡ ¶ [ ? ( , <br />
; § ‡ ‡ ] † § § : ( † [ † [ ¶ ? ‡ ] : .* ¡ ¶ : ( § ? ] ! ¶ † § ‡ ] ; § ? ‡ † ¡ ‡ ¶ ! ( , † § ? ( || * ] [ § ¡ ‘ ¡ , : , , † <br />
§ ) , ? || * ] ? , § § ( ! ¡ ( , .† § † [ ‡ ! ) * ] [ : ? ] ||<br />
<br />
Should this not be considered perfect, (though I suspect it would puzzle even the ingenious editor to detect its meaning, ) I shall give another method below, which I can show must be, and if I am successful I think you will do me the justice to admit that " human ingenuity" has contrived "a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve." I wish to be distinctly understood; the secret communication above, and the one following, are not intended to show that you have promised more than you can perform. I do not take up the gauntlet. Your challenge, I am happy to testify, has been more than amply redeemed. It is merely with an incidental remark of yours, that I am at present engaged, and my object is to show that however correct it may be generally, — it is not so universally.<br />
<br />
Agreeably to a part of my foregoing definition, that cannot be a proper cryptograph, in which a single character is made to represent more than one letter. Let us for a moment see what would be the result if this was reversed, — that is, if more than one cipher were used for a single letter. In case each letter were represented by two different characters, (used alternately or at random, ) it is evident that while the certainty of reading such a composition correctly, by help of the key, would not be at all diminished, the difficulty of its solution without that help, would be vastly increased. This then is an approach to the formation of a secret cipher. If, now, the number of the characters were extended to three or four for each letter, it might be pronounced with tolerable certainty that such a writing would be "secret." Or, to take an extreme case, a communication might be made, in which no two characters would be alike! Here all reasoning would be entirely baffled, as there would evidently be no objects of comparison; and even if half a dozen words were known, they would furnish no clue to the rest. Here, then, is a complete non plus to investigation, and we have arrived at a perfect cryptograph. For, since any given cipher would stand for but one letter in the key, there could be but a single and definite solution; and thus both conditions of my definition are fully satisfied. In the following specimen of this method, I have employed the Roman-capital, small letter, and small capital, with their several inversions, giving me the command of 130 characters, or an average of five to each letter. This is to "make assurance doubly sure," for I am satisfied that were an average of three characters used for each letter, such a writing would be emphatically secret. If you will be so kind as to give my cipher a place in your interesting Magazine, I will immediately forward you its key. Hoping that you will not be displeased with my tedious letter,<br />
<br />
I am most respectfully yours, <br />
W. B. TYLER.<br />
To EDGAR A. POE, Esq.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
Underneath Tyler’s communication, Poe included a cordial rebuttal of his correspondent’s views:<br />
<br />
"The difficulty attending the cipher by key-phrase, viz: that the same characters may convey various meanings — is a difficulty upon which we commented in our first article upon this topic, and more lately at greater length in a private letter to our friend, F. W. Thomas.<br />
<br />
The key-phrase cryptograph is, in fact, altogether inadmissible. The labor requisite for its elucidation, even with the key, would, alone, render it so. Lord Bacon very properly defines three essentials in secret correspondence. It is required, first, that the cipher be such as to elude suspicion of being a cipher; secondly, that its alphabet be so simple of formation as to demand but little time in the construction of an epistle; thirdly, that it shall be absolutely insoluble without the key — we may add, fourthly, that, with the key, it be promptly and certainly decipherable.<br />
<br />
Admitting, now, that the ingenious cryptograph proposed by our correspondent be absolutely what he supposes it, impenetrable, it would still, we think, be inadmissible on the first point above stated and more so on the second. But of its impenetrability we are by no means sure, notwithstanding what, at a cursory glance, appears to be the demonstration of the writer. In the key-phrase cipher an arbitrary character is sometimes made to represent five, six, seven, or even more letters. Our correspondent proposes merely to reverse the operation: — and this simple statement of the case will do more towards convincing him of his error than an elaborate argument, for which he would neither have time, nor our readers patience. In a key-phrase cryptograph, equally as in his own, each discovery is independent, not necessarily affording any clue to farther discovery. Neither is the idea of our friend, although highly ingenious, philosophical, and unquestionably original with him, (since he so assures us,) original in itself. It is one of the many systems tried by Dr. Wallis and found wanting. Perhaps no good cipher was ever invented which its originator did not conceive insoluble; yet, so far, no impenetrable cryptograph has been discovered. Our correspondent will be the less startled at this, our assertion, when he bears in mind that he who has been termed the ‘wisest of mankind’ — we mean Lord Verulam — was as confident of the absolute insolubility of his own mode as our present cryptographist is of his. What he said upon the subject in his De Augmentis was, at the day of its publication, considered unanswerable. Yet his cipher has been repeatedly unriddled. We may say, in addition, that the nearest approach to perfection in this matter, is the <i>chiffre quarre</i> of the French Academy. This consists of a table somewhat in the form of our ordinary multiplication tables, from which the secret to be conveyed is so written that no letter is ever represented twice by the same character. Out of a thousand individuals nine hundred and ninety-nine would at once pronounce this mode inscrutable. It is yet susceptible, under peculiar circumstances, of prompt and certain solution.<br />
<br />
Mr. T. will have still less confidence in his hastily adopted opinions on this topic when we assure him, from personal experience, that what he says in regard to writing backwards and continuously without intervals between the words — is all wrong. So far from ‘utterly perplexing the decipherer,’ it gives him no difficulty, legitimately so called — merely taxing to some extent his patience. We refer him to the files of ‘Alexander's Weekly Messenger,’ for 1839 — where he will see that we read numerous ciphers of the class described, even when very ingenious additional difficulties were interposed. We say, in brief, that we should have little trouble in reading the one now proposed.<br />
<br />
‘Here,’ says our friend, referring to another point, ‘all reasoning would be entirely baffled, as there would evidently be no objects of comparison.’ This sentence assures us that he is laboring under much error in his conception of cipher solutions. Comparison is a vast aid unquestionably; but not an absolute essential in the elucidation of these mysteries.<br />
<br />
We need not say, however, that this object is an excessively wide one. Our friend will forgive us for not entering into details which would lead us — God knows whither. The ratiocination actually passing through the mind in the solution of even a single cryptograph, if detailed step by step, would fill a large volume. Our time is much occupied, and notwithstanding the limits originally placed to our cartel, we have found ourselves overwhelmed with communications on this subject, and must close it, perforce — deeply interesting as we find it. To this resolution we had arrived last month; but the calm and truly ingenious reasoning of our correspondent has induced us to say these few words more. We print his cipher — with no promise to attempt its solution ourselves — much as we feel inclined to make the promise — and to keep it. Some of our hundred thousand readers will, no doubt, take up the gauntlet thrown down; and our pages shall be open for any communication on the subject, which shall not tax our own abilities or time.”<br />
<br />
<br />
So far as is known, Poe’s readers failed to “take up the gauntlet,” and the ciphers remained unsolved and forgotten until 1985, when Professor Louis Renza theorized that “W.B. Tyler” was really Poe himself, a suggestion based largely on the rather weak evidence that Renza had been unable to find documentation that Tyler actually existed. This claim was then championed by Shawn Rosenheim in his book “Cryptographic Imagination.” Rosenheim felt that Tyler’s letter was too similar to Poe’s own beliefs to be a mere coincidence, and he noted Poe’s known habit of anonymously publishing writings to and about himself. He also pointed out that Poe acknowledged that some of his readers suspected him of “writing ciphers to ourselves,” which Rosenheim chose to think was an indirect confession.<br />
<br />
The hunt for “W.B. Tyler” was on. In 1992, Terence Whalen solved the first of Tyler’s ciphers, which was eventually found to be a quote from Joseph Addison’s 1713 play “Cato.” Rosenheim then established the “E.A. Poe Cryptographic Challenge,” offering a prize of $2500 to the first person to solve the second cipher. Despite this lure, the puzzle was not solved for six years, when a Canadian software engineer named Gil Broza finally submitted a correct decryption. (Broza also discovered that one of the reasons for the difficulty with solving the cipher was the fact that it had numerous mistakes made either by the typesetter or the encipherer himself.) The resulting text proved to still be something of a puzzle (errors in original):<br />
<br />
“It was early spring, warm and sultry glowed the afternoon. The very breezes seemed to share the delicious langour 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 I have a little sun than no air at all.’”<br />
<br />
Rosenheim agreed that Poe did not actually compose this text (it is a variation of a popular punning joke—sun/son, air/heir—that made the rounds during the era,) but he maintained that the poet was the cipher’s author. He cited not only his belief that “its themes…are absolutely typical of Poe’s writing,” but Poe’s oddly discouraging comments about the Tyler ciphers. In 1842 he advised a reader named Richard Bolton to not even attempt to solve the codes “for the reason that it is merely type in pi or something near it. Being absent from the office for a short time, I did not see a proof, and the compositors have made a complete medley. It has not even a remote resemblance to the MS.” Rosenheim saw Poe’s efforts to exaggerate the errors in the ciphers as evidence of his authorship—although it is difficult to understand why Poe would wish others to ignore a puzzle he himself had created.<br />
<br />
Considering Poe’s well-known predilection for hoaxes and multiple literary identities, the circumstantial evidence for his authorship of these ciphers has been considered compelling enough for many researchers to assume he was “W.B. Tyler.” (This presumption has inspired numerous hilariously overblown efforts to interpret these ciphered quotations as Poe’s “secret autobiography”—excellent examples of the fevered lengths scholars will go to in order to try and gain insights about the man.) <br />
<br />
There are, however, some difficulties with the “hoax” theory. Author and professor Steven Rachman (who had originally endorsed Renza’s conclusions) discovered several contemporary poems by “W.B. Tyler”—evidently sappy verses that could hardly be considered as Poe’s work--in “Graham’s” and “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger.” I myself have found several nineteenth-century poems by a William Bartlett Tyler (whose name is sometimes also given as “W.B. Tyler.”) These poems are admittedly much later in date than the ones Rachman found, so this could be a different Tyler. However, it seems stretching coincidence to have two different American sentimental poets in that era with the same name.<br />
<br />
Some have asked why Poe would spend his valuable time creating a fake persona in order to encrypt two utterly meaningless quotations that he never even bothered to decipher. Also, Poe already knew he was suspected of inventing all the ciphers he had solved, and his pride was clearly offended at the idea he had debased himself by mere “gaggery, or more deliberately speaking, of humbug.” As John A. Hodgson, a researcher who became increasingly unconvinced Poe was Tyler, wrote: “[Poe] was entirely capable of such tricks, but he had his standards.” Hodgson gave further evidence of Poe’s sincerity in the matter: “Among the ciphers submitted to Poe at Alexander’s was the one from a G.W. Kulp…that Poe nevertheless ‘demonstrated to be an imposition—that is to say, we fully proved it a jargon of random characters, having no meaning whatever.’ In his rigorous and even elegant proof of the cipher’s incoherence, Poe offered the fullest glimpse of his deciphering method that he would provide prior to ‘The Gold-Bug.’ Some 135 years later, however, a professor and student in a cryptology class reexamined Kulp’s cipher, found it worth pursuing, and were able to decode it with the help of some computer programs. Kulp, it seems, had indeed submitted ‘a genuine article’; but he had not been ciphering in entire good faith. Poe had clearly offered to solve simple (monoalphabetic) substitution ciphers, and had analyzed Kulp’s as such; but Kulp had in fact sent instead ‘a polyalphabetic substitution cipher working with 12 alphabets keyed by the [twelve letters of the] words ‘United States.’ Kulp’s imperfectly good faith as a cipherer, now revealed, antithetically demonstrates Poe’s genuinely good faith as a decipherer.”<br />
<br />
Having said all that, there is still something very peculiar about the Tyler letter that suggests it contains a mystery that we do not realize even exists. The tone of the letter, as well as Poe’s strangely complimentary, but dismissive response, all gives off a certain sense of mockery towards the readers, of Poe enjoying a little private joke at our expense.<br />
<br />
In short, is it possible that these trivial cipher messages were “red herrings,” distracting us from the fact that the important “coded message” is somehow embodied <i>in the Tyler letter itself?</i> Could <i>that</i> have been Poe’s real hoax?<br />
<br />
We’ll probably never know. And that was very possibly Poe’s intention.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-91224272469425178182013-02-18T05:33:00.000-08:002013-02-18T05:34:32.765-08:00A Glimpse of Poe's Schooldays<br />
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<br />
The following appeared in the “(Troy) Kansas Chief” for Feb 19, 1880. It originally ran in the “Baltimore Bulletin” at a date unknown to me. Although Joseph H. Clarke shared a couple of other reminiscences of his most famous pupil that have often been quoted in Poe biographies, this interview, so far as I know, remains obscure. As I like to think of this blog as the place where weird old bits of Poeana go to die, I decided to post it.<br />
<br />
Few Poe reminiscences are trustworthy, but those discussing his youth are probably the most uncertain and contradictory of the lot. This is not surprising—they were all given many years after the fact, and deal with a period when few had any reason to take particular note of the boy. Recorded memories of Poe’s childhood fall into one of two categories: Deliberately embellished, if not outright fabricated accounts designed to tell a good story rather than good history, or sincerely vague, poorly-remembered anecdotes. <br />
<br />
Clarke falls into the latter category. He appears to have been an honest man, but unfortunately, no one thought to ask him about Poe until his old age, when he was, as this reporter stated with rather excessive frankness, “mentally feeble.” There are a couple of obvious whoppers in this interview—for instance, we know very few people attended Poe's funeral, and as a result the minister kept his remarks very short--but it is still of some interest, and I believe that, at least, Clarke gave his information as accurately as he could. That is certainly more than one can say about a good many people who talked about Poe.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
EDGAR ALLAN POE<br />
His Venerable Teacher Still Living in Baltimore—Interesting Reminiscences of the Poet<br />
<br />
One of The Bulletin’s staff, a day or two ago, had the good fortune to have an interview with the venerable Joseph H. Clarke, now 89 years old, who was the preceptor of the poet, Edgar Allan Poe. In Eugene L. Didier's memoirs of Edgar Allan Poe, the following occurs: "On Mr. and Mrs. Allan's return from their two years' visit to England, Mr. Allan placed Poe in the academy of Prof. Joseph H. Clarke, of Trinity College, Dublin, who kept an English classical school at Richmond, from 1810 to 1825."<br />
<br />
He greeted The Bulletin representative cordially, but it was plain to see that the aged man, although physically as many a man of thirty years his junior, had grown mentally feeble under the weight of many years. When the old gentleman was seated, the reporter explained that he wanted any reminiscences of Poe that he could give.<br />
<br />
"Edgar, Edgar," said the old man, rising, with a far-away look, as memories of old times flitted through his mind. "Why, he was a born poet. One day Mr. Allan came to me and said: 'Mr. Clarke, I have heard much about your school and as Edgar shows a decided aptness for classics, I have decided to place him under your care.' This was about 1820 or ‘21, and Edgar entered my school. He became one of my most distinguished scholars. He and Nat. Howard were in the same class. Nat. was as good, if not better, than Edgar in the classics, but Nat. couldn't write poetry like Edgar could. Edgar was a poet in every sense of the word. One summer, at the end of the session, Nat. and Edgar both wrote me a complimentary letter. Nat's was written in Latin, after Horace, but Edgar's was written in poetry. I came to Baltimore that summer, and I showed those letters to Rev. Mr. Damphoux. of St. Mary's College, and what do you think he said ? “Mr. Clarke, those compositions would do honor and credit to the best educated professor in my college.' Oh, yes, Edgar was a poet, and he wasn't over twelve or fourteen when he wrote that letter to me."<br />
<br />
"Did you keep it? have you it now?" the reporter asked, eagerly.<br />
<br />
“No, no," the old gentleman answered sadly; “I returned it to Edgar. One day, after I had come to Baltimore from Richmond, Edgar came to visit me. I told him about the letters, and Edgar rose and said, with such a strange, yearning look in his eyes: 'You couldn't do Nat. Howard and me a greater favor than to return us those letters. I think Nat. would like to have his, and I am sure I would give worlds to have mine.' I gave them to him.”<br />
<br />
"Then you have no memento of Poe?”<br />
<br />
The old man sadly answered, "No, sir; that's one thing I always regretted, not having kept some of Edgar's notes or poems. But then, you know, I couldn't tell at that time that Edgar would ever be a great man."<br />
<br />
"Wasn't Poe a very handsome boy, Professor?”<br />
<br />
"Well, he had very pretty eyes and hair, and rather an effeminate face, but I don't think he was a beautiful boy. He had a very sweet disposition. He was always cheerful, brimful of mirth, and a very great favorite with his schoolmates. I never had occasion to say a harsh word to him while he was in my school, much less to make him do penance." <br />
<br />
"Did he study very hard?"<br />
<br />
"No; he was not remarkable for his application. He was naturally very smart, and he always knew his lessons. He had a great deal of pride." <br />
<br />
"Did you ever see Mary [sic] Poe, Edgar's little sister?”<br />
<br />
"Yes; she was adopted by Mr. McKenzie when Mr. Allan took Edgar."<br />
<br />
"Was she pretty?"<br />
<br />
"Well, really, I can't remember very well, but I think she was a very sweet and interesting child."<br />
<br />
"You saw Poe, after you left Richmond, of course?"<br />
<br />
"Yes; when he came to Baltimore, and stopped at the tavern, he would never forget to come and see me." <br />
<br />
"Do you believe that your pupil was a habitual drunkard?”<br />
<br />
"That I can't tell. I think he was fond of wine, and I know that I always opened a bottle for him when he came to see me; but then it was the custom of the age, you know, to drink wine at that time. Then, when Edgar became editor of Graham's Magazine, he sent it to me regularly, gratis."<br />
<br />
"Was he affectionate to you, Professor?"<br />
<br />
"Yes, indeed; I think the boy and man loved me dearly, and I am sure I loved him."<br />
<br />
"When was the last time you saw him?"<br />
<br />
"When he was laid away to rest, in 1849. I went to his funeral. A large number of persons were present, and, I remember, the minister who officiated dwelt long on the great man's virtues. Yes," he concluded, "Edgar, as a boy, was a dear, open-hearted, cheerful, and good boy, and as a man, he was a loving and affectionate friend to me."</blockquote>
Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-84237396900038529622013-02-13T05:50:00.000-08:002013-02-13T05:51:12.058-08:00A Gift For Dr. Griswold<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
On this date last year, I prepared a little birthday tribute to the remarkable Rufus Wilmot Griswold. The experience inspired me to start a campaign to have the anniversary of his birth given its proper place among history’s memorable events. For instance, with the sinking of the Titanic. Or the Great Lisbon Earthquake. Or the sack of Rome by the Visigoths. Or the outbreak of the Black Plague.<br />
<br />
Ladies and gentlemen, I present World of Poe’s second annual salute to the Reverend Doctor:<br />
<br />
“Griswold, having now assumed the mantle of a true villain…”<br />
-Website for the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore<br />
<br />
“[T]hat very peculiar fancy-piece called a ‘Memoir.’”<br />
-George W. Eveleth extolling Griswold’s talents as a biographer in the “Old Guard,” June 1866<br />
<br />
“[Griswold] was one of the most irritable and vindictive men I ever met…”<br />
-Charles Godfrey Leland, one of the Reverend’s closest friends<br />
<br />
“Dr. Griswold’s biography of my Eddie is one atrocious lie.”<br />
-Poe’s aunt/mother-in-law Maria Clemm<br />
<br />
"[A] gentleman of the highest culture, a contemporary of Griswold, now living in New York, speaks of him as one of those characters in whom the habit of lying had come to be in such a degree a second nature, as to be excusable on the ground of the falsifier’s personal irresponsibility for what was not always a conscious act.”<br />
-William F. Gill<br />
<br />
"Almost as devious as they came in this era of deviousness."<br />
-Literary scholar Perry Miller<br />
<br />
"If Marie Bonaparte had to find necrophilism in connection with her study of Poe, it seems a pity she did not investigate Griswold, who, upon at least one occasion [after the death of his first wife,] came very close to it indeed."<br />
-Poe biographer Edward Wagenknecht<br />
<br />
“’[Poe] doesn’t think I’m a great man,’ quoth Rumpus.”<br />
-George Lippard writing of “Rev. Rumpus Grizzel” in "The Spermaceti Papers," “Citizen-Soldier,” July 26, 1843<br />
<br />
“I never see him that I do not think of the school-book description of the ‘Reptile’ in the ‘Animal Kingdom’--that is: a creature, ‘with lungs, a single heart, cold blood, a brain and a cartilaginous skeleton.’ Of course Griswold has a brain. He fancies it is the brain of the American continent, and he has had address enough to induce some of the more affluent book-publishers (more’s the pity!) to agree with him. And that he has but one heart, like a serpent and a fish, is evident from his conduct towards Poe, who, with all his faults, was truly a great man, and had a soul that was, beyond dispute, a splinter fractured from the diamond of the Infinite--and not the less a brilliant because, like other brilliants, it had its flaws and imperfections. . . . Griswold disliked Poe. Everybody knew that. But, when Poe, who equally disliked Griswold, died, and in a fit of magnanimity made the latter his literary executor, it was the infallibility of contemptible meanness, on the part of Griswold, to use the advantages of his position to carry out before the world his petty, personal enmity.”<br />
-Anonymous writer in the “Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch,” September 15, 1850<br />
<br />
“[T]his gentleman-the literary executor--I had well nigh said executioner--of Edgar A. Poe, before he had stiffened in his winding sheet, I should have supposed him, though honest enough perhaps, when he had no temptation to be otherwise, and rather willing to tell the truth, if he knew how, and it was likely to pay, yet wholly unfitted for the solemn duty he had undertaken so rashly; because, in my judgment, wholly incapable of understanding or appreciating Poe-dead or alive-and by no means of a temper to forget that he had ever been out-generalled or out-blazed, or not listened to by such a man as Poe, and therefore not likely to do him justice after death, when he would have no longer anything to fear from the poet’s ‘glittering eye’, and searching words.”<br />
-John Neal, “Daily Advertiser,” April 26, 1850<br />
<br />
“Have you seen Griswold’s Book of Poetry? It is a most outrageous humbug, and I sincerely wish you would ‘use it up.’”<br />
-Edgar Allan Poe, letter to Joseph Snodgrass, June 4, 1842<br />
<br />
“The pedagogue vampire.”<br />
-Charles Baudelaire<br />
<br />
“[T]he slanderous and malicious miscreant who composed the aforesaid biography…Edgar A. Poe was infinitely his superior, both in the moral and in the intellectual scale.”<br />
-Lambert A. Wilmer<br />
<br />
“…[Griswold’s] favorite pastime of forgery.”<br />
-Arthur H. Quinn<br />
<br />
“Rufus Griswold (a gentleman, grim by name, who makes so repulsive a figure in literary history, that he might well have been coined in the morbid fancy of his victim.)”<br />
-Robert Louis Stevenson, “Academy,” January 2, 1875<br />
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<br />
“I have not a particle of ill feeling toward Mr. Griswold, in truth it seems to me that he ought to be incapable of creating strong feelings of any kind; his want of truth, justice and dignity seems to be an infirmity rather than a vice.”<br />
-Ann S. Stephens, letter to Lydia H. Sigourney, April 27, 1843<br />
<br />
“By the way, if you have not seen Mr. Griswold’s ‘American Series of the Curiosities of Literature,’ then look at it, for God’s sake--or for mine. I wish you to say, upon your word of honor, whether it is, or is not, per se, the greatest of all the Curiosities of Literature, or whether it is as great a curiosity as the compiler himself.”<br />
-Edgar Allan Poe, “Doings of Gotham,” “Columbia Spy,” June 29, 1844<br />
<br />
“But stay, here comes Tityrus Griswold and leads on<br />
The flocks whom he first plucks alive, and then feeds on,--<br />
A loud-cackling swarm, in whose feather's warm-drest,<br />
He goes for as perfect a--swan as the rest.”<br />
-James Russell Lowell, “A Fable For Critics”<br />
<br />
“Stupidity's true mouthpiece, however, was one Rufus Griswold, who easily outgilfillaned the smug Gilfillan himself. This vessel of wrath had been the poet's friend, and (strange to tell) Poe, by appointing him his literary executor, was unconsciously guilty of posthumous suicide. Griswold was not one to lose an illegitimate occasion. Poe died on October 8, 1849. October 9. Griswold's infamy was in type. Hate and malice scream in every line of this monumental hypocrisy. Here speaks, through the mouth of Griswold, the hungry middle-class, which hated poetry and loathed the solitary dignity of Poe. The poet's character, said this literary Pecksniff, was ‘shrewd and naturally unamiable.’ He recognised no 'moral susceptibilities '; he knew ‘little or nothing of the true point of honour.’ His one desire was to ‘succeed--not shine, not serve--succeed, that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his self-conceit.’ And so magnificently did he 'succeed,' so vilely did he sacrifice his art to prosperity, that America, which kept Griswold in affluence, condemned the author of ‘William Wilson’ to starvation and neglect!<br />
<br />
But Griswold's purple patch must be given in its true colour. In these terms did our moralist describe the friend, laid but a few hours since in the grave: ‘Passions, in him, comprehended many of the worst emotions which militate against human happiness. You could not contradict him but you raised quick choler; you could not speak of wealth but his cheek paled with gnawing envy. The astonishing natural advantages of this poor boy—his beauty, his readiness, the daring spirit that breathed around him like a fiery atmosphere—had raised his constitutional self-confidence into an arrogance that turned his very claims to admiration into prejudices against him. Irascible, envious—bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold, repellent cynicism; his passions vented themselves in sneers.’ Those there are who assert that Griswold's outrage upon truth and taste was a revenge, deliberately taken upon Poe's hostile criticism. But there is no need to spy out a motive for so simple a crime. Griswold spoke not for himself, but for his world. Genius is repellent to those who know it not; gaiety is a crime in the eyes of unhappier men who fear not the disease. The envious morality of hypocrites, in whose veins vinegar flows for blood, rises superior to all the obligations of taste and friendship. No doubt the infamous Rufus laid down his pen that day with infinite content; no doubt he adjusted his spectacles over the Tribune next morning with a more than usual placidity. Thus he, who would not allow a poet the license of displeasure, gives an easy rein to his own denunciation. Nor does the poor devil divine the incongruity. Poe's ‘harsh experience,’ he says in a tone of grievance, ‘had deprived him of all faith in man or woman.’<br />
<br />
Of course it had: Poe had known Griswold.”<br />
-Charles Whibley, “Studies in Frankness”<br />
<br />
“The probing of the personal history of Rufus W. Griswold is like stirring up a jar of sulphuretted hydrogen--it exhales nothing but foul and loathsome odors.”<br />
-William F. Gill<br />
<br />
“We have often asked those whose course of light reading was more extensive than our own, to tell us what Rufus W. Griswold, the self-constituted critic among the poets of his country, had written; but no one could name a piece of his composition of the length of a brad awl.<br />
<br />
Judge, then, of our surprise, upon opening the Magazine of the intellectual and indefatigable Graham for June, to find Rufus W. Griswold’s Addled Egg--and such an egg!--no wonder the press cackled when such a pullet laid. It would have caused the muses to forsake Helicon in the days of Grecian glory, and made Homer himself forget his rhapsodies, and open his blind old eyes to behold it…the greatest poet of America--the Rev. Rufus W. Griswold, L.L.D. and A.S.S.”<br />
-Jesse Dow giving Griswold’s poetry the respect it deserves in the “Index,” June 2, 1842<br />
<br />
“Mr. Rufus W. Griswold is wholly unfit, either by intellect or character, to occupy the editorial chair of Graham’s Magazine.”<br />
-An anonymous writer who may (or may not) have been Poe, “New World,” March 11, 1843<br />
<br />
“Did any one read such nonsense? We never did, and shall hereafter eschew everything that bears Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s name...if ever such a thing as literary ruin existed, or exists, nine-tenths of the Poets (!) of America are ruined forever by the praise of Mr. Griswold!” <br />
-Henry B. Hirst's anonymously published review of Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of America," "Philadelphia Saturday Museum," January 28, 1843<br />
<br />
Happy birthday, Rumpus!Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-9289609017188076192013-02-05T07:46:00.000-08:002014-04-12T20:21:12.495-07:00Poe Hits the Lecture CircuitEven fans of Poe’s writings are often unaware that for the last six years of his life, he was also a successful lecturer. Unfortunately, the still-fragmentary documentation we have of his life means that some of the details of his speaking career are incomplete, relying mostly on whatever contemporary newspaper reports have been uncovered by scholars. We can usually only estimate how much he was paid for his lectures, and with the exception of “The Poetic Principle,” which was published shortly after his death, and “The Universe,” which became the basis for “Eureka,” we do not have full texts of his performances. It is also possible that he did additional lectures for which we have no surviving record. We know, however, that he was a popular and effective speaker, and it is somewhat mysterious that he did not, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, make more of what would have been a relatively easy and fast way to raise cash.<br />
<br />
Poe’s first known stage appearance took place at Philadelphia’s William Wirt Institute on November 21, 1843. Ticket prices were $1 for “a gentleman and two ladies” to attend the Institute’s entire season of lectures, 25 cents for the same to attend one evening, and 12 ½ cents to admit a single person.<br />
<br />
The local papers had given Poe’s talk on “American Poetry” an enthusiastic buildup. George Lippard in the “Citizen Soldier” promised attendees would be given “a refined intellectual repast,” and the “Philadelphia Inquirer” predicted a “large and intellectual audience.” Poe was indeed greeted by an overflow crowd, with “hundreds” being turned away at the gate. His debut proved popular with the critics, as well. The “Saturday Courier” reported it was “a very learned critique, marked by the severity of illustration for which the author is so ably known.” The “Saturday Museum” noted that Poe’s poetic talents, his “great analytical power,” and “command of language and strength of voice” gave him “qualities which are rarely associated in a public speaker.” They added that despite his “occasional severity,” “the lecture gave general satisfaction.” Lippard went even further, declaring that “it was agreed by all” that Poe’s lecture “was second to none, if not superior to all lectures ever delivered before the Wirt Institute.”<br />
<br />
Poe repeated his lecture in Wilmington, Delaware, one week later, with tickets at the same prices as at the Wirt Institute. A local correspondent described his talk as “Good, but rather severe.”<br />
<br />
He delivered an encore performance in Delaware on December 23, at the Newark Academy, a preparatory school for boys. On January 2, 1844, the “Delaware State Journal” published a review of this lecture written by “Academicus.” This critic’s identity is unknown, but he may have been the Academy’s principal,William S. Graham. In any case, it is one of the most detailed and interesting accounts we have of any of Poe’s lectures.<br />
<br />
“Academicus” recorded that Poe began by denouncing “the system of <i>puffery</i>” so common in the publications of the day. “Editors of newspapers building up large Libraries for which they pay by wholesale and indiscriminate puffs of works whose title pages they have hardly had time to copy--Authors reviewing and praising their own writings, or securing the bespoke praises of a friend--booksellers and publishers promoting the sale of their goods by measures equally corrupt, all received their full share of severe rebuke…While on the subject of criticism our Lecturer was especially witty and sarcastic in reference to a peculiar style of reviewing not unknown in New England, ‘yclept the ‘Transcendental.’ The wonderful involutions and dislocations by which good English words were made to wrap up the fancies of their mis-users until the little sense that was intended was forever buried like the Roman nymph…”<br />
<br />
Poe used that as an introduction to his analysis of current anthologies of American poetry, culminating with Rufus W. Griswold’s “Poets and Poetry of America,” which was “handled by the critical Lecturer in not the most gentle manner.” In essence, Poe said Griswold’s reliance on his personal favoritism caused “a miserable want of judgment.”<br />
<br />
After discussing individually some of the prominent poets of the time, Poe concluded with “a highly philosophical and eloquent discourse on the true end and province of poetry,” which was probably a precursor to his themes in “The Poetic Principle.”<br />
<br />
“Academicus” concluded by calling Poe’s visit “one of the most interesting and instructive lectures I have ever had the pleasure of hearing,” and expressed hopes that the speaker could be persuaded to return to Newark.<br />
<br />
On January 10, Poe repeated his lecture (which was described as “one of the most brilliant and successful of the season,” and “A literary treat of no common kind,”) in the Philadelphia Museum. He commanded a higher ticket price this time around, with single tickets going for 25 cents, while “a gentleman and two ladies” cost 50.<br />
<br />
On January 31, Poe brought his lecture to Baltimore’s Odd Fellows Hall. The “Sun” predicted “The name of the lecturer, the subject of the lecture, and the well known adaptation of the talents of the one to the material of the other, form a combination of attractions which will irresistibly result in a crowded audience—and our word for it a delighted one.” Three days later, Joseph Snodgrass in the “Saturday Visiter” admitted his talk was “very entertaining,” but disagreed with Poe’s view that “the inculcation of truth is not the highest aim of poetry.”<br />
<br />
Poe’s next stop was Reading, Pennsylvania’s Mechanics’ Institute, on March 12. We are told he “was greeted by a large and highly respectable audience, and they testified their approbation of the lecture by repeated bursts of applause.”<br />
<br />
So far as we know, Poe did not lecture again until early 1845. On February 28, he spoke about “The Poets and Poetry of America” (evidently an updated version of his previous talk,) in New York’s Society Library. Nathaniel Willis’ “Evening Mirror” predicted “those who would witness fine carving will probably be there.” In the “Morning News,” Evert Duyckinck noted the success of Poe’s earlier lectures, and commented that his New York appearance “will differ from anything he has ever done before, if it do[es] not prove novel, ingenious, and a capital antidote to dullness.”<br />
<br />
An audience of “some three hundred” came out to see Poe, who was, thanks to the newly-published “The Raven,” at the height of his fame. He was dismissive of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, two “sentimental poetesses” whose death in girlhood had given them what Poe saw as a largely undeserved vogue. He called Griswold’s poetry anthology the best of the current collections, (although he was clearly damning with faint praise,) then judiciously, and, on the whole, kindly, evaluated the currently fashionable poets, repeated his denunciations of “puffery,” (particularly when it came to “the Dunderheaded critics of Boston,”) and accused Longfellow of plagiarism.<br />
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<br />
The reviews were largely favorable. Horace Greeley’s “Daily Tribune” called it “a remarkable Lecture,” with “much acute and fearless criticism.” However, Greeley deprecated some of Poe’s harsher denunciations, and did not think much of his elocution. (“Mr. Poe writes better than he reads.”) His most severe rebukes, however, went to the people of New York City. He was “rather ashamed” that a city of four hundred thousand could not summon up a larger audience for “a critic of genius and established reputation.” Willis reported that Poe’s audience listened “with breathless attention.” Onstage, he wrote, Poe “becomes a desk--his beautiful head showing like a statuary embodiment of Discrimination; his accent drops like a knife through water, and his style is so much purer and clearer than the pulpit commonly gets or requires, that the effect of what he says, besides other things, pampers the ear.” The “New York Herald” felt Poe was overly harsh on American poets, particularly the most popular ones. When quoting the female poets, they complained, for every good passage he cited “what he deemed ten bad ones,” and the male writers were treated with even more disdain. On the whole, it “was the severest piece of criticism that has come within our recollection for some time….certainly, if we are to judge from what he advanced on this occasion, and take him at his own valuation, he is the only man in the country that is able to write a poem, or form a proper judgment of the writings of others.” The critic for the Boston “Daily Atlas” was not in attendance, but took umbrage at Poe’s reported slights of Sprague and Longfellow. “If he was to come before a Boston audience with such stuff, they would <i>poh</i> him at once.”<br />
<br />
The editor of the Boston “Evening Transcript” responded to Poe’s contempt for that city’s literati with a rhyming sneer:<br />
<blockquote style="font-style: normal;">
“There lies, by Death’s relentless blow,<br />
A would-be critic here below;<br />
His name was Poe<br />
His life was woe:<br />
You ask,’What of this Mister Poe?’<br />
Why nothing of him that I know;<br />
But echo, answering, saith—‘<i>Poh</i>.’"</blockquote>
Poe was scheduled to return to the Society Library on April 17, but “in consequence of the inclemency of the weather,” the lecture was cancelled.<br />
<br />
His next stage appearance is one of the most notorious—and misunderstood—episodes of his entire literary career. Early in the fall of 1845, he accepted an invitation to read an original poem at the Boston Lyceum on October 16. As I have already analyzed the entire complicated episode <a href="http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2011/06/mr-poe-takes-stage-part-one-of-two.html" style="font-style: normal;">here</a> and <a href="http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2011/07/mr-poe-takes-stage-part-two.html" style="font-style: normal;">here</a>, I will only repeat that it is, to say the least, debatable whether or not his recital of “Al Aaraaf” before a “densely crowded” audience was truly the unmitigated disaster of modern-day opinion.<br />
<br />
The next two years were famously difficult ones for Poe. Virginia’s increasingly failing health, ending with her death early in 1847, combined with Poe’s own physical and emotional debility, probably accounts for the fact that he made no further lecture appearances until early in 1848. On February 3 of that year, he delivered “The Universe” at New York’s Society Library, with a ticket price of 50 cents. His aim was not merely to air his metaphysical theories, but to raise money for his cherished magazine project, “The Stylus.” Unfortunately, the weather was extremely stormy, keeping the audience down to about sixty people. The small band who braved the rain and wind to hear his nearly three-hour talk were rewarded with a memorable night. A spectator later marveled that “I have seen no portrait of Poe that does justice to his pale, delicate, intellectual face and magnificent eyes. His lecture was a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy. He appeared inspired, and his inspiration affected the scant audience almost painfully.” Another member of the audience said Poe’s “brilliant effort was greeted with warm applause by the audience, who had listened with enchanted attention throughout.” The other reviews were, on the whole, equally positive. Even those who found Poe’s philosophy unconvincing or unintelligible acknowledged his remarkable persuasive powers. The main dissenter was Evert Duyckinck. In contrast to the other observers, he groused that Poe’s lecture was “full of a ludicrous dryness of scientific phrase…Why it drove people from the room…”<br />
<br />
Can’t please everyone.<br />
<br />
Poe’s next public appearance came about through the intervention of Mrs. Jane Ermina Locke, a regrettably unhinged admirer who had recently managed to shoehorn herself into his life. In the summer of 1848, she arranged to have him speak in her city of Lowell, Massachusetts. On July 10, he lectured at Lowell’s Wentworth’s Hall on “The Poets and Poetry of America.” Annie Richmond’s sister Sarah Heywood Trumbull said many years later that Poe’s lecture “fascinated” her. “Everything was rendered with pure intonation and perfect enunciation…he almost <i style="font-style: normal;">sang</i> the more musical versifications.” It was evidently, as the “Lowell Advertiser” said, “no every-day affair.” He was apparently invited to repeat his lecture in October, but the event never materialized. According to Sarah Helen Whitman, this was due to local excitement surrounding the upcoming Presidential election.<br />
<br />
On December 20, Poe delivered his talk on “The Poetic Principle” at the Franklin Lyceum in Providence, Rhode Island. His ever-growing reputation as both author and speaker drew what was considered a huge and enthusiastic crowd of about 1800-2000 people. (It was later said to be the Lyceum’s largest audience of the season.)<br />
<br />
Poe’s final speaking engagements began in Richmond, Virginia, in the summer of 1849, where he repeated his successful “The Poetic Principle.” He appeared at the Exchange Concert Room on August 17, with tickets selling for 25 cents. It was another critical and popular triumph. Poe himself wrote Maria Clemm that “I <i>never</i> was received with so much enthusiasm.”<br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TAMO8iueszc/UD5na6fKffI/AAAAAAAABjs/hoQ6GM3foLQ/s1600/exchange.jpg"><img alt="Exchange Hotel Richmond Virginia Edgar Allan Poe" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TAMO8iueszc/UD5na6fKffI/AAAAAAAABjs/hoQ6GM3foLQ/s400/exchange.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5782172683664522738" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 309px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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One of the attendees, novelist John Esten Cooke, recalled how Poe’s “wonderfully clear and musical voice speedily brought the audience under its spell. Those who heard this strange voice once, never afterwards forgot it.” Cooke objected to the “sing-song” manner in which Poe recited poems, although he admitted the “exquisite” readings “resembled music.” The Richmond “Daily Republican” called the “clearness and melody of his voice” and elocution “soul-inspiring.” The “Richmond Whig” praised his “strong, manly sense.” In the “Semi-Weekly Examiner,” editor John M. Daniel enjoyed Poe’s critical remarks, but found his manner of reciting poetry ineffective. After making some disparaging remarks about Poe’s writings as a whole, he added, somewhat contradictorily, that “Had Mr. Poe possessed talent in the place of genius, he might have been a popular and money making author. He would have written a great many more good things than he has; but his title to immortality would not and could not be surer than it is.”<br />
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On September 14, he brought “The Poetic Principle” to nearby Norfolk, with tickets at the Academy’s Lecture Room going for 50 cents. The audience was smaller than in the more metropolitan Richmond, but equally adoring. The “Daily Southern Argus” called the lecture “Chaste and classic in its style of composition—smooth and graceful in its delivery, it had the happiest effect upon the fashionable audience, who manifested their appreciation by the profoundest attention.”<br />
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Poe closed his lecturing career by repeating “The Poetic Principle” at Richmond’s Exchange Hotel on September 24. It was reported that the spectators were not quite as numerous as before, but there was still “a large, attentive, and appreciative audience.” Twenty-five years later, Edward Valentine recorded the impression this lecture made on his brother William, who had been in the audience. He said “There was little variation and much sadness in the intonations of his voice—yet this very sadness was so completely in harmony with his history as to excite on the part of this community a deep interest in him both as a lecturer and reader.”<br />
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Two weeks later, Poe was dead.<br />
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It is clear that Poe was a unique and talented lecturer, but, as I noted earlier, judging the financial side is more difficult, particularly as it is usually unrecorded whether he was paid a flat fee or a percentage of the box office. Poe scholar John Ward Ostrom calculated Poe’s proceeds, but they seem to be largely educated guesses. Ostrom estimated Poe’s 1843 lectures netted him about $100, with his three 1844 engagements earning a total of $75. His February 1845 talk perhaps earned $25. The Boston Lyceum appearance possibly earned the same sum, or it may have been double that. His lecture on “The Universe,” may have earned him only about $10, due to the bad weather keeping attendance down. Ostrom estimated his July 1848 trip to Lowell paid $20, and his Providence sojourn $50. Ostrom believed Poe cleared about $75 from his Richmond/Norfolk tours. <br />
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These sums seem small to us, but compared to earnings from his published writings, it was good money for two hours or so at a podium. (And it is possible these are low estimates. Bishop O. P. Fitzgerald, an eyewitness to Poe's final visit to Richmond, stated the poet's final lecture netted him $1500. Although this is uncorroborated and generally disbelieved, it suggests Poe's lectures could conceivably have been more profitable than we think.) As I said at the beginning of this post, it is a bit curious that Poe did not further exploit his evidently remarkable stage presence.<br />
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But then, Poe always had his own agenda.<br />
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<i>(Images of the <a href="http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1650791">Society Library</a> and <a href="http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?55086">Exchange Hotel</a> via NYPL Digital Gallery.)</i><br />
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Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301183716564462573.post-2793773788530809082013-01-30T05:37:00.000-08:002013-01-30T05:37:00.489-08:00Virginia Poe's RavenVirginia Clemm Poe died on this day in 1847, at the age of twenty-four. On February second, she was buried in the family vault of John Valentine, Poe's landlord, in the graveyard of the Old Dutch Reformed Church. However, many years later, the cemetery was razed. Poe biographer William F. Gill claimed that he "just happened" to be on the spot when Virginia's remains were about to be discarded. He often boasted that he rescued what he could of Poe's wife (which, unfortunately, only amounted to a "few, thin, discolored bones") and for years kept them in his house as a distressingly Ed Gein-like souvenir and general conversation piece. Finally, in 1885, the little that was left of poor Virginia was reburied with her mother and husband in Baltimore.<br />
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This article from the January 27, 1909 issue of the “New Ulm (MN) Review” gives Gill's own version of how his little adventure in body-snatching came to an end. The headline is “The Raven Came Tapping.” A better title might be, “A Good Illustration of Why William Gill is Considered One of Poe’s More Chuckleheaded Biographers”:<br />
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At the Poe memorial meeting in Boston the other evening William Fearing Gill of Paris, the friendly biographer of the poetic genius Edgar Allan Poe, deeply interested his audience by relating a strange incident which he said had never been published or told and which he had determined to reserve for the centennial anniversary of the poet's birth.<br />
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"I was living in New York at the time, and in my room I had in a box the bones of Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe, which I had rescued when the graveyard in which she was interred was leveled. It was a bleak morning in December. I was awakened by a rap, rap, rap. I went to the door. No one was there. Again came the rap, rap, rap. I went to the window and opened it. All was darkness, but I could distinguish some sort of small animal on the sill. 'Come in,' I said, and in walked a raven.<br />
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"On my mantel I had an album of autograph letters of Poe, together with a poem called ‘The Demon of the Fire,' which doubtless inspired his 'Raven.' This bird went to the book, perched on top of it and, fastening his talons in it, turned and looked at me. I said, in the words of the poem, 'Tell me what thy lordly name is.' The raven flapped his wings and cried, 'Whoo-oo,' probably as near 'Nevermore' as Poe's raven ever got. The apparition of the raven I accepted as Hamlet accepted the apparition of the ghost—as a rebuke because I had delayed so long in interring the remains of Mrs. Poe. While the bird sat there I wrote to Nelson [sic] Poe asking him to take the bones. He did so, and we interred them in Baltimore."</blockquote>
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A footnote: “The Demon of the Fire” (also known as “The Fire-Fiend”) was published in the “Southern Literary Messenger” in 1863, billed as an “unpublished MS.” of Poe’s. It was actually a hoax perpetrated by one Charles D. Gardette, who, when he republished the poem under his own name in 1866, stated unblushingly that he had been challenged to “produce a poem in the manner of ‘The Raven’ which should be accepted by the general critic as a genuine composition of Mr. Poe’s.”<br />
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It is depressing to record that Gardette succeeded, at least with certain critics. Not only Gill, but more reputable scholars, such as Edmund Clarence Stedman and James A. Harrison, showed a curious willingness to sacrifice their credibility by, even after Gardette’s confession, maintaining Poe’s authorship of lines such as:<br />
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“Speechless struck with stony silence, frozen to the floor I stood,<br />
Till methought my brain was hissing with that hissing, bubbling blood;<br />
Till I felt my life stream oozing, oozing from those lambent lips;<br />
Till the demon seemed to name me — then a wondrous calm o‘ercame me,<br />
And my brow grew cold and dewy, with at death damp stiff and gluey,<br />
And I fell back on my pillow, in apparent soul eclipse.”</blockquote>
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To be fair, those lines are a good description of how I feel after reading most of the Poe biographies.Undinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16214242522330278662noreply@blogger.com