The Name of Annabel Lee (Part Two)

4. Frances Sargent Locke Osgood

In Osgood's case, it has not been suggested that she herself was the inspiration for "Annabel Lee," but that one of her poems was. In 1983, in the journal "Studies in the American Renaissance," Buford Jones and Kent Ljungquist published a strange little article, "Poe, Mrs. Osgood, and 'Annabel Lee,'" where they made the argument that Osgood's "The Life-Voyage" was a source for Poe's work.

This remarkably silly thesis was quickly demolished in a rebuttal by John E. Reilly ("Mrs. Osgood's 'The Life-Voyage' and 'Annabel Lee,'" "Poe Studies," June 1984.) Despite this, it still has a few adherents among Osgood's modern-day champions, who fondly cherish a revisionist fantasy of her as an unappreciated feminist genius. However, all one has to do is read "The Life-Voyage"--something, incidentally, I do not really recommend doing, as it is a lengthy and quite tedious experience--to realize that it is as unlike "Annabel Lee" as anything calling itself a poem could possibly get.

5. Sarah Anna ("Stella") Lewis

After Poe's death, Mrs. Lewis was reputed to have said that she was the poem's inspiration, with one version of the rumor claiming that she had heard this directly from Mrs. Clemm. It is not clear whether we have anything first-hand from Mrs. Lewis herself about the matter, but in any case, the idea of a connection between "Stella" and "Annabel Lee" is something not even Poe scholars have been able to take seriously. It is highly questionable that even Mrs. Lewis did.

6. Nancy Locke Heywood ("Annie") Richmond

The similarity of Mrs. Richmond's adopted first name to that of Poe's heroine has led some of the more fanciful biographers to speculate on a possible connection. However, "Annie" herself found no personal significance in the poem. In fact, she wrote John H. Ingram that Mrs. Clemm always maintained that "Annabel Lee," a poem which Mrs. Richmond claimed not to "understand," was written for Virginia. She added rather puzzlingly, "I think myself, that it has very little significance, if it was intended for anyone else, but his bride."7. Nobody

Chief spokesperson for this theory was Susan Archer Talley Weiss, who claimed that during the summer of 1849, Poe made a point of telling her that "Annabel Lee" (which was, of course, unpublished at the time,) had no connection to his late wife, or any other woman.

8. Everybody

Kenneth Silverman opted to cover all the bases by suggesting the poem "represents all of the women he loved and lost."

9. Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe

A couple of the nuttier disciples of Freud have made hazy speculations that Poe had his long-lost mother in mind when he wrote the poem. Which brings us into pop-psychological waters I refuse to even wade into.

10. Maria Scott

That ever-industrious fabulist Susan Weiss at times blithely ignored the story she gave in #7 above, instead stating that "Annabel Lee" was this Miss Scott, an early love of Poe's who entered a convent and died young. (Weiss also wrote that at the age of ten, Poe wrote "To Helen" for this same girl.) Needless to say, there is no other evidence whatsoever that "Maria Scott" ever existed.

11. Mary J. Leland

I discussed this particular historical atrocity here.

12. Annabel Lee Ravenel

This is among the plethora of Poe legends that has absolutely no basis in reality, but refuses to die a decent death. In Charleston, South Carolina, there is a local legend (started, I suspect, by tour guides who had a few too many,) that when Poe was stationed there during his army career, he had the obligatory ill-fated love affair with a local belle, which, years after her untimely death, inspired his famous verses. Although the Ravenels were a genuine Charleston-area family, there is no evidence Poe knew any of them, and, as with the case of Mrs. Weiss' Maria Scott, there is no reason at all to believe anyone named "Annabel Lee Ravenel" ever so much as walked the face of the earth. But why let a little detail like that keep a good story down?

13. Jane Stith Stanard

Mrs. Stanard reputedly acted as friend and mentor to Poe during his boyhood, and her tragic descent into insanity and death when he was fifteen was believed to have been a serious blow to him. She was supposedly the inspiration for his first "To Helen" poem--which would be curious, as the lines are so obviously describing Helen of Troy, and have no discernable connection to the ill-fated Richmond matron. One or two literary critics have suggested that Mrs. Stanard was also the model for "Annabel Lee," (and, like most of the other women on this list, "Lenore,") but any possible link is far too tenuous for serious consideration.

So, there you have it; a veritable Army of Annabels. I am not aware of any stories arguing that the poem was inspired by Maria Clemm, Elizabeth Ellet, his landlady at 85 Amity Street, or Catterina, but if there are such claims, please do not tell me about them.

(Images courtesy New York Public Library, Wikipedia.)

In Defense of Maria Clemm (Part One of Three)

Poe's aunt/mother-in-law is often nearly as disparaged, albeit for different reasons, as her beloved "Eddie." Poe's early biographer John H. Ingram was the pioneer in this field--largely because he found Mrs. Clemm a convenient scapegoat for her nephew's problems. In our day, Poe specialists Thomas O. Mabbott, John Carl Miller, and Burton R. Pollin, in particular, have denounced the woman with a cruelty and sheer illogicality that forces one to suspect that they were grappling with unresolved and unpleasant "mother issues" of their own. The dislike such men have for her appears to stem from simple--dare I say it?--misogyny. Mabbott in particular stressed that his distaste for her largely arose from the fact that Maria Clemm was a physically unattractive, mannish sort who was indisputably the master of the house. (Both Mabbott and Pollin made it clear that their tastes ran to cutesy, childish balls of fluff like Frances S. Osgood.) These writers assume Poe himself at heart shared their resentment of "Muddy" and her take-charge character, without providing one atom of evidence this was the case. Mrs. Clemm was hardly a saint, but saints have a very low survival rate in our world, and most of this woman's long life was one constant, single-handed battle for survival--not for herself, but for the only two people she loved and who loved her.

The outline of her life is a starkly simple one. This sister of Edgar Poe's father David was born in Baltimore on March 17, 1790. In 1817 she married William Clemm, the widower of her first cousin Harriet Poe. (As a side note, those who look askance at Edgar's marriage to his first cousin should note that in those times intermarriage within clans was commonplace.) Maria and William had three children: Henry, Virginia Sarah or Virginia Maria (who died at the age of two,) and Virginia Eliza. William Clemm died in 1826, leaving both his families (he had five children from his first marriage) virtually nothing.

Although we do not know why, Maria's relatives evidently so disapproved of her marriage that they offered little help in her widowhood. Adding to her burdens was the fact that around this time she took responsibility for nursing her mother Elizabeth, a bedridden invalid. Elizabeth Poe received a small government pension, which Maria supplemented by taking on whatever work, such as washing and sewing, that she could find. She may have worked as a schoolteacher at some point, but as there was another Maria Clemm living in Baltimore at that time, it is sometimes hard to differentiate between the two women in the available city records. At some point in the late 1820s, her family gained the addition of her nephew William Henry Leonard Poe. This likely was of no help to her, as W.H.L. was reportedly a sickly, hard-drinking, and quite useless young man. Her only biological son, Henry, went to sea at some point during this period, and evidently never returned. Family legend said he died young during one of his voyages, but we have no details of when and how he died. For all her preoccupation with Edgar and Virginia, Maria Clemm herself left no known mention of Henry at all, which is one of the biggest peculiarities in her entire biography.

Edgar visited the household in 1829 (and possibly earlier, in 1827 and/or1828.) Sometime just before or after William Henry's death in August 1831, he moved in with the little family, inaugurating a long and remarkably close bond with his aunt and little cousin. In July 1835 Maria's mother died. Most unfortunately, her pension, which, meagre as it was, provided a crucial support for the household, died with her. The next month, Edgar went to Richmond to pursue some much-needed regular employment. He appears to have hoped to find a teaching position, but instead found a position at Thomas W. White's "Southern Literary Messenger." Maria and her daughter joined him there that October, and in the following May he and Virginia married. From that time until the deaths of Virginia in 1847 and Edgar two years later, the three were, through thick and thin (and Lord knows there was enough of the latter) almost literally inseparable.

Edgar's death left Maria completely adrift, both financially and emotionally. The fifty-nine year old woman found herself not only without monetary resources, but without a reason to live. For the past twenty years, her entire existence centered around taking care of her "two strange children," (as Mary Gove Nichols dubbed them.) Without them, she had no idea what to do with herself. She lived a sad, nomadic existence, living mostly with a succession of friends or Poe admirers, drifting rather aimlessly until 1863, when she entered the Episcopal Church Home in Baltimore. She died there in February 1871.

The condescending, if not overtly hostile, attitude so many Poe biographers have towards this remarkably unfortunate woman stems from four major charges:

1. The claim that she (through some sort of occult means never really defined) somehow "forced" or "pressured" Edgar into marrying her daughter. This is perhaps the ugliest story Susan Archer Talley Weiss ever unleashed upon the world, and is one of the easiest to refute.

Neither Weiss nor the subsequent biographers who mindlessly parroted her ever decided why, precisely, Maria Clemm risked ruining the lives of her much-loved nephew and her idolized only daughter by arranging a coerced marriage that was bound to bring misery to them both. Sometimes, it is claimed that it was because Virginia was so wildly infatuated with her cousin that her mother feared for her physical and emotional health if she did not immediately become his bride. Or it was because Maria herself wished to secure Edgar as a meal ticket. (If this was the case, Poe biographer Edward Wagenknecht dryly observed, she must have been painfully disappointed.) Or it was to keep him from marrying Thomas W. White's daughter Eliza. Or she "made the match" simply because that would allow Edgar and Virginia to share one bedroom, rather than using two separate ones, thus making their lives in the boardinghouse more economical. (I swear, I am not making that last one up.)

It has also often been suggested that Mrs. Clemm "brokered" the marriage in order to keep their little family together, which is truly peculiar reasoning. They were already together as a family, and had been for years. There was no reason why Poe could not continue living with and/or supporting his aunt and her young daughter, without having the additional, essentially superfluous, tie of marriage to bind them. And if, as so many assume, Mrs. Clemm felt this need to exploit her daughter in order to gain financial security, why didn't she cast Virginia's lot with the more prosperous and stable Neilson Poe when given the opportunity? As biographer William Bittner put it, with, perhaps, unnecessary frankness: "The only reason they could have had for getting married was that they wanted to go to bed together."

As I have said several times before, this sordid "forced marriage" legend is singlehandedly destroyed by a letter Edgar wrote Maria and Virginia from Richmond late in August of 1835. This letter proves that when he left Baltimore in search of steady employment, he already saw Virginia as his "darling little wifey," and that, instead of being manipulated into this marriage, he was terrified "my own sweetest Sissy" might be persuaded to postpone their wedding, or even call it off altogether. Reading between the lines, it is clear that if anyone had any doubts about the planned marriage, it was Maria herself. The fact that so many still insistently cling to Weiss' story is simply incomprehensible.

In Part Two: More dirt will be dished.

(Image of Maria Clemm via Library of Congress)

Linking Fancy Unto Fancy: More "Raven" Lore

"He's a walking contradiction
Partly truth and partly fiction"
-Kris Kristofferson, "The Pilgrim"

I have, as I earlier threatened I might do, compiled a list of at least the most notable instances of stories detailing "How Poe wrote 'The Raven,'" or "How I helped Poe write 'The Raven.'" (The latter has a sub-category of "How Poe stole 'The Raven' from me.) If nothing else, it all serves as yet another cautionary tale warning of the dangers of taking Poe reminiscences (even the first-hand ones) too trustfully. I probably missed a few "Raven" legends while putting this roster together, but if there are any stories weirder than these out there, I'm not sure I even want to be reminded about them.Here is how and when Poe's most famous poem was written:

1.Under a New York streetlight sometime in the winter of 1844 (so Cornelius Mathews' niece told us in an earlier post.)

2. In the summer of 1842 or 1843, at the Barhyte estate in Saratoga Springs. (Again, see this earlier post.)

3. In the winter of 1843 in Philadelphia, as a desperate attempt to put food on the table of his starving wife and mother-in-law, an attempt that ended in failure, as no one he approached, including George R. Graham and Louis Godey, wanted anything to do with the poem. (This, according to the second or third-hand accounts related by Hyman Rosenbach, who was born nine years after Poe died. Rosenbach was one of those enterprising journalists with a nose for sniffing out colorful but extremely dubious Poe stories.)

4. It was written hurriedly during the course of one night while Poe was living in Fordham, in a frantic effort to obtain medical care and other necessities for Virginia. (So says Francis Gerry Fairfield in a particularly bizarre 1875 article, "A Mad Man of Letters." Of course, "The Raven" was first published in January of 1845, and Poe did not move to Fordham until the spring of 1846, but Fairfield was cheerfully untroubled by that pesky little detail.)

5. It was written piecemeal in New York City in the summer of 1844, with the aid of his fellow boozers at "Sandy Welsh's cellar on Ann Street." Thus, so we are told, "'The Raven' was a kind of joint-stock affair in which many minds held small shares of intellectual capital." (This was also related by Fairfield, who said he had it from a Col. Du Solle, who supposedly heard the story from Maria Clemm. Fairfield, however, insisted that #4 above was the "true" account, and that Poe, who was, according to Fairfield, a victim of "cerebral epilepsy," which turned him into a "habitual liar," simply invented the tale related by Du Solle.)

6. It was written in Richmond, in the office of "Southern Literary Messenger" editor John R. Thompson. As Thompson only took over on the "Messenger" in 1847, further comment is unnecessary. (This story comes to us from James K. Galt, John Allan's great-nephew.)

7. It was written while the Poes were boarders at the Brennan Farm outside New York City, sometime in the latter half of 1844. (This, incidentally, is the most credible account we have about the poem's creation.)

8. It was composed on an unspecified date at a Merion, Pennsylvania inn, as commemoration of Poe's failed love affair with a local girl. (This story appears to be the work of a Pennsylvania blowhard named Henry Shoemaker, who, during the early 1900s, gulled many an overzealous Poe devotee with a series of completely fabricated stories incorporating the poet into local history.)

9. It was composed over a period of ten years. (Susan Archer Talley Weiss claimed Poe confided this to her.)

10. And, of course, there is Poe's own version of how "The Raven" came to be written, "The Philosophy of Composition." Most Poe historians dismiss his account as a mere hoax, and certainly Poe was indulging himself in some gleeful nose-tweaking in this essay, but I would not be at all surprised if there wasn't a good deal of truth in his story. In any case, he must have greatly enjoyed how his account disconcerted the romantics. As he commented mockingly: "Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peek behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true purposes seized only at the last moment--at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view--at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections and rejections--at the painful erasures and interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions--the tackle for scene-shifting--the step-ladders, and demon-traps--the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio."

Certainly, that sounds more plausible than these giddy tales of a raven-haunted Poe deliriously scribbling lines in the rain under a streetlight, or enlisting his drinking buddies or a small boy in Saratoga to help him haphazardly cobble the poem together.But wait, there's more. Not content with being an eyewitness to literary history, an equally large flock of buzzards sought even greater glory by presenting to the world their accounts of how that untalented loser Poe just couldn't have written "The Raven" without them. (And, of course, if you consider all the people who later claimed to have been among "the very first" to hear Poe recite the poem, or to read it before its publication, you'd have to assume he unveiled it before a crowd the size of Australia.) My favorite listing in this category comes, of course, from the immortal Susan Talley Weiss, who, in her "Home Life of Poe," described the poet coming to her in the summer of 1849, begging her help in rewriting the poem, as he "regretted" having ever published it in such an imperfect form. (She added that she "did not feel particularly flattered by his proposal, knowing that since his coming to Richmond he had made a similar request to at least two other persons.") Weiss wrote that Poe had asked her to recite the poem, while he took notes on the many and glaring flaws they noted in the work. (This collaboration would have been an interesting sight, considering Weiss was completely deaf since childhood and unable to lip-read. As usual when writing about Poe, the lady coyly omitted that bit of information.) She told her readers that, alas, they were interrupted in their work by "the tumultuous entrance of my little dog, Pink, in hot pursuit of the family cat," and so the world was cruelly deprived of the new, improved Poe/Weiss "Raven."For sheer unmitigated shamelessness, it is always hard to trump Mrs. Weiss when she was in top form, but many have tried. Probably the earliest entrant in the "Poe Plagiarized Me" sweepstakes was that strange and creepy being, Thomas Holley Chivers. After Poe was safely dead, Chivers worked off what seems to have been a long-festering jealousy and resentment of his "friend" by making a series of increasingly insane claims that Poe had stolen virtually his entire body of poetic work from Chivers. In 1850, he kicked off this campaign by publishing a pronouncement that "The Raven" was stolen from his own "To Allegra Florence in Heaven:"

"As an egg, when broken, never
Can be mended, but must ever
Be the same crushed egg forever--
So shall this dark heart of mine!
Which, though broken, is still breaking,
And shall never more cease aching
For the sleep which has no waking--
For the sleep which now is thine!"

Not to be outdone, yet another crushed egg, a Philadelphia friend of Poe's named Henry B. Hirst, became obsessed in his later years with the notion that he had actually written Poe's masterwork. His proof for this claim was evidently the fact that he had, at one point, owned a pet raven. Hirst went "harmlessly insane" in the latter part of his life, but it is difficult to say if this fantasy was a symptom of his madness or a cause. (As a side note, while Poe was still alive, Hirst aroused his wrath with claims that "Ulalume" was plagiarized from Hirst's "Endymion." Poe responded--in classic Poe fashion--by writing that on the contrary, it was Hirst who stole from him. "Now my objection, in this case, is not to the larceny per se. I have always told Mr. Hirst that, provided he stole my poetry in a reputable manner, he might steal just as much of it as he thought proper--and, so far, he has behaved very well, in largely availing himself of the privilege. But what I do object to, is the being robbed in bad grammar. It is not that Mr. Hirst did this thing--but that he has went and done did it." )

In 1870, the "New Orleans Times" published a "confession" from Poe himself, admitting that he had received "The Raven" from an unknown poet, one Samuel Fenwick, who died soon afterwards. Subsequently, said Poe, he became so intoxicated he no longer knew what he did, and while in that state signed his own name to the poem and sent it to be published. Although the letter was immediately revealed to be a hoax, the story continued to be repeated as fact for quite some time afterwards--a tribute to the power of the printed word, or the world's eagerness to denigrate Poe by any means necessary, or both.

In 1901, John A. Joyce published the claim that Poe stole "The Raven" wholesale from Leo Penzoni's "The Parrot," which he claimed had been published in the "Milan Art Journal" in 1809. (Modern-day researchers have been unable to find any clue that either Penzoni or the magazine in question ever existed.) In the years following Poe's death, claims were also made that "The Raven" was merely a translation of unspecified Chinese or Persian poems.Perhaps the apex to all this delirious nonsense was reached by one C.D. Gardette, who in 1859 published a poem entitled "The Fire Fiend," which he claimed Poe had written as an "incomplete" predecessor to "The Raven." Even after Gardette admitted in print that he had intended nothing more than a playful Poe-like hoax, "The Fire Fiend" continued to be described as Poe's genuine handiwork at least as late as the early 1900s. (Poe biographer William Gill even claimed to have seen the manuscript of the poem in Poe's handwriting!) One can best demonstrate the truly horrifying readiness of so many Poe devotees to believe virtually anything told about him by reciting these lines from Gardette's all-too-successful prank:

"Speechless; struck with stony silence; frozen to the floor I stood,
Till methought my brain was hissing with that hissing, bubbling blood--Till
I felt my life-blood oozing, oozing from those lambent lips:--Till
the Demon seemed to name me;--then a wondrous calm
o'ercame me,
And my brow grew cold and dewy, with a death-damp stiff and gluey,
And I fell back on my pillow in apparent soul-eclipse!"

When the ghost of Rufus W. Griswold, in whatever strange netherworld he was by then inhabiting, heard that Poe was actually being blamed for these lines, he must have just laughed his head off.

More on the Amazing Susan Weiss

On this blog, I have often referred to Susan Archer Talley Weiss, that prolific and pathological liar. It is hard, however, to describe her writings in a way that do them justice--they really have to be read in their entirety to appreciate their true horror. Her claims that she was a mere slip of a wee girl--"little more than a child"--when she claimed to have met Edgar Allan Poe in 1849 (she was 27 at the time.) The complete lack of any proof that she met Poe in person at all, not to mention his sister Rosalie and the Mackenzie family (Weiss claimed they were her main sources about Poe's personal life--after, of course, all these alleged witnesses were safely dead. It is also worth noting that there is no evidence that Rosalie or any member of her foster family related any of this spicy inside information about Poe to anyone else.) Weiss' descriptions of her lengthy and intimate conversations with the poet, who had, she claimed, immediately adopted her as a favored confidante (these descriptions coyly avoid mentioning the fact that she was completely deaf since childhood.) Her account of Poe enlisting her to re-write "The Raven." (Weiss sniffed that she "did not feel particularly flattered by his proposal, knowing that since his coming to Richmond he had made a similar request to at least two other persons.") Her complete invention of the current popular image of Virginia Poe as a childlike nincompoop who could not even be bothered to read any of her husband's writings. Her inconsistent, contradictory, and frequently quite insane claims. All these factors, as well as many, many more, leave the reader frankly in awe of the sheer magnitude of her powers of fantasy. The world lost a potentially great novelist of the Grand Guignol school when Mrs. Weiss made the decision to peddle her work as non-fiction. Unfortunately, however, her writings have been allowed to pass largely without challenge, or even close examination. As a result, she became an eminent member of that Rogues' Gallery led by Rufus Griswold, Thomas Dunn English, Sarah Helen Whitman, J.H. Whitty, etc., all dedicated to distorting the historical record about Poe.

After having read everything Susan Weiss wrote about Poe, as well as researching what little we know about her decidedly strange personal life, (particularly her curious alleged "marriage" to the mysterious Louis Weiss,) I have come to the quite serious, unexaggerated conclusion that the woman was mentally ill. It is hard to tell whether she reached her peak of lunacy in discussing Poe's marriage or his death. Early on, she often implied that his demise resulted from one drinking binge too many. In the mid-1870s, when Elizabeth Oakes Smith's story about Poe's death resulting from a beating (which Smith linked to his quarrel with Elizabeth F. Ellet over her letters) got wide circulation, Weiss wrote a short magazine piece contemptuously refuting the charge. Afterwards, however, she became increasingly enamored of the idea. She wound up not only embracing Smith's story, but outdoing it altogether. By 1885, this is what Weiss was writing to Poe's biographer George Woodberry:

"I have mentioned the quarrel between himself & Mrs. Shelton in regard to certain letters of hers which he refused to give up until his own had been returned to him. On her part the feeling was most bitter & vindictive, she having been told of some unflattering remarks he had made in regard to her and his sending an open and verbal reply in answer to her note demanding the return of the letters. [Note her obvious plagiarism of the Ellet scandal.] We all heard on that occasion that she said 'she would have him chastised within an inch of his life, if she had to wait seven years for it,' or words to that effect, if not verbatim. I did not at the time believe that she could so have expressed herself--but have since heard from more than one source that Poe died from the effects of a severe beating, administered by Mrs. Shelton's order."

I do not have the most admiring opinion of the Widow Shelton, but even I can't quite see her as a cross between Catherine de Medici and Vito Corleone.

Arthur H. Quinn, who authored practically the only Poe biography that does not read like a supermarket tabloid, discussed a particularly amusing passage from her book, "Home Life of Poe," that is a fine representation of the lady's remarkable style. Here, she quotes her mother as relating to her an account of being neighbors with Poe's parents in Norfolk, VA, in 1811.

"'At this time,' continued my mother, 'we were living on Main Street, and my uncle, Dr. Robert Butt, of the House of Burgesses, lived close by, on Burmuda Street.'" Weiss then drew a detailed picture of David and Eliza Poe, who, with their children, lived next door to Mr. Butt, along with an "old Welsh nurse," (Eliza Poe's mother, according to Weiss.)

Quinn did a little research into this statement, and discovered the following:

1. In 1811, Virginia had no legislative body known as the "House of Burgesses."
2. No one named "Robert Butt" was ever, at any time, a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses.
3. There is not one record showing that anyone named "Robert Butt" ever even lived in Norfolk.
4. Quinn did not mention this, but we know that Eliza Poe's mother was an English actress named Elizabeth Arnold, who died long before her daughter married David Poe.

And this was the woman Poe specialist Thomas O. Mabbott treated as a highly trustworthy source! "Seldom," Quinn noted dryly, "has one sentence contained so many errors." On the contrary. Mrs. Weiss wrote many other sentences that could leave the one he quoted in the dust.

Poe's Weird Women (Part Four) - Eliza White

With the sole exception of his marriage to Virginia Clemm, all of Edgar Allan Poe's many reputed romantic relationships with women have a strangely unreal, undocumented, unconvincing, and ephemeral quality. One of the most notable examples is his supposed flirtation with Elizabeth "Eliza" or "Lizzie" White. Poe met her in 1835, when he went to work on the "Southern Literary Messenger," the Richmond publication owned by her father, Thomas W. White. We know nothing certain about what--if any--relationship he had then with the fifteen-year-old Eliza. (Poe scholar J.H. Whitty claimed she was 23 when she met Poe, but records prove she was born in 1820.) It has been suggested that a poem Poe published in the September 1835 "Messenger," "Lines Written in an Album," which is addressed to an "Eliza," was written for Miss White, but that is highly unlikely. The poem appeared in print after Poe had been in Richmond only a few weeks, so it's almost certain the innocuous little verse was composed while he was still in Baltimore. (It has also been claimed--and generally accepted--that Poe originally wrote the poem for his cousin Elizabeth Herring, and Whitty had a notion that it was written with Virginia Eliza Clemm in mind, but both these statements are based on dubious or nonexistent evidence. Chances are Poe simply plucked the name, "Eliza" from thin air.)

Nearly everything we are told about their relationship originated with Elizabeth Oakes Smith (it's strange how the same few names keep popping up in Poe legend again and again,) who claimed to be a friend of the White family. After Poe died, she evidently told any number of people--including John Ingram and her friend Sarah Helen Whitman--that if Poe had lived, he would have married Eliza. (Or, as Smith called her, "Lizzie.") She did not explain where this left Whitman and Sarah Elmira Shelton. Smith also told Ingram that Maria Clemm had pressured Poe to marry Virginia in order to "save" him from "Lizzie," who was, according to Mrs. Smith, willful, capricious, and addicted to morphine. (After all, what interest could Poe have had in marrying Virginia Clemm, who was, according to everyone who knew her, lovely, intelligent, sweet-natured, and who adored him? Good Lord, fate worse than being broken on the wheel.) It is notable, however, that despite Smith's fondness for publishing "autobiographic" articles that consisted of whatever stray dirt she could rake up about her contemporaries, she never dared to put any of this in print. It is also notable that she simultaneously expressed her belief that after Virginia's death, Poe had an antipathy towards the idea of remarriage. She seemed not to notice the obvious incongruity.

Smith's stories have more holes than a sieve factory. She was known as an irrepressible and irresponsible gossipmonger (she was also responsible for disseminating a garbled and extremely lurid version of the "Ellet letters" incident, where Poe supposedly died as the result of a beating administered in New York by thugs hired by a woman with whom he had quarreled and whose letters he had refused to return.) Mrs. Whitman--herself no stranger to mythomania--told Ingram frankly that Smith scarcely knew the first thing about Poe, and simply invented virtually everything she ever wrote about him. Smith herself conceded to Ingram that while "Lizzie" was in love with Poe, and hoped to eventually marry him, she had never seen the poet treat Miss White with anything other than his habitual dignified courtesy. Small wonder that Ingram quickly found himself irritably dismissing Smith as a completely worthless source.

The fable that Poe may have wanted to marry Eliza, rather than Virginia, is demolished by the famous letter he wrote to Mrs. Clemm in August 1835, where he expressed his deep love for Virginia, and indicated that he already saw himself as virtually engaged to her. (And, of course, if he and Virginia were, as many believe, privately married after they took out a marriage license on September 22, 1835, that settles the issue altogether.)

The indefatigable Susan Talley Weiss later picked up Smith's extravaganzas about Eliza and Poe and put her own deranged spin on them. She reiterated the notion that Poe had intended to marry Miss White, rather than Virginia, but as was usual with her, she never managed to get her stories straight. At one point, she indicated that it was Maria Clemm's insistence that Poe wed her daughter that ended his budding romance with Eliza. Elsewhere, she claimed that Poe had actually been engaged to Miss White, but Poe's "dissipation" forced her to break off the match.

One seeks in vain for evidence proving any of this. Poe's only recorded references to Eliza are two brief, casual asides in letters written to Mrs. Clemm during his 1849 Richmond visit. They do nothing to indicate he was romantically interested in her, or ever had been. We have a number of Thomas White's letters which mention both Eliza and Poe. They contain no hint of any sort of personal relationship between his young daughter and his assistant. In the late 1850s, Sarah Helen Whitman wrote Mrs. Clemm asking if there had ever been a romance between Eliza and Edgar. Poe's aunt responded that Eliza had visited them at Fordham before and after Virginia's death. She said they had all esteemed Miss White as a family friend, but Poe's feelings for her had never gone further than that. (Eliza's visits to them while his wife was still alive, as well as the fact that she attended Poe's Richmond marriage to Virginia substantiates this statement.) J.H. Whitty wrote that Eliza's sister, Sarah Bernard, and John Fergusson, a "Messenger" employee intimate with the White family, both told him that there had never been anything romantic between Poe and Eliza. Whitty can never be trusted as a source, but his testimony is at least consistent with all available reliable evidence.

Most striking of all is the fact that we do not have one word about Poe from Miss White herself. This is particularly curious, as in the 1850s White, in an effort to escape her poorly-paying job as a music teacher (which she bitterly described as "drudgery,") tried launching a career giving public readings from Shakespeare and other poets (not Poe, however.) She publicized herself as the daughter of the founder of the "Southern Literary Messenger." If she had any interesting anecdotes or reminiscences of the "SLM's" most famous employee, Edgar Allan Poe, surely she would have made use of them by incorporating them in her readings, or by giving newspaper interviews, in her effort to attract audiences.

Her hopes of establishing herself as a professional "reader" came to nothing (one contemporary review gently hinted that her ambitions outstripped her abilities,) and she was forced to return to her hated "drudgery." She was teaching music in Richmond until at least 1880. Whitty claimed White died in 1888, but as he misstated her birth year, I'm doubtful he got the time of her death right. I have yet to uncover any valid record of when she died, or where she is buried. (Whitty stated she was buried in Richmond's Shockoe Hill Cemetery, but records of that burial place do not list her name.) Sadly, the death of an impoverished elderly spinster, who was virtually alone in the world, would have received little notice.

Other than Mrs. Smith's questionable--and extremely unflattering--descriptions, we have little or no information about what sort of person Eliza White was. Her one extant letter (written as an application for a clerking job in Richmond during the Civil War,) her attempted career as a "reader," and the dreadful poetry she wrote for the "Messenger" all suggest a theatrical, rather affected personality, but there is too little evidence to know for sure. We do not even know what she looked like. No picture of her exists, and there is no reliable description of her appearance. A cousin of White's once stated that her chief claim to beauty was her light-blonde hair, which implied that she was otherwise not particularly attractive. (This same relative, significantly, could not offer any insight about Eliza's friendship with Poe, explaining that her cousin never mentioned the poet's name.)

Elizabeth W. White--whether or not she was infatuated with Poe, or was a drug addict, or indulged in "capricious" behavior--was definitely one of the most obscure, as well as among the most tenuous, of Poe's many Weird Women.

Susan Archer Talley Weiss

Weiss has been aptly described by Arthur Quinn as the most "irritating" of all the Poe biographers. She published several strange magazine articles about Poe, as well as an even-stranger book, "The Home Life of Poe." She was a self-described Poe "confidante," who claimed to have struck up a close friendship with him during his last visit to Richmond, Virginia in the summer of 1849. (There is no other corroboration that she ever even met Poe in person. She also claimed to have obtained extensive information about his private life from his sister Rosalie and her foster family, the Mackenzies. However, as Rosalie Poe and the Mackenzie family members she quoted as sources were all dead by the time Weiss began publishing her Poe information, these stories rely exclusively on Weiss' word, as well.)

Nearly everything Weiss wrote about Poe, in fact, is completely uncorroborated, and where her statements can be checked, she is generally wrong, often bizarrely so. (I'm not sure which is my favorite Weiss anecdote--her story about Poe enlisting her to help him re-write "The Raven," or her claim that he died as a result of a beating that was administered to him by order of his estranged ex-fiancee, Sarah Elmira Shelton.) Dominating her work is her strange obsession with proving that Poe's marriage to Virginia Clemm--a woman she never even met--was a tragic failure.

One would think that such a weird and wholly untrustworthy source would be treated with the contempt she deserves, but for reasons which completely elude me, Weiss became a major influence on many Poe biographers, such as George Woodberry, William Gill, Thomas O. Mabbott, and Frances Winwar. Even biographers that acknowledge her unreliability, such as Quinn, Kenneth Silverman, and the editors of "The Poe Log," wind up quoting her extensively. (They often do this without attribution, leaving the reader to assume they are relating proven factual events, when in reality, they are merely retelling her fairy tales.) This is a great pity, because although Weiss is always described as a "friend" of Poe's, her writings about him have ironically done more damage to his reputation than anything since Griswold's infamous biography. Her tone towards Poe grew increasingly negative over the years, culminating in her 1907 book, which bluntly described him as a drunken, weak-willed, skirt-chasing creep, unhappily married to a plump, infantile "child-wife" who never even read half his poetry. It is an amazing piece of work, considering that--at best--she had a brief acquaintance with Poe at the very end of his life, and that she was not even intimate with anyone who truly knew him well.What is most puzzling about Weiss' ubiquity in Poe biography is the universally ignored fact that she had lost her hearing in childhood, as the result of an illness. Her entry in Rufus W. Griswold's "Female Poets of America" anthology described her as completely deaf, and numerous contemporary biographical sketches of her state the same thing. For good measure, an 1861 newspaper article about her stated she could not even lip-read--that all questions put to her had to be in writing. This alone obviously destroys all her stories of long, intimate conversations with Poe--not to mention all the information she claimed to have been told about him by others. But because--for self-evident reasons--she never mentioned her inability to hear in any of her writings about Poe, his biographers have also ignored this critical detail.

This is one of the many things that, when I began to explore the world of Poe, made me feel like Alice going down the rabbit hole.