A Tale of Two Valentines

Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library houses what is described as the "original manuscript" of Edgar Allan Poe's 1846 Valentine poem to Frances S. Osgood. The same library also has the poem Virginia Poe wrote to her husband, which is dated the day after the Osgood Valentine. Now, I'm not a professional handwriting expert, but I wish someone else would take a close look at this and this. Can I possibly be the only one who thinks that the handwriting in the "Osgood manuscript" is very much like Virginia's? Not to mention the fact that both poems are written on the same flower-embossed stationary (which hardly seems like the sort of paper a man would use.) The body of the Osgood poem does not match any accepted specimens of Poe's writing from that period (it certainly does not match the writing in Poe's other manuscript copies of this poem,) and the title and initials "EAP" at the bottom of the document are in a different, more "Poe-like" hand. If Virginia wrote out both poems, it would explain the otherwise inexplicable fact that Mrs. Clemm kept this copy of the Osgood verse among her papers, rather than forwarding it, among with Poe's other literary manuscripts, to Rufus Griswold after her son-in-law's death.

If Virginia did indeed make--and keep--a fair copy of the 1846 version of the Osgood Valentine, it opens the possibility, strange though it may sound, that she composed it, as well. Poe biographer Edward Wagenknecht commented that he doubted Virginia's Valentine to her husband was the only poem she ever composed, and it seems to me that he may have been more accurate than he knew. The sentiments expressed in the Osgood poem are mocking, rather than romantic, and could have been written by a woman as easily as a man. Virginia's authorship would also explain how Osgood's middle name came to be misspelled as "Sergeant" rather than "Sargent." Surely Edgar Poe, with his extensive magazine experience, would not make this mistake about a writer whose full name often appeared in print. In short, these two Valentines invite a certain amount of curiosity about the oft-ignored Mrs. Poe.

(Header image via New York Public Library)

More About the Osgood Valentine

In March of 1849, Poe republished his 1846 Valentine poem to Frances Osgood. He rewrote the poem--an acrostic containing her name--correcting the earlier version's misspelling of "Sargent." This necessitated a complete revision of the latter half of the poem, and in doing so Poe did a very curious thing. The last few lines of the 1849 poem refers to Osgood's "well-known name" and says of it:

"Its letters, although naturally lying--
Like the knight Pinto (Mendez Ferdinando)--
Still form a synonym for truth. Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle though you do the best you can do."

Ferdinando Mendez Pinto was a sixteenth-century traveler who was regarded as a famous teller of lies. His name, in fact, became so associated with falsehoods that the saying was that he only told the truth when he admitted to being a liar--only by confessing his many tall tales did his name become a "synonym for truth." Interestingly, Poe's enemy Charles Briggs used the pseudonym "Ferdinand Mendoza Pinto," to write a series of columns for a New York paper--a pen name Poe dryly described as "apt."

In other words, by writing that Frances Osgood's name, like Pinto's, was a "synonym for truth," he was publicly calling her a liar. Which casts a fascinating, and completely ignored, light on their relations.

In Defense of Virginia Poe

Ferdinand: Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died young.
Bosola: I think not so; her infelicity seem'd to have years too many.
-John Webster, "The Duchess of Malfi"

I believe that Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe is an unjustly shadowy and undervalued figure in Poe's life. There are, unfortunately, no known letters from her, and only two brief notes to her from her husband survive, so vital information about her personality and relationship with Poe is scanty. The hostile testimony of Susan Talley Weiss (who never knew Virginia and whose knowledge about Poe is, to say the least, debatable,) and that alone, has given history a view of Virginia as a perennially childlike, insipid girl who was a pitifully inadequate mate for her brilliant husband. For some reason, it is Weiss' account of Virginia that has largely formed the reputation of Poe's wife. The little solid information we have about her, however, suggests that Weiss--as in so very much else--was a malicious liar. Virginia's one surviving composition--an 1846 acrostic Valentine poem to Poe, containing his name--is written in a elegant, sophisticated hand, and while it is not a technically polished poem, it conveys both intelligence and sensitivity:

Ever with thee I wish to roam
Dearest my life is thine
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues
Love alone shall guide us when we are there--
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee--
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

(Intriguingly, there is some reason to speculate that she may have been the actual author of the Valentine poem Poe addressed to Frances Sargent Osgood in that year. The earliest known manuscript of the poem, currently in Baltimore's Enoch Pratt library, appears to be in Virginia's writing, with Poe himself adding his merely his initials and the poem's title to the document.) The testimony of people who actually knew Virginia all describe a beautiful, cultured, charming, refined young woman who made a loving and loyal wife for her troubled husband. Many statements from friends of the pair, as well as Poe himself, indicate he loved her deeply--as a man, not merely as a "brother" as Weiss suggested--and from all accounts of her, there is no reason why he should have felt otherwise.Virginia had a difficult life--she never knew anything but poverty, she became an invalid at nineteen, died a lingering, painful death before she was twenty-five, and she was married to one of the most unusual and trouble-plagued men of her time--but she seemed to have handled her lot with patience, unfailing good nature, and quiet courage. She deserves a better historical reputation that she has generally been granted.