An Early Poe Memorial Poem

The 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.

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."

It is not true, "the Poet had no friends."
There's not a hamlet nor a way-side cot
Throughout the land, where misery has dwelt,
But furnished him a friend--warm, heart-felt friend.
'Tis true they did not swell the air with praise
And loud-toned, fulsome acclamation,
(Like purse-made friends, who never tell the heart
Their friendship,) for his soul seemed theirs--
His lips and pen their speaking oracles--
His harp, their tale of wrong and suffering.
There's not a spirit crushed by time and grief,
And silent in its heart-wrecked misery,
(A looker-on, midst homage ill-deserved,)
But feels in Poe he had a friend, and Poe
A friend in him.

There is a class of men who feel some wrong
In every freak of circumstance and chance--
But these were not his friends. His were the souls
Who, through the live-long day and darkling night,
Conjure no wrong--but writhe with it, and pride,
Till, broken-down in spirit, Death relieves.
It may have been that on thy youthful brow,
Shaded by curls and love, and in the eye
Nature had written Genius--Child of Song!
If this--and dark obscurity were his,
We have a key to wrongs most exquisite;
And in the wreck of hopes, when cheeks have paled
And curls lie matted o'er the sunken eye,
No wonder we should see Poe's world-sick friend
Striving in silence to let the soul go free.
It may have been that chilling poverty
Had stepped between his heart and her he loved,
Changing his crimson hopes to dark despair,
Freezing the morning of his look and life--
If so--I pledge you he became Poe's friend
For lending him his Annabel, and song.
Ah! many a friend, around the grave of Poe,
Will help to plant the willow o'er his head,
Shading his harp and him, low sleeping there;
And with a lynx-eyed jealousy, will watch
And shield from weaker pens his memory.
His was a heart too big for mortal frame;
And in that soul that, rearing up dark things
For men to stare at, turned his gaze to Heaven,
When o'er the quiet Earth deep twilight hang,
Shading the face of nature (that the light
Her sleep might not disturb,) we see a star
That rises in the firmament of thought
So far above its fellows, that we start
To know it had a habitation here,
And fear 'tis sacrilege in hearts like ours
To feel we are Poe's Friends!
-Chicago, Oct. 1849

In Memoriam: A Little-Known Poe Obituary

"But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn!--for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old-time entombed."
-"The Haunted Palace"

The following eulogy for Poe appeared in the "New Bedford (MA) Mercury" on October 20 and 26, 1849. It does not appear that the author, who was probably "Mercury" editor Benjamin Lindsey, knew Poe personally, but it is one of the most interesting contemporary obituaries of him I have seen. It is particularly notable that this author concentrates on Poe’s crucial and unique role in American literature, while bypassing (except for brief, and not unkindly, comments at the end) the usual tiresome frettings and moralizings about his private life.

This column has largely been overlooked by Poe scholars, (although Burton Pollin republished it in 1994,) so I include it here to commemorate this day. It can almost stand as the “authorized” obituary Griswold would have written if—well, if he had not been Griswold:

"The recent melancholy decease of Mr. Poe seems hardly to have drawn from the public press that hearty recognition of his abilities which they undoubtedly merit. Here and there a member of this conscientious body seizes the occasion to air his morality. This was to have been expected. People who had, Heaven knows, reason enough to remember him while living, will certainly take the opportunity of his death to chronicle his errors, and their own virtues. This too was to have been expected. Men and women, whose pretentions he laughed at, and whose principles of literary labor he despised; who having taken possession of the papers and magazines did not hear the salutary truth half often enough; who seized the mutual idea of the day for praise, as journeymen tailors do for pence, and paid each other monthly dividends with ludicrous punctuality; who maintained themselves precariously by writing verses, none of them better, and not many of them as good as those with which “Persons of Quality” graced the literature of the last century; men and women who, upon the largest and most liberal consideration, seem to the honest judgment wanting as much in sincerity and earnestness of purpose as literary ability—alas! These were the unworthy censors to whom Poe’s works and ways were submitted. Unworthy they certainly were, for he was solid while they were frivolous, earnest while they were sunk in lethargy; full of manliness and vigor which contrasted unfavorably with their monthly produce of poor verses and fashionable tales.

To another class Poe, during his fitful life, owed small thanks! These were the men who are consecrated to the service of respectability in letters and ex officio in dullness in every thing; men too harmless to find much fault with; whose quarterly oracles might indeed be missed by the wakeful. They are men who heartily admire every thing upon which time and reputation have set their seals, but who would have refused to talk with Savage, or visit the garret of Johnson. They are men who do not like to be startled out of their self-complacency; who read Addison or Junius for style, and absolutely could not, if they would, make American letters anything but a dead reproduction of the forms of standard authors. It has never occurred to these sapient philosophers that they are living in the nineteenth of the centuries; that a literature with a head and heart in it which shall remain as the exponent of our struggles, our hopes, or only our despair, which shall indicate to the future by its shortcomings its half-articulate utterance , its very want and weakness, that which spiritual darkness wrapped us as in a garment, and free action and manly thought were forgotten, there remained one or two in whose bosom smouldered the fires of an antique heroism—that such a literature, of necessity intemperate, fragmentary, and eccentric, will not come, heralded by the soft lullaby of the lute or the quiet ripple of Arcadian rivulets, these men have forgotten, if they ever knew. Poe, more than any literary man of his time and country, chafed in his fetters. He saw at a glance through what we call American literature, and as he was a man to say what he thought, he never was forgiven.

It was as a critic that Mr. Poe made himself especially obnoxious to these retail dealers in literary commodity, as to distinguish them from the wholesale importers, we may call them. The Duke of Nassau who purchases numerous jugs wherein to export to a thirsty world the veritable Selters, submits them all to a rigid and ultimate test. Being filled with water, if it shall be found upon subsequent inspection that any one has leaked, or appeared to leak the least in the world, the stern hammer of the potentate, in the hands of some qualified deputy, settles completely enough that jug’s prospects of foreign travel. It was in this summary manner that Mr. Poe was wont to complete the career of certain “broken cisterns.” They should not pass themselves upon a confiding world, as genuine Selters—the empty jugs. That this prompt and final adjudication of matters gave rise to much lamentation and many tears, is not to be denied. There was then and is now much talk of cruelty. But if a fly will try to convince the world that he is a beetle, or even if a respectable beetle claims to be called and known as a tortoise, what remedy is there but the entomological pin, were it only for the purpose of scientific demonstration and refutation of all that? That Mr. Poe did the state some service, and they did not know it, only proves how blind the state is to that lamentable waste of paper and ink of which our bards, callo[w] as well as callous, are guilty. His way of doing the work may seem questionable to the tender hearted, whose gentle constitution alike blinds them to the extent of the evil, and the immediate need of stringent remedies; we have no doubt that it was judicious, and considering the future, not untinctured by benevolence.

But personal as Mr. Poe sometimes was, we suspect he was irritated and dissatisfied rather with our whole system than with any individual examples. Few men knew better than he, few men had better opportunities of knowing, the falsity and emptiness of the hosts who covet the lofty honors of inspiration, or the impudent assumption of mere imitators, that they were singing the thoughts and achievements of the American age or the American people. He knew that America did not sing other music than the clang of the forge, or the ring of the emigrant’s axe. That his country, unquestionably great and genuine in much, should be forever exhibiting her weak side to the world, vexed him sometimes into virulence, for he himself never attained the pure height of a rational severity. With those who thus compromised her character Mr. Poe lived for the most part in a state of quarrel. It could hardly have been otherwise, for he was a practical man, who knew what he did well, and did what he did do well, and who was not above the examination of details. He was intended by Nature for the noblest warfare against error, but he submitted to champion Truth in meaner contests.

Of Mr. Poe’s works we do not intend to speak at length. They are the various productions of a literary man working for bread, in an age essentially un-literary. But in all he did, whatever may be its intrinsic value, there is a certain completeness or finish, which is remarkable when one considers his erratic courses. This is what we meant when we said that what he did do he did well. About this he seems to have been punctilious. He would have his metre right, if not his morals. His “Tales,” by which he is and probably will be, best known, amidst their wildness, and the luxuriance of their grotesque fancies, exhibit a rigidity of mathematical demonstration which (paradoxical as it may appear) we think is closely allied to the lofty spirituality of his poems. If we might institute a comparison—not in the best taste certainly, but merely for the purpose of a slight illustration—we should say that his mind was not unlike that of Coleridge, while his general handiness, practical skill, and versatility of pursuit, are fragmentary traces of Goethe’s well-disciplined and gigantic intellect.

And of whom are we thus speaking? Whose name is this we are thus joining with those of the illustrious departed? Alas! The name of one whose way of life was not wise; who struggled in vain against the world, the flesh, and the devil. He grappled with the sins and short-comings of his day and generation, and he fell. He sleeps soundly now that was so restless—the weary spirit is quiet at length. The man of many means which he could not use, of dauntless spirit which he could not bridle, who chafed and fretted in the harness of this clod-pated world until he cast it off forever, has departed; and while the censorious renew their shallow estimate of his works, his worth and his ways, we may sit down by his fresh grave and reverently remember that all things, whether of life or of death, are governed by Infinite Wisdom, while as year by year the world tramps forward to a better and brighter era, let us not complain that it treads into the dust so much of what to us is dear and beautiful."



(Header image via Wikipedia. Footer image via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

The Joke of the Thing: Poe and George Lippard

On this date in 1849 the writer George Lippard, a strange, colorful purveyor of ultra-lurid melodrama, Gothic mysticism and eccentric social activism who probably deserves a blog all of his own, published in the Philadelphia “Quaker City” a characteristically iconoclastic eulogy of Edgar Allan Poe, a man he revered both personally and professionally. Unfortunately, Lippard's exotic, if undoubtedly heartfelt, recollections are virtually all we know of the friendship between two of the most unusual figures in American literature.

He described the last time he saw Poe, just a few months before the poet's death, when his friend was clearly feeling weary of the world. “We talked of the time we had first met, in his quiet home on Seventh Street, Philadelphia, when it was made happy by the presence of his wife--a pure and beautiful woman. He talked also of his last book ‘Eureka,’ well termed a ‘Prose Poem,’ and spoke much of projects for the future.”

Lippard described Poe as “a man of genius, hunted by the world, trampled upon by the men whom he had loaded with favors, and disappointed on every turn of life.” He went on to say, with a palpable snarl, “We frankly confess that, on this occasion, we cannot imitate a number of editors who have taken upon themselves to speak of Poe and his faults in a tone of condescending pity! That Poe had faults we do not deny…He was a harsh, a bitter and sometimes an unjust critic. But he was a man of genius--a man of high honor--a man of good heart…As an author his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night. And the men who now spit upon his grave, by way of retaliation for some injury which they imagined they have received from Poe living, would do well to remember that it is only an idiot or a coward who strikes the cold forehead of a corpse.”

Almost exactly five years later, on October 21, 1854, the Boston publication “Dodge’s Literary Museum” printed another column Lippard wrote about Poe. Although, like his earlier reminiscences, he was ostensibly discussing only Poe's personal and professional travails, Lippard was a literary and political firebrand who had himself suffered battles with the establishment. (His brief, hectic life ended a few months before the publication of this article, when he was only thirty-one.) Lippard's writings about Poe show a clear identification with his struggles. He obviously intended more than a mere personal account of his friend--he wished to make a statement, to hold up Poe's sad last days as a cautionary tale showing the evil wrought by the current literary and social hierarchy. This being the case, it is possible that Lippard's descriptions of Poe were somewhat exaggerated, but they are nonetheless both interesting and moving.

Lippard's article is one of the stranger contemporary reminiscences of the late poet, never even directly mentioning him by name. It is a cryptic, dreamlike account of his encounter with Poe in Philadelphia during the summer of 1849.

He described his late friend as sick in mind and body, missing one shoe (an odd and unlikely detail that may be a coded reference of some sort,) and desperately in need of money. Lippard claimed he made the rounds of the city’s literary set on Poe's behalf, and finally managed to put together a small amount of money to enable his beleaguered companion to continue his journey. Lippard said he never forgot “that saddest of all sights--a great man whose genius had enriched publishers, begging his bread in Philadelphia, on a hot summer’s day.”

He continued, “One day, news came that the poet was dead. All at once the world found out his greatness. Literary hucksters who had lied about him, booksellers who had left him to starve, gentlemen of literature, who had seen him walk the hot streets of Philadelphia without food or shelter—these all opened their floodgates of eulogy, and slavered with panegyric the man whom living they would have seen die in the next ditch without one effort to save him.

This is the joke of the thing.”

Lippard concluded sardonically: "Great is the poet who is dead! Allah il Allah! Allah bismallah!”

In Memoriam

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old--
This knight so bold--
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell, as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow--
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be--
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied,--
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

RIP, Edgar, wherever you are. Here's hoping you finally found your Eldorado.

The Many Deaths of Edgar Poe

"And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die"
-Oscar Wilde, "Ballad of Reading Gaol"

The major roadblock in the efforts to solve the mystery of Poe's death is the strange fact that none of the witnesses to his final days ever managed to coordinate their testimonies with each other, or even themselves. Poe's biographers tend to cherry-pick among the various accounts given over the years by Joseph Snodgrass, Dr. Moran, Neilson Poe, and other minor figures, selecting and arranging statements as they would pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in order to build whatever narrative most pleases them. For the most part, these chroniclers find it easiest to ignore the fact that whenever you are presented with multiple conflicting accounts of the same event, that only means that none of them can be trusted.

The most commonly accepted story is that a Joseph Walker encountered a disheveled, semi-conscious man "who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe," in Baltimore's Ryan's Tavern. Walker was able to ascertain that the unfortunate man was an acquaintance of Snodgrass, who was immediately summoned. According to Snodgrass, he accompanied the poet to the hospital. Unfortunately, his details of the event varied over the years that he told and re-told the story, and it is established that he manipulated facts in at least one crucial area--the text of the note Walker supposedly sent alerting him to Poe's desperate condition. He falsely claimed Walker warned him that Poe was intoxicated, a lie which does little for Snodgrass' credibility.

Then, of course, the biographies go on to relate Dr. Moran's colorful and harrowing descriptions of his famous patient screaming the name "Reynolds" in his delirium, declaring that the best thing his friends could do for him was to blow out his brains, finally conquering the fever called living with the plaintive plea for God to help his poor soul, etc., etc. (Historians generally ignore Moran's later accounts, which are, amazingly, even more lurid. He also showed a remarkable inconsistency with even the most basic facts, such as the day Poe was brought to the hospital, where he was found--he occasionally liked to say the poet was discovered by an anonymous passerby "lying on a bench by a wharf"--and when he died. According to Poe’s biographer Eugene Didier, Moran lied about having personally attended Poe at all. Again, the point has to be made--if Moran's later versions of Poe's death are demonstrably inconsistent and untrustworthy, why should his original tale be trusted?)

What further complicates the whole matter is the fact that there is a much lesser known, and seemingly equally credible, version of Poe's death that utterly contradicts everything cited above. It comes from a distant relative of his, Elisabeth Ellicott Poe. According to Miss Poe, on October 3, 1849, her grandfather, George Poe Sr. (who was Edgar’s first cousin,) was walking along the streets of Baltimore when saw a man, whom he presumed to be in a drunken stupor, lying beneath the steps of the Baltimore Museum. When he looked closer at the figure, he realized, to his horror, that it was his literary cousin. After sending for Neilson Poe, who lived nearby, George Poe took his unconscious relative to the hospital. Mrs. Clemm was sent for, and doctors worked for days to save the poet. However, he never fully regained consciousness, and finally died on the morning of October 7. Elisabeth Poe was an advocate of the “cooping” theory—that Edgar had been shanghaied by the “Plug Uglies,” a local political organization, drugged, and utilized for their curious electoral purposes. The combination of drugs and exposure, she declared, had killed her famous relative.

Now, of course, Miss Poe’s story—which she claimed was verified by Neilson Poe himself—contradicts the accepted Snodgrass/Moran accounts in practically every detail. Neilson Poe himself was of little help in getting to the bottom of the mystery. Others who knew him asserted that he believed Poe had indeed been “cooped,” a misadventure which resulted in his death. However, a month after Edgar’s demise, Neilson wrote Rufus Griswold that "The history of the last few days of his life is known to no one so well as to myself...I think I can demonstrate that he passed, by a single indulgence, from a condition of perfect sobriety to one bordering upon the madness usually occasioned only by long continued intoxication, and that he is entitled to a far more favorable judgment upon his last hours than he has received..." In short, his famous cousin went on one spree too many. Neilson promised to make a “deliberate communication” on the subject, but so far as we know, he never did.

In 1871, a journalist provided Richard Henry Stoddard with an account he claimed to have received from Neilson. Assuming this journalist quoted him accurately, Neilson claimed that he somehow found Edgar “in a state of insensibility,” and brought him to the hospital. In this version of the story, there was merely a “horrible suspicion” that he had been “cooped.” According to this journalist, while Edgar was traveling to Philadelphia from Baltimore, he took one drink that immediately sent him into a “state of delirium,” and the conductor of the train returned him to Baltimore (presumably, just dumping this stricken stranger on the street to fend for himself.) What happened next was unclear, but the implication was that he then somehow fell into the hands of the unscrupulous ward managers.

Unfortunately, this story is, of course, undocumented (and this journalist never made it clear how Neilson Poe learned all this, as Edgar himself was unable to say what had happened to him.) It does not even come directly from Neilson. It is one of the many inexplicable enigmas surrounding Edgar Poe’s death that, although Neilson evidently spent a good deal of effort investigating the tragedy, he never publicly gave any detailed, first-hand account of what he believed had happened. The reasons for his odd reticence are unknown.

It is strange enough that we do not know for certain where Edgar Poe was or what he was doing in the five or so days between his departure from Richmond and his arrival in Moran’s hospital, or that we cannot even make an educated guess about what killed him. It is virtually incomprehensible that so basic a matter as who first discovered him in Baltimore and brought him to the doctors, where he was found, and whether or not he was intoxicated at the time should be such a matter of dispute. It all makes George W. Eveleth’s assertion that Poe’s death was simply a hoax seem quite rational in comparison.

It Was Many and Many a Year Ago...

"Both we, and the beings I have mentioned as inhabiting the other elements, vanish into air at death, and go out of existence, spirit and body, so that no vestige of us remains; and when you hereafter awake to a purer state of being, we shall remain where sand, and sparks, and wind and waves remain...The element moves us, and, again, is obedient to our will, while we live, though it scatters us like dust when we die..."
-Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, "Undine"

Forget about who's buried in Grant's Tomb. I want to know who's in Virginia Poe's. Poe biographer William Gill claimed that when the Fordham cemetery where Virginia lay was razed, many years after her death, he "just happened"--mirabile dictu!--to be visiting the burial ground at the precise moment when her remains, which lacked anyone to claim them, were to be discarded. Gill said he recovered what he could of her bones, and kept them in his bedroom for some time.

This rather ghoulish tale--which does not appear to have ever been independently verified--seems just too coincidental and fortuitous (not to mention self-glorifying) to be automatically believed, particularly since Gill, like J.H. Whitty, was among the more eccentric and untruthful Poe acolytes. (Published accounts of Gill's story vary in their details, making the truth all the harder to pin down.) In 1885, what was said to be these same bones were reburied with Poe and Maria Clemm in Baltimore. (What was left of them, at any rate--the sexton at the Baltimore churchyard later described Virginia's remains as being delivered to him in a container the size of a cigar box!) Of course, it would have been impossible in that pre-DNA-testing era to prove these bones were actually Virginia's. However, no one ever even tried to examine them to determine if they at least could have belonged to a woman of Virginia's age. Gill's account is simply too strange to be completely trusted, and it is also curious that he supposedly kept these bones for some indeterminate length of time before delivering them to a decent resting-place. It really is not at all certain who--or what--is buried under Virginia's name.

And, of course, there is a very curious allegation that when Edgar himself was reburied under an elaborate monument in 1875, they accidentally exhumed the wrong corpse, that of a young man named Philip Mosher Jr. Unless yet another exhumation takes place--which is unlikely, as the Baltimoreans, who are understandably touchy about the issue, prefer to literally let sleeping bones lie--the controversy can never be resolved with any certainty, as the various accounts of Poe's death, burials, and exhumation abound in contradictions. However, Poe himself would undoubtedly delight in the thought that, for all those years, his monument was graced by annual visits from the Mosher Toaster. It would certainly be his last, greatest hoax. In short, there is at least an outside chance that poor Maria Clemm is spending eternity in the company of complete strangers.

In an earlier post, I discussed an oddly disquieting reminiscence of Poe and Virginia entitled, "The Bones of Annabel Lee." The anonymous author was either unaware of or unconvinced by the stories that Virginia had been reburied at her husband's side, as he presumed that her "fragments" "are still wandering about..." Perhaps he was nearer the truth than we know.

In any case, spare a thought today for the gallant and undervalued spirit of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, who died on this date in 1847.

In pace requiescat!





(Image: John William Waterhouse, "Undine," 1872. Via Wikipedia.)

In Memoriam

Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the gray tomb-stone--
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy:

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness--for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee--and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
The night--tho' clear--shall frown--
And the stars shall look not down,
From their high thrones in the heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given--
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever:

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish--
Now are visions ne'er to vanish--
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more--like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze--the breath of God--is still--
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy--shadowy--yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token--
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

"The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of the absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God."
-Edgar Allan Poe, end note to "Eureka"

Poe Toaster, R.I.P.?

I suppose you all have heard that the Poe Toaster failed for the first time to make his annual appearance. This article doesn't give any new information; I was just fascinated to see the story turn up in Pravda, of all places.

As for PT's identity, well, I think Bill Crider may have been on to something.

(The Poe Toaster ain't me, I swear it. I hate Cognac.)

How Did Edgar Allan Poe Die?

I haven't the slightest idea. And neither do you. All of the usual suspects--delirium tremens, rabies (you'd think they'd figure Poe was rabid enough already,) brain tumor, syphilis, meningitis, tuberculosis, accidental poisoning, suicide, or (pace John Evangelist Walsh) a beating at the hands of robbers/emissaries of scorned women/crazed would-be brothers-in-law (take your pick)--are, for various reasons, uncertain or unconvincing. And while the "cooping" scenario has a certain Poesque quality that I'm sure would have delighted him, I think it's safe to put that one out of the running altogether. One can understand how good old George W. Eveleth came to the conclusion that the story we're told of Poe's demise was so nonsensical, it could not have happened at all.

It is an ironic blow to history that most of our information about Poe's death comes from Dr. John J. Moran, the resident physician of the hospital where the poet breathed his last. From the very start, Dr. Moran (I keep having the urge to type "Dr. Moron," but that would not be kind) evidently told different versions of the end of his most famous patient to different people. His descriptions took on increasingly baroque details as time went on, to the point that, by the time he published a booklet about Poe and hit the lecture circuit, the good doctor had made himself a public laughingstock. A letter he wrote to Maria Clemm in November 1849 has been used as the basis of all theorizing about Poe's last days. However, Moran was so unreliable (and, as even this early letter shows,) so intoxicated by the reflected glory he felt he gained from being a part of Poe's tragic end, that I would not trust him if he stated that rain was wet.The nineteenth-century Poe biographer Eugene Didier claimed that Poe's attending physician was a Dr. William M. Cullen (or Cullan,) not Moran, and that Dr. Cullen flatly contradicted everything Moran said about the poet's end. Michael Powell, a modern-day researcher into Poe's death, was also of the opinion that Moran never knew anything first-hand about the poet's demise. Moran's letter to Mrs. Clemm might be said to bear all this out. He gives no cause of death, stating only, "presuming you are already aware of the malady of which Mr. Poe died..." This could be interpreted as implying Moran wasn't sure himself what "the malady" was. He claimed the details he gave about Poe's death came from "the record of his case"--a record no one else from that day to this has ever seen. His reliance on this possibly mythical "record" again argues against Moran having any personal knowledge about Poe. Moran's claim that Poe's last words were "Lord help my poor soul," sounds like someone quoting the final speech of the lead villain in a third-rate Victorian stage melodrama. And the part about Poe spending his last night calling repeatedly for "one Reynolds" is simply lunatic. (It's interesting that Moran afterwards dropped that part altogether.) And, of course, all the details Moran provided Mrs. Clemm found themselves, shall we say, "evolving" over time, which implies that the doctor never had a solid account of Poe's death to begin with. I see no reason to trust Moran's first story any more than his millionth.

Where does all this leave us? Truly, in the Valley of Unrest. We know that, from at least the mid-1830s on, Poe suffered from periodic attacks of incapacitating illness--his "bad spells" as Mrs. Clemm reputedly called them--possibly accentuated or precipitated by depression, that became increasingly acute during the particularly stressful period right before and following Virginia's death. Periods of delirium were said to have set in. Losing Virginia, who was more of a mental and emotional support than possibly even he realized, did nothing to help his condition. Poe clearly deteriorated emotionally, although the oft-expressed theory that he was going mad is debatable. On the one hand, if the letters he allegedly sent Sarah Helen Whitman and "Annie" Richmond are geniune, increasing insanity is the only way to explain those singularly revolting epistles. On the other hand, his published work remained as precise and controlled as ever. It is hard to picture a crazed madman writing "Annabel Lee," "The Bells," or "Eureka." It is yet another unanswerable mystery.

These "bad spells" were often clearly not alcohol-related, although whatever drinking he did obviously must have exacerbated the problem. Blaming his death on drink alone seems far too simplistic. It is logical that, at some point after he left Richmond, he came down with another attack of his malady--whether or not he had been drinking at the time was possibly almost irrelevant--and left to what I suspect was (Moran's suspiciously defensive words to the contrary) the indifferent care of hospital workers, the combination of emotional stress, exhaustion, and possible starvation and dehydration finished him off. I'm convinced he did not have much of a will to live at this point, and it would not have taken a lot to end his existence. It was said that Mrs. Clemm always maintained that if she had only been able to nurse Poe herself, she could have pulled him through the episode as she had so often done before. That may have been true.

Marie Louise Shew Houghton told John Ingram that a doctor of her acquaintance had diagnosed Poe as having a "brain lesion," and heart trouble, which she knew would send him to an early grave. None of this is substantiated--certainly not by the doctor she named--and at the time she was writing to Ingram, Mrs. Houghton--who died soon afterwards--was not at all well herself. Her letters to Ingram are so strange, wild, and at times downright hallucinatory, they are patently the work of someone who tragically was losing--or had already completely lost--whatever wits she had once possessed. Her hysterical ravings can, at times, be downright frightening to read, and it is a sad indication of Ingram's desperate need for source material that he made biographical use of the few semi-coherent things she wrote. She may have been telling the truth. She may have been telling a complete fantasy. Either way, her statements do little to explain his known symptoms.

So...back we go to Square One: What was this episodic, increasingly debilitating condition? Where was he during those "lost days" between the time he left Richmond late in September, only to be found half-dead in a Baltimore tavern nearly a week later? No one has found the answer. I see no way anyone ever will. And I'm certain the old boy himself would have it no other way.

October 7, 1849

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly--
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!

That motley drama--oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out!--out are the lights--out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm,
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

A Little-Known Comment About Poe's Death

Aside from some self-serving, self-glorifying, and arguably dishonest reminiscences of her acquaintance with Edgar Allan Poe that appeared in December 1849 in a magazine entitled "Saroni's Musical Times," (and later republished by Rufus W. Griswold in his Poe memoir,) we have only one reference from Frances S. Osgood about the death of Poe. It is in a brief letter (now in the New York Public Library) she wrote sometime in October 1849 to someone she identifies on the envelope only as "my sister May." (The note was evidently hand-delivered.) In between inconsequential news of her activities, she breezily comments:

"I am well but very sad--for I have just heard of the sudden death in Richmond [sic] of the friend of whom I spoke to you Saturday--the author of the Raven! Half an hour before I heard of his death I was reading with much emotion a late critique of his upon my poems--a most kind and beautiful one. Poor fellow! And he was just about to be married so happily too!"

(One wonders if this "late critique" was the one where Poe commented about Osgood's poems that "her versification is sometimes exceedingly good, but more frequently feeble," and, regarding her verse-drama, "Elfrida," that she had "unquestionably failed in writing a good play." That would certainly arouse "much emotion.") There is nothing in this note to indicate Osgood was particularly grief-stricken over the death of a man who had, of course, refused to have any contact with her for nearly four years. Her notion that Poe died in Richmond, instead of Baltimore, is a characteristically daft touch.

The identity of "sister May" is uncertain. It has been presumed she was Osgood's sister Martha, but that seems impossible. Aside from the fact that "May" is an unlikely nickname for "Martha," the note is obviously addressed to a child, and it invites "May" to come see Osgood "after school."

Ellen and May Osgood

Osgood's nine-year-old daughter May Vincent was then enrolled in a fashionable New York City boarding school (it is interesting that the girl lived at this school, instead of at home, even though her mother was then living in the same city.) Also, the letter was not sent through the post, which would have been the case if Osgood was writing to her sister Martha in Boston. It is most likely that the note was addressed to her daughter. If so, the fact that she called the girl "sister" and signed the note "your own Fanny," casts a peculiar light on Osgood as a mother. Her lack of maternal instinct was evidently well-known in her circle. Even her literary patron Rufus W. Griswold admitted she was "not domestic." Still more telling is a published quote from Elizabeth Oakes Smith:

"...here is the face of Fannie Osgood, oriental, not Madonna-like; her soft brown eyes beamed upon you as if conscious of their loneliness; but I never could bear to think of her as a mother. She was so fragile, so dependent, so utterly impracticable, that maternity looked distorted upon her..." Regarding "Fannie's" daughters, Smith added that Osgood "did not mean to neglect them..." Chillingly, Smith went on to say that, for their sakes, she was relieved when Osgood's "delicately organized" (i.e., neurotic) daughters Ellen and May died the year after their mother passed away.

Incidentally, the above quote, as well as Osgood's portraits, confirm that her eyes were brown. Why Poe, in his description of her in "The Literati of New York City," said her eyes were grey is anyone's guess. Was it a subtle form of insult? Or did he simply not know her well enough to be able to correctly recall the color of her eyes?

(Images: New York Public Library, Wikipedia)