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.

I'm back...

...Temporarily, at least. And not here. Today I'm guest-posting over at that lethally interesting blog, Executed Today. I'm exploring a sordid little mystery from 1876: Was Mary Stanley's death the result of natural causes, criminal neglect...or murder? (And, yes, there is a Poe connection.)

Hope you like it.

Be That Word Our Sign of Parting...

This is just to say that I'll be taking a hiatus from this blog. (I'm suddenly picturing all of you responding to this statement by quoting to me the words of Oliver Cromwell: "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately...Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!")

I had only one reason for starting World of Poe back in 2009--to leave "on the record" (even if it's in this obscure back alley of cyberspace) some sort of counterargument to the many errors, misconceptions, deliberate lies, and, here and there, (particularly on the Internet) sheer gibbering insanity that have hopelessly befuddled any efforts to truly understand Edgar Allan Poe.

Like so many others before me, I found it very difficult to reconcile the profound idealism and deep spiritual insight of Poe's writings with the degraded, almost buffoonish person found in his biographies. It is easy to imagine that a man can be a deeply flawed person and still be a talented writer. It is impossible to imagine that such an individual can be a wise writer. And Poe was not only a wise and enlightened writer indeed--one of the very wisest I have ever encountered--but an eminently sane, even compassionate one. ("Not only do I think it paradoxical to speak of a man of genius as personally ignoble, but I confidently maintain that the highest genius is but the loftiest moral nobility.") I realized that something had to be wrong somewhere. So I began examining his history more closely, and soon discovered that nearly everything was wrong. His "accepted" life story consisted largely of one bizarre falsehood after another. Rufus Griswold's memoir was not an anomaly. It was a template. (And, if you can imagine it, I have avoided writing here about some of the more appalling crimes that have been perpetrated against Poe, simply because I knew few would believe me.)

However eccentric or inept my rebuttals may have been, well, Edgar, at least I tried. I only hope I've done my "mite" (as George W. Eveleth would say) in aiding what I have come to think of as the Poe samizdat. Let me put it this way: If I've managed to persuade just one person to look at everything said or written about the man with a certain healthy skepticism, it will all have been worth it.

I suppose my admittedly odd crusade is all thanks to "Eureka." For many years, the work was generally regarded as the ravings of a madman or megalomaniac. In recent times, the focus has been almost exclusively on Poe's cosmology, reducing his book to a mere scientific essay. What both schools of thought have largely overlooked is that "Eureka" is, as Poe himself said, "a poem"--to my mind, one of the greatest ever written. It is difficult to pull individual quotes from this work--it must be read as a whole, really, or not read at all--but there are some particular passages that I have studied so often I practically have them memorized:

"...But now comes the period at which a conventional World-Reason awakens us from the truth of our dream. ­ Doubt, Surprise and Incomprehensibility arrive at the same moment. They say:--'You live and the time was when you lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than your own; and it is only through this Intelligence you live at all.' These things we struggle to comprehend and cannot:--cannot, because these things, being untrue, are thus, of necessity, incomprehensible.

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of any one’s soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought;--these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity--are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul is inferior to another--that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul--that each soul is, in part, its own God--its own Creator:--in a word, that God--the material and spiritual God--now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.

In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice--of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more--it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have ­imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes--with a view--if even with a futile view--to the extension of our own Joy."

The close of "Eureka" contains the two finest lines he ever wrote:

"Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness--that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life--Life--Life within Life--the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine."

Strange, and to some, outrageous, though it may sound, "Eureka" has been a vital help and consolation in my long, painful struggles to make some sense of this "material and spiritual universe." For that reason alone, I will always feel love and gratitude towards Edgar Poe, and a corresponding desire to defend his name against all the dirty work--whether anyone in the world listens to me or not. I owe the man at least that much.

I hope to continue posting here from time to time, whenever I come across anything else in Poe "scholarship" that particularly annoys me. (Or if, God help us, Lenore Hart decides to lift from write another Poe novel.) I find abandoned blogs peculiarly depressing; it's like walking into a ghost town. For now, however, I'll "sling the knapsack for new fields," and focus my energies, such as they are, elsewhere.

So, as far as this space is concerned, I bid farewell--as cordially to foes as to friends.

Mr. Poe Takes the Stage (Part Two)

"The Frogpondians may as well spare us their abuse. If we cared a fig for their wrath we should not first have insulted them to their teeth, and then subjected to their tender mercies a volume of our Poems:--that, we think, is sufficiently clear. The fact is, we despise them and defy them (the transcendental vagabonds!) and they may all go to the devil together."
-Edgar Allan Poe, writing in the "Broadway Journal," November 22, 1845

Poe was clearly having far too much fun with his antagonists. When reading his editorial, it is difficult to imagine anything better suited to add fat to the fire, and it is even more difficult to imagine that this was not precisely his intention. Inevitably, this only invited further attacks upon him from Miss Walter and her editorial allies, who seemed to never tire of informing their readers that Poe was a pathetic, indigent madman who had, it was suggested, been visibly drunk during his Lyceum recital. (The allegation that Poe took the stage intoxicated is still widely repeated today, despite the fact that it is utterly fictitious. Despite what such unfortunate productions as Jeffrey Combs’ recent one-man show about Poe would have us believe, he never made any sort of stage appearance when he was under the influence.) Poe himself snorted at such insinuations, wondering why “these miserable hypocrites” couldn't “say ‘drunk’ at once and be done with it?”

The literary battle over his Lyceum appearance continued for an astonishing length of time, at least partly due to the fact that, whenever it showed any signs of dying a natural death, Poe would use the pages of the “Broadway Journal” to eagerly bring it back to full strength. Other newspapers and magazines were drawn into the fray, either for or against him, and Poe responded to both praise and abuse with equal gusto. (When the "Harbinger," the official journal of the transcendental Brook Farm commune, published a column questioning Poe's mental condition, he responded, "Insanity is a word that the Brook Farm Phalanx should never be brought to mention under any circumstances whatsoever." He added condescendingly that the "Harbinger" was "the most reputable organ of the Crazyites," run by people whose objects were honorable, "all that anybody can understand of them." He also noted with malicious delight that the circulation of the "Broadway Journal" had doubled since his Lyceum appearance.)

He probably would have kept the debate going in perpetuity—the opportunity it gave him to publicly mock the Transcendentalists was clearly a source of unflagging joy to him—if it had not been for the untimely demise of the “Broadway Journal” in January of 1846. Deprived of his public forum, Poe was forced to retreat from the field, a complication which allowed his enemies to attack him with impunity.

When the "Journal" folded, the Transcendentalists immediately proclaimed victory over Poe. Cornelia Walter even published a clumsy little poem in which she hinted that a conspiracy had deliberately brought down the magazine:

"To trust in friends is but so so,
Especially when cash is low;
The Broadway Journal's proved 'no go'--
Friends would not pay the pen of Poe."

Clearly, Poe and the Transcendentalists were adversaries to the death. But why? Initially, the Transcendentalists had wanted to bring Poe into the fold; to make him one of their own. Poe, however, felt contempt for them from the beginning.

Many of the early Transcendentalists were evolving Unitarians who desperately wanted to be spiritual, but could not commit themselves to the existence of God. They chose to instead worship environmentalism, and European philosophers, and communitarianism, and "good works," and anti-industrialization.

And Poe considered them frauds, phonies, and misguided lost souls. He said as much often enough, and he said it to their faces when he mischievously recited "Al Aaraaf." As a truly spiritual man, Poe disdained the pretensions of the Transcendentalists, whose religion was the movement itself. So many of Poe's poems and stories are about the soul's quest for Heaven, for God, for escape from earthly entombment. Yet, some souls don't make the grade. In "Ulalume," the soul briefly soars, but then falls back to the hell of earth. In "Al Aaraaf," the souls choose to exist in a grey area where they will eventually perish because they retained earthly thoughts and desires, and never achieved true spirituality. "I know how to get to Heaven," he seemed to be saying, "and you don't."

This was the message he intended to convey to his Boston audience.

Perhaps the most curious thing about the Boston incident is that, contrary to what one would assume, it had no discernible impact on Poe’s career as a lecturer. Even though the Lyceum’s Board of Trustees would later censure him, (not so much for his appearance there itself, but for the insulting things he published about it afterwards,) he continued to receive invitations to lecture or recite at various venues. Although he did not make very many more public appearances in the four years before his death, this appears to have been by choice. His lectures were generally very well reviewed, and frequently well-attended. If he had wished to, Poe, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, probably could have made a good living by concentrating on lecture tours. His reasons for not doing so are unknown, but he probably simply had other priorities. In any case, the controversy which surrounded his Lyceum appearance was never repeated in any of his other stage performances.

There is another thing that needs to be said about his Boston Lyceum failure— it was hardly universally regarded as having been a failure. As was noted earlier, some of the more objective papers found his recital mystically compelling. The “Boston Daily Courier” called “Al Aaraaf” “an elegant and classic production,” that was, they implied, simply too good for his audience. In 1879, the Transcendentalist writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had been in the audience on that memorable night in Boston, recorded the remarkable impact of Poe’s performance. Higginson recalled that the spectators found the poem “rather perplexing,” and it failed to make a great impression upon them until Poe began to read the second half of the poem. His tone began “softening to a finer melody." When he came to the verse that began:

Ligeia! Ligeia!
My beautiful one!
Whose harshest idea
Will to melody run,
O! is it thy will
On the breezes to toss?
Or, capriciously still,
Like the lone Albatross,
Incumbent on night
(As she on the air)
To keep watch with delight
On the harmony there?

Higginson said Poe’s voice “seemed attenuated to the finest golden thread; the audience became hushed, and, as it were, breathless; there seemed no life in the hall but his.” He added that “every syllable was accentuated with such delicacy, and sustained with such sweetness as I never heard equaled by other lips...I remember nothing more, except in walking back to Cambridge my comrades and I felt we had been under the spell of some wizard.” Surely, any event that could elicit such a reaction could hardly be called disastrous.When Cornelia Walter began trumpeting his performance as a pitiful debacle, Poe clearly relished the attention, no matter how negative it may have been. He was an instinctive showman, who would have been in full agreement with the old Hollywood adage of “say anything you like about me, as long as you spell my name right.” He saw Walter’s campaigns against him as chances to not only publicize the “Broadway Journal,” and his recent book, “The Raven and Other Poems,” but to highlight what he saw as the mendacity and imbecility of his enemies. He certainly accomplished both those goals. Poe’s so-called “madness” had a cool-headed method to it much more often than is popularly assumed.

Mr. Poe Takes the Stage (Part One of Two)

“[T]he most exquisite of sublunary pleasures…[is] the making of a fuss, or, in the classical words of a western friend, the ‘kicking up a bobbery.’”
-Edgar Allan Poe, writing in the “Broadway Journal,” November 22, 1845

One of the most notable incidents that led to the destruction of Poe's reputation was his appearance at the Boston Lyceum on October 16, 1845. The uproar surrounding his recital of "Al Aaraaf"--a performance that seems to have largely confounded his audience--and his subsequent public war of words with "Boston Transcript" editor Cornelia Walter served, perhaps more than any other event during his lifetime, to cement Poe's image as a drunken, erratic lunatic. While at least some of Poe's biographers realize that the disastrous nature of his actual appearance before the Lyceum was greatly exaggerated afterwards--in no small part due to the efforts of Poe himself--there has been no consensus about Poe's motives and intentions regarding the notorious recital. Did his failure to produce an “original” address for the occasion lead him to recycle an old poem out of desperation, or, as he asserted, did he deliberately mean to "quiz the Bostonians?" Or was it a sign he was simply going mad?

It is possible that Poe did find himself unable to produce a new poem “on order” for the occasion—like most men of genius, he was unable to “commercialize” himself—and so resorted to this obscure early work. However, I suspect that Poe's own explanation was closest to the truth. His disdain for the Bostonians was certainly quite genuine. It is easy to picture him presenting them with "Al Aaraaf"--a mystical exploration of Heaven, Hell and the grey area that lies between--as a deliberate challenge to their well-known intellectual and spiritual pretensions. He likely assumed the poem, a cousin of "Ulalume," "Israfel," "Dream-Land," "The Conqueror Worm," and others, would be completely over their heads, and he undoubtedly saw their confusion as further proof of their inferiority.

When Poe accepted the invitation to appear in Boston, he knew perfectly well that he was entering enemy territory. His very public mockery of the New England intelligentsia, as well as his recent campaign to prove that Longfellow, the darling of the Bostonians, was a plagiarist, ensured that his appearance would be controversial. The Boston newspapers even predicted that if Poe dared to show his face in their city, the audience "would poh at him, at once." It is usually assumed that Poe's motives in taking on such an obviously hazardous assignment were purely financial. Pressed for money, he agreed to appear in front of the Lyceum, despite the potential for disaster. However, just the opposite may be true--that he welcomed the invitation precisely because of the potential for disaster. Poe was never happier than when in the thick of literary battle--the noisier and more violent it was, the better he liked it. When he cheerfully asserted in the "Broadway Journal" that he accepted the chance to appear before a Boston audience because he was curious to see what it would be like to be hissed at in public, he may not have been entirely facetious.Certainly, his performance seemed designed to confuse and irritate his audience as much as possible. After delivering a brief, self-deprecating address that was clearly dripping with sarcasm, he proceeded to recite “Al Aaraaf"—lengthy, complicated verses that are probably the most abstruse he--or just about anyone else, for that matter--ever wrote. Although he followed up his performance by fulfilling audience requests to hear "The Raven"--a recitation that, by most accounts, went over well--the damage had been done. Some attendees, already stupefied by a three-hour speech by Massachusetts politician Caleb Cushing, found Poe's obscurities too much to handle, and walked out on him with the vague feeling that they had been insulted.

That feeling was entirely justified. At a private gathering that was held after the recital, Poe asserted that "Al Aaraaf" was intended to spoof the audience. It had, he claimed, been written before he was twelve years old, and that such a juvenile work was quite sufficient for the likes of the Bostonians. His expressions of contempt for his audience were, of course, widely circulated, and, of course, the local papers responded in kind. Cornelia Walter, who already had it in for Poe because of his "Longfellow War," immediately published an editorial describing Poe's performance as a humiliating failure. From then on, she used the "Boston Transcript" as a forum to regularly mock him, often in the crudest terms possible. Although at least one other Boston paper, as well as several members of the audience, described Poe's recital as beautiful, if somewhat baffling to most listeners, they were drowned out by the catcalls of his enemies, who made full use of the means Poe had provided to attack him.

Say what you will about Poe, but he was always ready to give his opponents as good, or better, than he received. As his contemporary John Du Solle once remarked, "If Mr. P. had not been gifted with considerable gall, he would have been devoured long ago by the host of enemies his genius has created." Two weeks after his Lyceum appearance, Poe wrote a lengthy editorial in the "Broadway Journal" giving his side of the story. He showed no remorse for his actions. Indeed, he countered that “that most beguiling of all beguiling little divinities" Miss Walter "has been telling a parcel of fibs about us, by way of revenge for something we did to Mr. Longfellow (who admires her very much) and for calling her ‘a pretty little witch’ into the bargain." According to Poe, his recital was a smashing success. The approbation he received “was considerably more (the more the pity too) than that bestowed upon Mr. Cushing.” He asserted that all the claims his appearance had been a failure were entirely due to “that amiable little enemy of ours,” at the “Boston Transcript.” (He added that “We shall never call a woman ‘a pretty little witch’ again, as long as we live.”)

Having finished with his defense, Poe gleefully went on the offense. He acknowledged that he himself had been born in Boston, “and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact.” Bostonians “have always evinced towards us individually, the basest ingratitude for the services we rendered them in enlightening them about the originality of Mr. Longfellow.” This prejudice against him, Poe explained, made it scarcely possible that he would put himself to the trouble of composing an original poem for such an audience, so he favored them with one that was “quite as good as new—one, at all events, that we considered would answer sufficiently well for an audience of Transcendentalists.” This poem, he blandly assured his readers, was one which he had written, printed, and published in book form “before we had fairly completed our tenth year.” He sardonically commented that “We do not, ourselves, think the poem a remarkably good one:--it is not sufficiently transcendental.” However, his listeners “evinced characteristic discrimination in understanding, and especially applauding, all those knotty passages which we ourselves have not yet been able to understand.” Unfortunately, he sighed, he could not resist “letting some of our cat out of the bag a few hours sooner than we had intended,” when he told his dinner companions of the success of his hoax. His conclusion: “We should have waited a couple of days.”

Next post: The power of words.

(Image: Boston Common--Frogpondians and all--circa 1845, courtesy of New York Public Library.)

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.

Poe and the Milk of Paradise

"[I] was afraid, from the wild imaginations manifested in your writings, that you were an opium-eater--had some chance for hope that this might not be the case, as the same wildness was evident in your childhood productions--supposed that you could not have acquired the habit when so young, and therefore hoped."
-George W. Eveleth, letter to Edgar Allan Poe, January 11, 1848

One of the many disastrous effects of a strange, near-universal mania for reading Poe’s writings as hidden autobiography is the fact that, because several of the narrators of his stories used opium, it is often assumed that he himself was familiar with the narcotic. No serious modern-day Poe biographer credits the idea that he was a habitual drug user, as scholars recognize that his literary depictions of the drug were inspired by contemporary works such as Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.” However, the image of him as the wild-eyed poète maudit ecstatically scribbling verses and stories while in an opium-fueled frenzy is amazingly durable, particularly on the Internet. Never underestimate the power of mythology.Considering the popularity of the belief that Poe was an opium addict, it is rather remarkable that the evidence in its favor is so weak. In 1850, the poet William Ross Wallace wrote John Neal that alcohol, taken alternately with opium, “kept him [Poe] half his days in madness.” Wallace knew Poe, but not at all intimately, and Poe seems to have privately disliked him, although he admired some of Wallace’s poetry. The tone of Wallace’s letter is of someone passing on gossip rather than relaying first-hand information. (Ironically, Wallace himself was an unstable character notorious for his dissipation. He may well have been projecting his own failings on Poe.) Poe’s biographer George Woodberry said that Neilson Poe’s daughter Amelia told him that Edgar’s cousin Elizabeth Herring stated that “his periods of excess were occasioned by a free use of opium.” I have mentioned my reasons for doubting this—at best—third-hand testimony here. Our ubiquitous old friend Susan Archer Talley Weiss wrote that Rosalie Poe had visited Fordham in the spring of 1846 (we have no other evidence this visit took place,) and had witnessed an incident where her brother “begged for morphine.”

I have chronicled Mrs. Weiss’ amazing powers of imagination since literally the first day of this blog. Suffice to say that if she asserted the sun rose in the east, that alone would be enough to make me dismiss the notion.

In the 1870s, Annie Richmond produced a copy of a letter she claimed to have received from Poe in November of 1848, describing his attempts to commit suicide through an overdose of laudanum. According to this letter, he miscalculated. His body, unused to such poison, rejected the laudanum and sent him into unconsciousness before he could take the full dose. Assuming Mrs. Richmond provided an accurate transcript of this letter—and it must be said I believe her to be only slightly more honest than Susan Weiss—and also assuming the incident was not one of the colorful fables Poe enjoyed telling about himself, this has been seen as proof that Poe was not accustomed to taking drugs.

In his 1896 “Reminiscences of Poe,” Thomas Dunn English firmly rejected the idea that Poe took drugs. He said, “Had Poe the opium habit when I knew him, I should, both as a physician and a man of observation, have discovered it…” English’s account is a remarkably ingenious work of libel, relying on malicious, sly intimations against Poe which he did not have even have the courage to explicitly describe (likely because he knew they could be refuted if he did.) It is something of a minor masterwork of the use of vague insinuation in the cause of character assassination. As I have said before, I do not believe English knew Poe nearly as well as he claimed, but in any case, it is reasonable to believe that if he thought he could get away with using charges of drug use against his old enemy, he would have done so. The fact that he did not is surely a strong piece of evidence in Poe’s favor.

Similarly, English’s business associate Thomas H. Lane, who knew Poe in his Philadelphia and New York years, alleged that one or two drinks could instantly transform Poe from someone “in every way a gentleman” into a surly drunk. However, he was positive the poet was never a drug user.

John Carter, a Richmond doctor who had socialized with Poe during the poet’s visit there in 1849, wrote Woodberry that “Poe never used opium in any instance that I am aware of, and if it had been a habitual practice, we certainly would have detected it, as he numbered amongst his associates half-dozen physicians…I never heard it hinted before, and if he had contracted the habit, it would have accompanied him to Richmond.” (Unfortunately for Poe, Woodberry ignored this unequivocal, first-hand medical testimony in favor of the Susan Weiss/Amelia Poe hearsay. In his biography of Poe, he asserted his belief that Poe used drugs, although he admitted that “it is only a personal view, and may be erroneous.”)

Incidentally, this passage from Woodberry’s book serves as an example of the dangers of trusting Poe biographies too implicitly. Hervey Allen, in his inexplicably popular “Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe,” quoted—whether through a deliberate desire to smear Poe or sheer stupidity (the baroque silliness of his book makes either theory plausible) repeated Woodberry’s conjecture that Poe used drugs—but quoted it as part of Dr. Carter’s letter to Woodberry. Thus, the unsuspecting reader of Allen’s book was left to believe that a medical man who knew Poe well believed he was an addict, when, in truth, he said precisely the opposite. This is just one of the many reasons why, whenever I begin to peruse Allen’s biography, I am faced with the strong urge to hurl it against the wall. (I refrain, however—flinging around Kenneth Silverman’s “Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance” left enough damage in my home.)

In short, while it cannot be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Poe did not take opium—in history, nothing is more futile than trying to prove a negative—there is no reliable evidence of his drug use, and the testimony refuting the charge is considerably more assertive and credible.

There is, as well, an odd legend that Poe also took absinthe, which, in his day, acted as a hallucinogenic. The sole evidence for this is a 1988 book describing itself as a “history” of the liqueur. It listed “Edgar Allen Poe” (whenever a Poe source cannot get the middle name right, you know you’re in for a rocky ride,) as a drinker of “absinthe and brandy.” This claim is found nowhere else in history, and the author provided no documentation or source for his statement.

Unfortunately, once any allegation, no matter how absurd and unproven, gets into print, it takes on an invincible life of its own. Sure enough, every few weeks or so I stumble upon a blog, website, or newspaper article chattering merrily about the notorious madman Edgar Poe, opium and absinthe addict.

It’s all enough to make a poor-devil Poe blogger want to reach for the laudanum bottle herself. With an absinthe-and-brandy chaser, please.