Poe

by Peter Ackroyd

  Now he needed to restore his life. One cause of drinking and of despair had at least been removed. In a letter he wrote some months after Virginia's funeral he revealed that he had been intoxicated even to madness and “I had indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife.” This might have been a line out of his fiction, but the truth was there. It was the crippling anxiety induced by her condition, and the fatal progress from hope to despair, that had materially influenced his drinking. Now, he said, “my ambition is great.” Once more he began to revive hopes of publishing his own literary magazine.

  In the summer of 1847 he visited Washington and Philadelphia with the intention both of gaining subscribers and of placing articles in the local magazines. He was spotted in the garden of the Episcopal High School in Virginia, near Washington, and was persuaded to recite “The Raven” to “the delight of all who were present.” Without the restraining presence of Maria Clemm, however, and despite his own earnest protestations, he fell back into drink. To one associate in Philadelphia he wrote, on returning to Fordham, “Without your aid, at the precise moment and in the precise manner in which you rendered it, it is more than probable that I should not now be alive to write you this letter …” He said that he was “exceedingly ill—so much so that I had no hope except in getting home immediately.” “Ill” was often, for Poe, a euphemism for being drunk. No force on earth could now restrain him from the bottle. There was never any connection between his protestations and his behaviour, just as there was no relation between his reminiscences and his real life. His words sprang freely from his imagination, his actions from need and obscure desire.

  During these months at Fordham, however, away from the temptations of the bottle, he began to contemplate a long scientific essay. On 3 February 1848, the newspapers of New York announced that Poe would be lecturing that evening on “The Universe” at the Society Library on the corner of Broadway and Leonard Street. The proceeds were supposed to help to finance the Stylus. But it was a stormy night, and only sixty people attended. Poe spoke for some two and a half hours on the mysteries of the cosmos, and one young lawyer in the audience recalled “his pale, delicate, intellectual face and magnificent eyes. His lecture was a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy. He appeared inspired, and his inspiration affected the scant audience almost painfully. He wore his coat tightly buttoned across his slender chest…”

  The newspaper accounts were on the whole laudatory, although it is not at all clear that the journalists present fully grasped Poe's analysis of “divine essence” and “infinite space.” Yet the Morning Express concluded that “this brilliant effort was greeted with warm applause by the audience, who had listened with enchained attention throughout.” Others were not so enthusiastic. One contemporary regarded it as “a mountainous piece of absurdity for a popular lecture.” Of the newspaper reviews Poe commented that “all praised it… and all absurdly misrepresented it.” He predicted that his work would be appreciated two thousand years hence. Nevertheless Poe was emboldened by its more immediate success. Two months later he approached George P. Putnam in his publishing offices on Broadway.

  Putnam recalled the meeting when Poe “seated at my desk, and looking at me a full minute with his ‘glittering eye’ he at length said ‘I am Mr Poe.’ I was ‘all ear,’ of course, and sincerely interested.” Poe then paused. “I hardly know,” he said, “how to begin what I have to say. It is a matter of profound importance.” He then went on to claim that he proposed the publication of a work that would throw into the shade Newton's discovery of gravitation, and that the book “would at once command such universal and intense attention that the publisher might give up all other enterprises, and make this one book the business of his lifetime.” He proposed a first printing of fifty thousand copies. Putnam was “impressed” but not “overcome,” he said, and promised a response two days later. Then Poe asked him for a small loan.

  Putnam thought over the matter, purchased the manuscript, and eventually printed five hundred copies of Eureka.

  In the meantime Poe lingered in New York. He dined with his literary friend Rufus Griswold and unfortunately became inebriated. He sent a request for assistance to Mrs. Shew, who dispatched a doctor and a friend to minister to him. They “found him crazy-drunk in the hands of the police, and took him home to Fordham (eleven miles), where we found poor Mrs. Clemm waiting for him.” He had been away from home for three days, and had spent all the money given to him. So his rescuers left Maria Clemm five dollars for immediate necessities.

  Mrs. Shew was in any case reaching the limit of her toleration for the eccentricities of her erstwhile patient. She never complained of his drunkenness or his excitability; for her these were merely the symptoms of a fatally weakened constitution. But she objected to Poe's beliefs, stated in his lecture on the universe. He had already prepared his notes for publication, and at the end of his discussion he made a clear argument for a version of pantheism. A clerical friend of Mrs. Shew, the Reverend John Henry Hopkins, had discussed the matter with Poe. In a letter to Mrs. Shew he described how “a strange thrill nerved and dilated for an instant his slight figure, as he exclaimed, ‘My whole nature utterly revolts at the ideas that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself.’ ” Poe was hardly a Christian at all.

  This is not what the pious Mrs. Shew wished to hear. She could not consort with a heretic. Her trips to Fordham became infrequent. She became more formal, and more restrained. When she uttered a faint “amen” for the grace before dinner, Poe claimed that “I felt my heart stop, and I was sure I was then to die before your eyes.” In the early summer Mrs. Shew sent him a letter of leavetaking. He replied that “for months I have known you were deserting me.” It should be remembered that, of all the calamities he most feared, that of female withdrawal was by far the most painful. It was connected with the death of his mother, and the deaths of the other young women to whom he had been devoted. So to Mrs. Shew he called out as from the depths—“for me alas! Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me, I shall hardly last a year longer!” He added that “it is too late you are floating away with the cruel tide. I am a coward to write this to you, but it is not a common trial, it is a fearful one to me.” It was the last letter she ever received from him.

  Even before Mrs. Shew's defection, however, Poe had been surveying the horizon for another and more impressionable young woman. In May 1848, he wrote an impassioned if not exactly passionate letter to Jane E. Locke; he called her “Sweet friend, dear friend” and alluded ruefully to his “hermit life …buried in the woods of Fordham.” He claimed that “my whole existence has been the merest Romance—in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” He wanted to learn more, much more, about her personal history. There was one question “which I ‘dare not even ask’ of you.” That question was, no doubt, concerning her marital status. It turned out that she was married. She went from being “My Dear Friend” to “My Dear Mrs. Locke.” His plans had again been thwarted. But within a few weeks he was set to try again.

  • • •

  Eureka was published in the summer of 1848. It was the last of his works to be issued in his lifetime, and is in certain respects the most puzzling. The confusion is not helped by his preface in which he declared the composition to be “an Art-Product alone: let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.” It purports to be an account of the origin and the history of the universe, couched in the most recondite prose, but it is also a record of the obsessions and preoccupations that had animated Poe's fiction and poetry. It begins with the general proposition that, “In the Original Unity of the First Things lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.” Poe surveyed the universality of gravitation before suggesting that the gravitational principle was simply one manifestation of the desire of all things to return to some original state of unity. “I am not so sure that I speak and see
,” he wrote, “that my heart beats and my soul lives … as I am of the irretrievably bygone Fact that All Things and All Thoughts of Things, with all their ineffable Multiplicity of Relation, sprang at once into being from the primordial and irrelative One” But all things yearn to return to that original “unity” and that primaeval “nothingness” or, as he put it, “their source lies in the principle, Unity. This is their lost parent.” The reference to “lost parent” may be significant. Was he contemplating that yearned-for return to the mother? There may be some buried allusion to his own loss in the belief that a “diffusion from Unity, under the conditions, involves a tendency to return into Unity—a tendency ineradicable until satisfied.” Is there perhaps here some explanation for his excessive drinking, in the desire to return to some state of infantile bliss and tactility?

  But then in the return to that original unity, that womb, “the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine. And now—this Heart Divine—what is it? It is our own” The tell-tale heart beats within Poe, and within every one of us. The universe is within us. It is an ancient doctrine, which Poe might have derived from Paracelsus or from Blake, but it is likely to have been found anew by Poe himself. In a letter to one correspondent he stated that “What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionise the world of Physical and Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly—but I say it.” Some cosmologists have claimed that Poe is the harbinger of Einstein and the first theorist of “black holes,” but it might be suggested that Poe is simply applying his ever restless and perplexed imagination to the world of matter and of spirit. He added, in this context, “The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.” Poe gives himself too little credit.

  • • •

  In the same period Poe composed two of his most famous poems, “Ulalume” and “The Bells,” that come as close to “sound poetry” as any verse he ever wrote. It is said that he designed the first of them as an exercise in elocution or recitation, and that in the other he wished to reproduce the effect of the pealing of bells. He told some journalists in Richmond that he wished “to express in language the exact sounds of bells to the ears.” In both cases he succeeded, but at the cost of sense and perhaps of significance. They are exercises in “pure poetry,” where cadence and the suggestive melody of rhyme are employed for their own sake. He wished to create “this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem's sake.” Its object was pleasure, not truth, and its effect was one of indefinite rather than definite pleasure; it consisted solely in “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” This theory is equivalent to the doctrine of art for art's sake, adumbrated by Pater and Swinburne for a later generation. Yet there was something more. There was also his statement that “the origin of Poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder Beauty than Earth supplies,” for a “supernal Loveliness” to be glimpsed in “the glories beyond the grave;” he is invoking the yearning for something irremediably lost, something missing for ever.

  His late poems, then, could be seen as complementary to his speculations in Eureka. It was poetry like this that appealed to the French Symbolist poets and guaranteed his preeminent reputation among poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. But the same work was less enthusiastically received by Anglo-American poets and critics, who have deemed it “juvenile” or a form of “nonsense poetry” in the line of Edward Lear. That disparity of judgement exists still.

  The Women

  The departure of Mrs. Shew, and the false start with Mrs. Locke, had not materially affected Poe's passionate desire for female companionship. In the summer of 1848 he visited Mrs. Locke and her husband at Lowell, in Massachusetts, where he was about to deliver a lecture on “The Poets and Poetry of America.” Mrs. Locke then introduced him to a neighbour, a young woman named Annie Richmond. At a later date, in a fictional essay, he claimed that he was smitten at first sight. “As she approached, with a certain modest description of step almost indescribable, I said to myself, Surely here I have found the perfection of natural, in contradistinction from artificial grace… So intense an expression of romance, perhaps I should call it, or of unworldliness, as that which gleamed from her deep-set eyes, had never so sunk into my heart of hearts before.” Her eyes were “spiritual.” Perhaps he deemed her even capable of an early death.

  After he had given his lecture he spent the rest of that evening, and much of the following day, with Annie Richmond. He may also have been in the company of her husband and her brother, but that does not seem to have lessened his enthusiasm. Jane Locke had already been forgotten. Annie Richmond herself recalled that “he seemed so unlike any other person… all the events of his life, which he narrated to me, had a flavour of unreality about them, just like his stories.” They may have been much closer to his fiction than she ever imagined. He was per-manently incomplete, passionately attaching himself to anyone who showed affection or even kindness. Hence his espousal of abstract “beauty” as the source of all wisdom and consolation. But at the same time he was a ferocious analyst and calculator of his position, examining all the objects that made up his prison.

  In the same month as his meeting with Annie Richmond, for example, he made discreet enquiries about Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet from Providence, Rhode Island, who had lately sent him a Valentine poem. He asked one correspondent, “Can you not tell me something about her—anything—everything you know …” The tone of his letter suggests that he was in a state of some desperation: he needed the love and comfort of someone, anyone, with whom he felt a poetic affinity. He was the orphan crying for more.

  Then in July he travelled down to Richmond, his boyhood home, ostensibly to gather subscribers for his literary magazine. There are reports of his drinking, however, and of his reciting passages from Eureka in the public bars and taverns. One contemporary, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, reported that “his entire residence in Richmond of late was but a succession of disgraceful follies.” This sounds like an exaggeration.

  He was collected enough, for example, to seek an interview with one of his erstwhile loves. Elmira Royster, by whom he had been enamoured before he had gone to the University of Virginia, had now become an affluent widow, Mrs. Shelton. She recalled later that Poe was excited by their meeting after many years. “He came up to me in the most enthusiastic manner and said, ‘Oh!, Elmira, is this you.’” It is likely that he considered proposing to her, but a newly composed poem from the other widow, Sarah Helen Whitman, changed his plans. It concluded with the immortal line, “I dwell with ‘Beauty which is Hope.’ ” After he received the poem, through the agency of Maria Clemm, he left Richmond and made his way towards Providence. We may apply to him what he wrote to an earlier correspondent: “You need not attempt to shake off, or to banter off, Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is a part of your self—a portion of your soul.” And so it proved for Poe.

  Mrs. Whitman possessed an ethereal temper. She was known as the “Seeress of Providence”—whether the town, or futurity itself, is open to question. She was distracted and absentminded; she swathed herself in veils, which invariably became entangled, and was continually dropping or losing little items such as fans and shawls. She was said to flutter “like a bird.” She was a great exponent of table rapping and other communications beyond the grave. She was also addicted to ether, with which she liberally soaked her handkerchiefs in more than usually distressing moments. There were many such moments ready to engulf her.

  Poe reached New York at the beginning of September 1848, and wished to satisfy himself that Helen Whitman was in residence at Providence by sending an anonymous letter asking for her autograph. It was one of the little “hoaxes” that he enjoyed. Two weeks later he presented himself in person, with a formal letter of introduction from a mutual friend. Then he gave her a signed
volume of The Raven and Other Poems with a dedication “from the most devoted of her friends. Edgar A. Poe.” The next morning they visited the Athenaeum Library where Mrs. Whitman, somewhat disingenuously, asked him whether he had ever read “Ulalume.” To her infinite surprise, Poe revealed himself to be the author.

  That evening Poe was introduced to the circle of Helen Whitman's closest friends. One of those present recalled that “Poe and Helen were greatly agitated. Simultaneously both arose from their chairs and walked towards the center of the room. Meeting, he held her in his arms, kissed her; they stood for a moment, then he led her to her seat. There was a dead silence through all this strange proceeding.”

  On the following day they visited a local cemetery, overlooking the Seekonk River. In these affecting surroundings Poe proposed marriage. Helen Whitman recalled later that “he endeavoured … to persuade me that my influence and my presence would have power to lift his life out of the torpor of despair which had weighed upon him, and give an inspiration to his genius, of which he had as yet given no token.” She declined, or perhaps prevaricated, citing the need to support an elderly mother. She promised instead to write to him, with a fuller explanation. Two days later Poe left for New York, to which place he was followed by a letter from Mrs. Whitman claiming that she was too old and too fragile to become the second Mrs. Poe. She was in fact only six years his senior, but the protestation of a weak nervous constitution rings true. He was not a man for a faint-hearted female.