edgar allan poe essays and reviews

The Edgar Allan Poe Review

Barbara cantalupo, editor.

Biannual Publication ISSN 2150-0428 E-ISSN 2166-2932 Recommend to Library Code of Ethics Project MUSE Scholarly Publishing Collective JSTOR Archive

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Access current issues through Scholarly Publishing Collective or back content on JSTOR . The Edgar Allan Poe Review publishes peer-reviewed scholarly essays; book, film, theater, dance, and music reviews; and creative work related to Edgar Allan Poe, his work, and his influence. Also included are the following regular features: “Marginalia” (short, non–peer reviewed notes), interviews with Poe scholars, the Poe in Cyberspace column, and Poe Studies Association updates. EAPR is the official publication of the Poe Studies Association .

Established in 1972 as a nonprofit, educational organization, the Poe Studies Association (PSA) supports the scholarly and informal exchange of information on the life, works, times, and influence of Edgar Allan Poe.

Editor Barbara Cantalupo, The Pennsylvania State University, US

Book Review Editor John Martin, University of North Texas, US

Editorial Board David C. Cody, Hartwick College, US Dennis W. Eddings, Western Oregon University, US Alexander Hammond, Washington State University, US José R. Ibáñez, Universidad de Almeria, ES Sonya Isaak, Heidelberg University, DE Paul Jones, Ohio University, US J. Gerald Kennedy, Louisiana State University, US Richard Kopley, The Pennsylvania State University, US Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, US Jonathan Murphy, Texas A&M International University, US Scott Peeples, College of Charleston, US Stephen Rachman, Michigan State University, US Jeffery Savoye, The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, US Elizabeth Sweeney, College of the Holy Cross, US Brett Zimmerman, York University, CA

If you would like to submit an article to The Edgar Allan Poe Review please visit http://www.editorialmanager.com/poe/ and create an author profile. The online system will guide you through the steps to upload your article for submission to the editorial office.

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Selected writings of Edgar Allan Poe: poems, tales, essays and reviews

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Edgar Allan Poe Essays and Reviews: Theory of Poetry, Reviews of British and Continental Authors, Reviews of American Authors and American Literatur (Library of America) Hardcover – 1 Aug. 1984

• Print length 1544 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Library of America
• Publication date 1 Aug. 1984
• Dimensions 13.06 x 4.57 x 20.65 cm
• ISBN-10 0940450194
• ISBN-13 978-0940450196
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Library of America (1 Aug. 1984)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1544 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0940450194
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0940450196
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.06 x 4.57 x 20.65 cm
• 12,948 in Essays, Journals & Letters

About the author

Edgar allan poe.

Author, poet, and literary critic, Edgar Allan Poe is credited with pioneering the short story genre, inventing detective fiction, and contributing to the development of science fiction. However, Poe is best known for his works of the macabre, including such infamous titles as The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Lenore, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Part of the American Romantic Movement, Poe was one of the first writers to make his living exclusively through his writing, working for literary journals and becoming known as a literary critic. His works have been widely adapted in film. Edgar Allan Poe died of a mysterious illness in 1849 at the age of 40.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Major works: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket • Eureka: A Prose Poem • “The Fall of the House of Usher” • “The Tell–Tale Heart” • “The Black Cat” • “The Masque of the Red Death” • “The Pit and the Pendulum” • “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” • “The Poetic Principle” • “The Raven”

On Edgar Allan Poe

February 5, 2015 issue

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Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore

Edgar Allan Poe; portrait by Gabriel Harrison, 1896

Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day. He both amazed and antagonized his contemporaries, who could not dismiss him from the first rank of writers, though many felt his work to be morally questionable and in dubious taste, and though he scourged them in print regularly in the course of producing a body of criticism that is sometimes flatly vindictive and often brilliant.

It seems to have been true of Poe that no one could look at him without seeing more than they would wish or he could tolerate. His clothing was always neat and genteel and very shabby. His manner was gracious and refined and notoriously pathetic or outrageous if he happened to have been drinking. He was always too desperate for money to be tactful in his solicitations of acquaintances, being the sole support of a beloved and tubercular wife, a cousin he had married when she was not quite fourteen. He was a popular writer and a very successful editor, and always meagerly paid. The gentility that was his entrée and his armor was of a Southern kind, not much appreciated by the New Englanders who dominated literary life. And the Virginia family among whom he had acquired the manners and tastes of refinement had disowned him without a dime.

The writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson said Poe had “the look of over-sensitiveness which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing than coarseness.” And he does seem to have been overwhelmed by himself, intolerably sensitive and proud and intolerably brilliant, his drinking and bitterness abetting his discomfitures and humiliations. That said, his strange little household of aunt/mother and cousin/wife, through it all and while it lasted, was always reported to be warm and sweet. He was a strong, athletic man who, through the whole of his career, bore up under his weaknesses and afflictions well enough to be very productive, most notably in the unique inventiveness, the odd purity, of his fiction.

Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in 1838, relatively early in his career. It is his only novel. Its importance is suggested by the fact that his major work comes after it. That is, in writing Pym he seems to have come to a realization of the strongest impulses of his imagination. The book shows evidence of haste, or of a certain waning of interest in the earlier, more conventional part of it. Pym ’s flaws are sometimes ascribed to the fact that it was written for money, as it surely was, and as virtually everything else Poe wrote was also. This is not exceptional among writers anywhere, though in the case of Poe it is often treated as if his having done so were disreputable. Everything about him, however neutral in itself, seems to be subsumed into his singular reputation and to reinforce it. Be that as it may, the Narrative makes its way to a climax as strange and powerful as anything to be found in his greatest tales.

The word that recurs most crucially in Poe’s fictions is horror . His stories are often shaped to bring the narrator and the reader to a place where the use of the word is justified, where the word and the experience it evokes are explored or by implication defined. So crypts and entombments and physical morbidity figure in Poe’s writing with a prominence that is not characteristic of major literature in general. Clearly Poe was fascinated by popular obsessions, with crime, with premature burial. Popular obsessions are interesting and important, of course. Collectively we remember our nightmares, though sanity and good manners encourage us as individuals to forget them. Perhaps it is because Poe’s tales test the limits of sanity and good manners that he is both popular and stigmatized. His influence and his imitators have eclipsed his originality and distracted many readers from attending to his work beyond the more obvious of its effects.

Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka , which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has the grand scale of the nineteenth-century voyage of discovery, and a different and larger scale in the suggestions that emerge as the voyage proceeds, suggestions of more and other meanings in these explorations than were conventionally ascribed to them. Pym is frequently compared with Moby-Dick , which was published thirteen years later, after Poe’s death. As Melville would do, Poe uses whiteness as a highly ambiguous symbol, by no means to be interpreted as purity or holiness or by association with any other positive value. There is blackness, too, in Pym , specifically associated with the populations that inhabit the regions nearest the South Pole. The native people in Tasmania, the island south of Australia then called Van Diemen’s Land, were said by explorers and settlers to be black, and were in any case, with the word “black,” swept into the large category of those vulnerable to displacement, exploitation, and worse. Since Poe was a Southerner and very sensitive about it, especially with regard to the scorn he felt on the part of Northern Abolitionists, it might be assumed that his prejudices would align themselves in a fairly conventional way along the axis of white and black. Yet they do not.

It is seldom mentioned that Poe came of age in a slave society, in a household where slaves were present. Poe does nothing to draw attention to the fact. An account of the business interests of Poe’s foster father, John Allan, quoted by the biographer Jeffrey Meyers, notes that he and his partner “as a side issue were not above trading in horses, Kentucky swine from the settlements, and old slaves whom they hired out at the coal pits till they died.” This last item suggests that Poe might not have been particularly sheltered from an awareness of the ugliness of the system. Charles Baudelaire has encouraged the notion that Poe was an aristocrat manqué. But John Allan was a successful immigrant merchant—by no means the type of gentleman planter who stood in the place of aristocrat in the self-conception of antebellum Virginia. Poe’s aristocrats are surrounded by mists and parapets, never by a society or an economy, and they are always the decadent last flowering of an endless lineage, not offspring of the parvenus of colonial settlement. With the single exception of “The Gold-Bug,” Poe did not write about the South, at least explicitly. But in Pym he does address the matter of race, an issue of great currency at the time.

His contemporary, the prolific and prospering novelist William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, a defender of his region and its institutions, wrote this:

The savage had disappeared from [Kentucky’s] green forests for ever, and no longer profaned with slaughter, and his unholy whoop of death, its broad and beautiful abodes. A newer race had succeeded; and the wilderness, fulfilling the better destinies of earth, had begun to blossom like the rose…. High and becoming purposes of social life and thoughtful enterprise superseded that eating and painful decay, which has terminated in the annihilation of the red man.

Though this kind of thinking was not unusual then, any more than were the policies it rationalized, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym differs strikingly from these conventions in its treatment of race and European expansion. Poe may not have intended this departure when he began to write the book. Perhaps his aesthetic sense intervened to change the course of the narrative, to make it radical, original, and true.

Something very like the appropriation of Kentucky by white settlers lies behind the events that bring Pym to the visionary conclusion of his narrative. In the early years of the nineteenth century the British began what became the extermination of the native people of Tasmania, who had tried to resist white encroachment on their island. Such appropriations were, of course, a major business of Europeans, or whites, virtually everywhere in the world at the time Poe wrote. They were boasted of as progress, in language like Simms’s. It would have required unusual sensibility in Poe to have taken a different, very dark view of the phenomenon. But he was an unusual man. And the horror that fascinated him and gave such dreadful unity to his tales is often the inescapable confrontation of the self by a perfect justice, the exposure of a guilty act in a form that makes its revelation a recoil of the mind against itself. This is true of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “William Wilson,” major tales written after Pym . It is not true of the tales that preceded it.

Poe’s great tales turn on guilt concealed or denied, then abruptly and shockingly exposed. He has always been reviled or celebrated for the absence of moral content in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straightforward moral parables. For a writer so intrigued by the operations of the mind as Poe was, an interest in conscience leads to an interest in concealment and self-deception, things that are secretive and highly individual and at the same time so universal that they shape civilizations. In Pym and after it Poe explores the thought that reality is of a kind to break through the enthralling dream of innocence or of effective concealment and confront us—horrify us—with truth.

Early in the Narrative there is a long episode of concealment that becomes entrapment as the ship on which the young Pym has stowed away is taken over by mutineers. The leader of one group of mutineers is identified as “a negro,” and is described as “in all respects…a perfect demon,” though there seems little in his malevolence to distinguish him from the rest. A figure called Dirk Peters intervenes to rescue Pym and his friend, the son of the ship’s captain, from the violence intended for them. Peters is the son of a white fur trader and “an Indian squaw” from the Black Hills. Pym says he “was one of the most ferocious-looking men I ever beheld.”

The description that follows is bizarre, and interesting because it also seems to be forgotten as the fiction develops, though Peters’s association with blackness is finally and surprisingly important. This mutineer, who decides to save the young men out of mere kindness, becomes in the course of the narrative the resourceful, protective, insightful companion of Pym’s harrowing travels. Pym refers to him several times as “the hybrid,” but all the grotesquerie falls away forgotten as the tale moves closer to its own vortex, the acceleration of fictional energy that moves it toward parable until, as in Poe’s moral tales, horror breaks through deception and delusion.

Young Pym is simply telling a story of a kind popular at the time, a nautical adventure lived out beyond the farthest reaches of exploration. The story is disrupted by its own deeper tendencies, the rising through this surface of the kind of recognition that must find expression in another genre. As his ship approaches the region of the South Pole, Pym notes the mildness of the climate, coolly inventorying the resources of the islands, which were assumed by such voyagers to be there for the taking.

Suggestions emerge, however, that the natives of the island of Tsalal, where they land, have yet another narrative about these explorations. Pym says, “It was quite evident that they had never before seen any of the white race—from whose complexion, indeed, they appeared to recoil.” But he quickly begins to suspect that their ignorance is feigned, and also their friendliness. They are shrewd in their dealings with the whites in a way that implies a fearful knowledge of them. He notes their interest in the ship’s armaments, and how careful they are always to outnumber their visitors. On their part, the whites, who, Pym says, “entertained not the slightest suspicion” of bad faith, keep the ship’s cannons trained on the island and go ashore “armed to the teeth” with muskets, pistols, cutlasses, and knives. In the event, their weapons are of no use. All of them are killed except Pym and Peters. The blacks burn their ship, a catastrophic error, since it contains a store of gunpowder.

If Pym were a conventional story, the immense roar and the towering flames might attract the notice of a passing sail—and there would be no need for a note explaining its lacking an ending. But the force of the narrative carries it beyond the fate of individuals, toward an engagement with a reality beyond any transient human drama. White and black might seem to have battled to a draw if rescue had brought the tale to a close. Instead, the region into which Pym’s ship has penetrated increasingly gives evidence that much more is at issue than he is prepared to understand. The natives are appalled at the sight of anything white. Marks on a wall suggest hieroglyphics to Peters but not to Pym. The native language and even the cries of birds echo the biblical “ mene, mene, tekel, upharsin ”—you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The king of the black islands they have violated has a name that sounds like Solomon. The world becomes more alien and repellent as it becomes continuously whiter. Peters falls silent. And then a vast shrouded form rises out of the veil of mist, its whiteness suggesting figures of biblical apocalyptic judgment.

In his prose poem Eureka , Poe concludes that God and the human soul are pervasively present in the universe itself. Truth is intrinsic to reality, as it is to consciousness. The pedantic voice of the postscript knows and does not know the meaning of the ciphers found at Tsalal, “ I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock. ” Poe has brought the tale to a region that, in his place and time, was far beyond the common understanding, and perhaps beyond his own as well, except in its deepest reaches, where he knew that God is just.

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• Publisher Cambridge University Press
• Publication date 1984
• ISBN 10  0521263425
• ISBN 13  9780521263429
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition number 2
• Number of pages 1400

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Last Update: July 30, 2024 Navigation: Main Menu Poe's Works Poe Bookshelf Editorial Policies Searching THC52 : Prev Pages Next Pages

Text: Richard Beale Davis, “Explanatory Notes,” Chivers' Life of Poe , 1952, pp. 103-121

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

[page 103:]

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Page 23, Line 4

The two stanzas of Chivers’ clipping, and no more, appear in The Literary Museum of Boston, published by Ossian E. Dodge, in the issue of November 20, 1852, p. 383, col. 1. No comment accompanies it save the sentence: “From a poem entitled ‘The Dead Year,’ by Mrs. R. S. Nichols, we extract a very just tribute to one who was at times a god, and again a fiend — Edgar A. Poe: — ”

Page 25, Line 18

Chivers of course relies on Poe's literary executor for many details. The references here and later will be to “ Memoir of the Author ,” in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe with a Memoir by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, and Notices of His Life and Genius by N. P. Willis and J. R. Lowell , 4 vols., New York 1857 [2nd Edition], I, The present reference is to p. xxxiv . Griswold's “Memoir” is based on his notorious “ Ludwig ” article on Poe appearing a few days after the poet's death, expanded with biographical data and letters for the first time in volume three of the first edition of the Works in 1850 .

Page 25, Line 29

How much Chivers knew of Griswold's personal character is not discussed in either Damon, op. cit. , or Joy Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Poe's Literary Executor , Nashville, 1943. Certainly Chivers’ relations with the anthologist had been none too pleasant. On September 20 1850, and March 28, 1851, Chivers had written to Griswold asking the return of all the letters he had written to Poe. After the first letter Griswold professed himself insulted by the request, and Chivers in turn replied that he had no thought of imputing anything: he merely wanted his letters. Evidently he never received them, for ten letters addressed to Poe and the two to Griswold still repose among the Griswold Papers of the Boston Public Library. Chivers’ second letter to Griswold was published in Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, loc. cit. , XVII, 408 . [page 104:]

Page 26, Line 24

See Griswold, “Memoir,” p. li .

Page 26, Last Line

Ibid. , p. liv . “He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes turned up in passionate prayer (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned, but) for their happiness who at the moment were objects of his idolatry. ... ”

Page 27, Line 27

Thomas Hood, “The Bridge of Sighs,” stanza 9.

Page 28, Line 16

The quotation is from “Edgar Allan Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger , XVI, No. 3 (March 1850), 172-187 . Apparently Chivers is mistaken in assigning this and later excerpts from the same essay to Philip Pendleton Cooke (1816-1850). Cooke's biographer, John D. Allen ( Philip Pendleton Cooke , Chapel Hill, 1942, p. 109), does not list it among Cooke's essays. And David K. Jackson ( The Contributors and Contributions to the Southern Literary Messenger , Charlottesville, 1936, p. 101) assigns the unsigned article to John M. Daniel (1825-1865). Cooke died on January 20, 1850. Chivers may have felt that similarities between this article and an earlier one by Cooke, “Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger , XIV, No. (January 1848), 34-37 , warranted the assumption that Cooke was the author of the later essay. John M. Daniel, caustic editor of the Richmond Examiner , though he knew Poe, follows Griswold's memoir in certain details and “prejudices.”

Page 32, Last Line

Francis Lord Jeffrey (1773-1850), master-critic of the Edinburgh Review , made many statements to this effect. See Contributions to the Edinburgh Review by Francis Jeffrey , 4 vols. in one, New York 1881. Chivers, who is careless in his quotations, may have had in mind Jeffrey's statement that “A great poet, or a great original writer, is above all other glory.” See Jeffrey's letter to Mr. Empson, Edinburgh, December, 1837, in Henry T. C. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, with a Selection from His Correspendence [[ Correspondence ]], 2 vols., Edinburgh 1852, II, 296-7, letter No. 138. [page 105:]

Page 33, Last Line

From the epitaph on Jonathan Swift, D. D. See Henry Craik, The Life of Jonathan Swift , London, 1882, p. 496. For full context see Temple Scott, ed., The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift , 12 vols., London, 1900-1914, XI, 404-7.

Page 34, Line 2

Poe was born on January 19, 1809. Here and in most of this factual biographical outline Chivers relies on Griswold's “Memoir,” the inaccuracies of which are carefully corrected in later biographies such as Hervey Allen's Israfel , 1926 , and Arthur H. Quinn's Edgar Allan Poe , 1941 . Of course Poe himself, by misinforming Lowell and Henry B. Hirst, who were to write magazine sketches of him, is responsible for many of these inaccuracies.

Page 36, Line 13

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , by Edgar A. Poe, Philadelphia, Lea and Blanchard, 1840 .

Page 36, Line 25

Poe probably wrote and did publish “The Gold Bug” in 1843 (see Quinn, Poe , p. 392 ). Here Chivers again mistakenly follows Griswold (p. xxxiii) , apparently this time in a typographical error, for Griswold's “Memoir,” normally chronological, follows this 1848 date for “The Gold Bug” with an account of Poe's activities in 1844.

Page 37, Line 7

Griswold does not mention Henry C. Watson's association with Poe on the Broadway Journal , but the clippings among the Poe-Chivers Papers indicate that Chivers had a file of the magazine at his disposal. He was probably looking straight at the announcement in the issue of February 22, 1845, that Poe and Watson were now Briggs’ associates (see Quinn, Poe , p. 452 ). Later Watson and Poe, then Poe alone edited it. See C. F. Heartman and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe ... , rev. ed., Hattiesburg, Miss., 1943, p. ,6o.

Page 37, Line 22

According to Professor Quinn ( Poe , p. 506 ) Poe moved to Fordham in May or June, 1846. Poe wrote to Chivers from Fordham on July 22, 1846, ( Ostrom, ed., Letters , II, 325-327 ), ante January, 1847, ( ibid. , p. 499 ), and on July 13 (14?), 1848, ( ibid. , [page 106:] p. 375 ). Chivers’ remark here is clear evidence that he intended to print Poe's letters to him in his “Life.”

Page 38, Line 1

Eureka: a Prose Poem , by Edgar A. Poe, New York: Geo. P. Putnam, of Late Firm of “Wiley & Putnam,” 155 Broadway, MDCCCXLVIII .

Page 38, Line 14

This account of Poe's last days follows Griswold faithfully. For the corrected account, using all available materials, see Quinn, Poe , pp. 636-641 , and Philip Van Doren Stern, “The Strange Death of Edgar Allan Poe,” Saturday Review of Literature , October 15, 1949, pp. 8-9, 28-30.

Page 39, Line 19

The correspondence had begun actually in 1840, when Poe sent to Chivers a prospectus of the Penn Magazine with a letter soliciting his support. Chivers replied on August 27 of the same year (for text of letter see Works , I, 190-191 ) and wrote other letters in 1841 and 1842 before he received a reply from Poe to July 6, 1842. It is this last date which he probably considered as marking the beginning of a real exchange. In a sense he was right, though he continued to write many letteers [[letters]] to Poe's one. For a checklist of the Poe-Chivers correspondence, see Ostrom, Letters , II, 498-499 . The total was at least thirty-six, of which only ten were Poe's. Eight of Poe's and eleven of Chivers’ are extant.

Page 39, Line 26

The letter of July 6, 1842, apologizes for earlier strictures on Chivers in the “Autography” articles, professes admiration for Chivers’ recent verse, and feels “the necessity for our being friends.” For text, see Letters , II, 325-327 .

Page 39, Line 27

The “Conversations” as far as page 56, line 9, were first printed by Professor George E. Woodberry in “The Poe-Chivers Papers,” Century Magazine , XLIII, No. 3 (January 1903), 442-447 . Though he printed the most interesting and significant portions of the text, his reading of a difficult hand leaves much to be desired. Some phrases were simply marked “illegible,” but more deplorable is the misreading of key words which has distorted the meaning of whole passages. See the textual notes on these passages. [page 107:]

Page 40, Line 4

Richard Henry or Hengist Horne (1803-1884). His best-known work, Orion , was published in 1843.

Page 40, Line 6

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). His best-known work, Death's Jest-Book , begun in 1825, was not published until 1850, but other things such as The Bride's Tragedy appeared in the 1820's.

Page 40, Line 10

Of course Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), later Browning.

Page 40, Line 11

This critique of Miss Barrett's work appeared in the issues of January 4 and it, 1845. It is republished in Works , XII, 1-35 . That Chivers had read at least the beginning of the essay is evidenced by his borrowing from the first two lines of it. See below, notes on page 82, lines II-12.

Page 40, Line 17

Poe had begun a cordial correspondence with Horne at least as early as March, 1844, (see Ostrom, Letters , I, 245 ; II, 600). On May 17, 1845, Horne wrote to Poe remarking that he was sending two copies of Orion , one in the hope of finding for it an American publisher. “I also send a copy, in which I have written your name ... of which I beg your acceptance” ( Works , XVII, 209-220 ). Chivers’ facts, most of which he could hardly have secured from printed or manuscript sources at his disposal, are correct. And of course this would date the “Conversations” in the summer of 1845.

Page 41, Line

Poe's good opinion of Horne's work is clear in his review of it in Graham's Magazine , March, 1844, (for text see Works , XI, 249-275 ). Poe considers it superior to Paradise Lost in its description of Hell.

Page 41, Lines 15-18

III, i, 30-33. The text (in E. Bernbaum, ed., Anthology of Romanticism , 5 vols., New York, 1933, V, 268) reads:

Drink! be the nectar circling through your veins

The soul of joy, ye ever-living gods,

Till exultation burst in one wide voice

Like music from Elysian winds. [page 108:]

Page 43, Line 1

John Kearsley Mitchell (1793-1858), a native of Virginia (now West Virginia), Professor of Medical Practice at Jefferson Medical College, was most kind to Poe ( Quinn, Poe , p. 268 ). Dr Mitchell was the father of the even better-known Dr S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) and was himself, as Poe says, a poet. Mitchell first attended Virginia in January, 1842, when she broke a blood vessel in singing, and he befriended the Poes during the remainder of their stay in the city. Poe complimented him as the author of “several pretty songs which have been set to music,” and of a volume of verse, in “A Chapter on Autography,” Graham's Magazine , December, 1841, (text in Works , XV, 220-221 ). In 1839 Dr. Mitchell had published Indecision, a Tale of the Far West and Other Poems. His fondness for music may have attracted him especially to Virginia Poe.

Page 43, Line 16

Poe's “dream magazine” was a strong force in shaping many of the actions of his later years. For some of his correspondence on the subject see Letters, passim (index).

Page 44, Line 12

As Chivers remarks elsewhere, Poe was living at this time at 195 East Broaway, upstairs ( Quinn, Poe , p. 463 ). William Perris’ insurance atlas for 1852 shows that 193-197 East Broadway was occupied by the Franklin House and a lithograph of the Franklin House about 1845 appears in I. N. Phelps Stokes’ Iconography of Manhattan Island , III, P1. A-25b. It is a very nice-looking building. This does not jibe with references to the Poes’ dwelling place as a tenement. There was probably a servant girl of their landlord's on the lower floor. The Poes almost surely had none of their own.

Page 44, Line 25

See the letter to John Tomlin of September 16, 1840, in which Poe thanks him for nine subscribers to the Penn Magazine ( Letters , I, 146 ). Tomlin was postmaster at Jackson, Tennessee. His last extant letter to Poe, of February 23, 1844, ( Works , XVII, 158 ) makes no mention of subscribers (also see Letters , I, 147n ), though several other letters do.

The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. A New Translation from

Page 45, Line 3   [page 109:]

the Arabic, with Copious Notes. By Edward William Lane. ... Illustrated by many hundred engravings on wood, from original designs by William Harvey. ... London, C. Knight and Co., 1839-41. 2 vols. Poe may have had this edition in mind, or less probably, for he speaks of the volume he has as a part of an edition, the one volume edition of 1845 entitled Arabian Nights and Anecdotes ... by E. W. Lane.

Page 45, Line 9

George Hooker Colton (Yale 1840; died 1847) was the young editor of The American Review; A Whig Journal . Number One of Volume Two (July, 1845), for example, contains four brief (2 to 3 pages) “papers,” then a long poem, a review (28 pages), an article (4 1/2 pages), Poe's “Eulalie,” another article (10 pages) another (10 pages), another (5 pages), and a final (6 pages), pages, fourteen items in all.

Colton had bought Poe's “Raven” and published it in the issue of February, 1845. He published many other things by Poe in later numbers (see Cullen B. Colton, “George Hooker Colton and the Publication of ‘The Raven,’ “ American Literature X, No. 3 [November 19387, 319-330). Poe in turn praised the Reveiw [[ Review ]] in his literary column in the Mirror ( ibid. , p. 327). It is remarkable that Colton, a half-nephew of Poe's enemy Lewis Gaylord Clark (see below) always seems to have remained on excellent terms with Poe.

Page 45, Line 18

For a discussion of the impression each made on the other at this meeting ( c. May, 1845) see Quinn, Poe , pp. 461-463 .

Page 45, Line 29

In reviewing Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America in Graham's in June, 1842, Poe criticized the anthologist for his choice from among Lowell's poetry, with the exception of “Rosaline.” And, in his review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems in Graham's in March, 1842 (for text see Works , XI, 68 ) Poe says of Lowell's “Rosaline”: “we sincerely think no American poem equals it in the higher elements of song.” Why Chivers does not say what he had in mind in declaring the poem a plagiarism is puzzling, for in such matters he is usually quite specific.

Page 47, Line 10

Poe's published comments of this period on Tennyson agree entirely with what is here said (see Works , XI, 127 , 175 , 236 , 255 ). [page 110:]

Page 48, Line 26

Poe certainly did pursue this policy of speaking respectfully of Bryant. E.g. , see his criticisms in the Southern Literary Messenger (January, 1837) and Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (May, 1840). For texts see Works , IX, 268-305 ; X, 85-91 .

Page 49, Last Line

The Ethiopian melodies were actually songs of the Negro minstrels of the nineteenth century. There were minstrel groups called the “Ethiopian Minstrels,” the “Ethiopian Serenaders,” etc. Sally in the Wildwoods may very well have been a minstrel song, though a copy of it has not been located.

Page 50, Line 2

Ole Bull (1810-1880) was the Norwegian violinist who toured America c. 1854 playing melodies based on Norwegian folk music.

Page 50, Line 13

Amelia Welby (1819-1852) was praised by Poe in the Democratic Review of December, 1844, ( Works XI, 277 ). Poe's statement concerning music runs: “At the fiftieth it induces ennui — at the hundredth, disgust.”

Page 50, Line 16

In the three paragraphs following the reference to Mrs Welby, Chivers may be incorporating some of his own concepts into Poe's. Certainly he is clothing them in his own language. Actually Chivers and Poe agree on many things. Both felt, for example, that the short poem would be pleasing; but Chivers did not believe with Poe that a poem must necessarily be brief. For several of Chivers’ letters and prefaces on the subject, see Edd W. Parks, Southern Poets , New York, 1936, pp. lvi-lvii, 322-332.

Page 51, Last Line

A favorite quotation of Poe's. E.g. , see “Ligeia.”

Page 57, Line 73

Here Chivers again follows Griswold, “Memoir,” p. xxv . There is no real evidence as a basis for this charge. In fact, the reminiscences of Poe's college friends and the records of the University would indicate quite the contrary. [page 111:]

Page 57, Line 21

As indicated above, all the evidence here and elsewhere would suggest that the two men first met about June 1845.

Page 57, Line 25

This was probably the refectory of Hugh Pattinson located (according to the New York City Business Directory of 1844-1845) at 107 Nassau, corner of Ann Street. A city map shows 107 at the northwest corner of Nassau and Ann, and another refectory, that of Gilbert Blackford, at III Nassau, the third house north of Ann. An index of restaurant and hotel men at the New-York Historical Society lists H. Pattinson as proprietor of the Temperance(!) Eating House, corner of Nassau and Ann Streets. Hervey Allen, Israfel , 1934 ed., p. 478 etc., indicates that Poe was a frequenter of Sandy Welsh's tavern on Ann Street. No such name is indicated in the directories of this period, though Alexander F. Welsh did have a refectory at 85 Nassau Street (a block and a quarter below Ann Street). Doggett's City Directory for 1845-1846 gives the corner of Ann and Nassau Streets as the address of the Evening Mirror .

Page 58, Line 15

“The Trait House” is a puzzle, for the directories and maps for the city in this period do not locate it nor any other “House” having a name remotely resembling this.

Page 58, Line 16

The unfortunate relations between Poe and Clark have been traced in part by Herman E. Spivey, “Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark,” PMLA , LIV, No. 4 (December, 1939), 1124-1132. Professor Spivey, who traces the relationship for several years before and after this episode, had to rely for his information concerning the present meeting on Woodberry's misleading summary ( Century , LXI, No. 3 [January, 1903], 433 [[443]] ) and the paraphrase of it in Hervey Allen's Israfel. Both sources state merely that Poe tried to attack Clark for a fancied insult, and that Clark, seeing how matters stood with Poe ( i.e. , that he was intoxicated), gracefully bowed himself out of the way. Allen was of the opinion that Poe had acquired a “persecution delusion.” Professor Spivey, not knowing of the Chivers-Poe specific statement of the original manuscript, concludes that Poe is harking back to a quarrel initiated by himself in the New World in 1843, disparaging the Knickerbocker [page 112:] and Clark, and continued in other periodicals in the same year, Certainly however the tone of Poe's remarks at this time is not strong, though Clark's references to Poe are. At any rate, Professor Spivey allows a twenty-month interval between the last reference to Poe in the Knickerbocker of October, 1843, and this street encounter, and shows Clark taking up the quarrel in print again in January, 1846, ( Knickerbocker , XXVII, 71, “Literary Notices”) . From then on the controversy was out in the open.

Chivers’ account, however, alters the picture considerably. It is borne out by the allusion to Poe in the Knickerbocker , which Chivers gives as the cause of Poe's anger and which Professor Spivey failed to note. One now sees that 1) Poe humiliated Clark in a manner somewhat to Clark's discredit, and that therefore Clark may have on the basis of this personal encounter have proceeded to his more violent denunciations of Poe, and 2) Poe was moved to treat Clark as he did, when he was intoxicated, by Clark's remarks in the Knickerbocker (XXVI, No. 1 [July 1845], 76). The tone and content of the article might have incensed one less sensitive even than Poe:

Gossip with Readers and Correspondents. — Some sage correspondent of the ‘Broadway Journal’ has temporarily resuscitated from oblivion an article from an old English magazine, entitled ‘Mr. Peter Snook,’ which it lauds without stint, but the very ‘plums’ of which we defy any person of taste to swallow with pleasure. Its humor, which we tried to discover, is pronounced superior to that of Dickens; whereas the wit of the writer is no more to be compared with that of ‘Boz’ than the personal ‘style’ of Jaques Strop is with the manner of Robert Macaire. ‘Chaçun à son gôut,’ however; and had it not been for an indiscriminate fling at American periodicals, we should not have quarrelled with the commentaries of the nil-admirari critic in question: he is simply one of a numerous class, who are ‘nothing if not critical,’ and even less than nothing at that. ‘How very rarely,’ says our literary Aristarchus, ‘are we struck with an original article in an American magazine, but how frequently with the novelty of foreign ones!’ Judging from the taste exhibited by the critic in his ‘foreign’ selection, we should say that the less he was struck with an American magazine article, the more credit would it reflect upon the periodical which contained it. It is pleasant as well as instructive to notice the contrast exhibited in ‘foreign’ comments upon American magazines. Take our own, for example. ... [page 113:]

As Poe intimated in the encounter, Clark ought to have known the review was his. Not only had it appeared in the Broadway Journal , I, 2 3ff., but earlier in the Southern Literary Messenger of October, 1836, (for text see Works , XI [[XIV]], 73-89 ) during Poe's editorship of the latter.

Years later Chivers wrote a parody of “The Raven” (published in the Georgia Citizen of March 20, 1852) entitled “The Rappings,” in which Poe's spirit is made to rebuke Clark for the nonsense he had written about Poe.

Page 59, Line 9

Willis Gaylord Clark's poems had been reviewed, probably by Lewis Gaylord Clark, in the May, 1844, Knickerbocker under “Literary Notices.” The title is given as The Literary Remains of the Late Willis Gaylord Clark ... New-York. ...

Page 59, Line 28

For a discussion of the probable identity of the lady of Providence with Mrs. Osgood, see the Introduction above, under “Authenticity of Personal Data.” For the Poe-Osgood relationship, see Quinn, Poe , 476-480 ; 497 ; 675-676 . Other students of Poe have felt that the relationship was less Platonic and less purely literary than most recent biographers have made it. E.g. , see Professor T. O. Mabbott's reference to the “amour with Mrs. Osgood,” in “The Astrological Symbolism of Poe's ‘Ulalume,’” Notes & Queries , CLXI ( July 11, 1931), 27.

Page 61, Line 10

This was the period of Poe's introduction into the literary circles of New York and other Eastern cities (see Quinn, Poe , pp. 475-495 ). C. F. Briggs in a letter of July 16, 1845, (see George E. Woodberry, Life of Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols., Boston, 1909, II, 143 ) states that Poe was supposed to have read a poem before “the societies of the New York University a few weeks since.”

Page 61, Line 18

T[homas] Babington Macaulay's Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols. , 1841-1844, Carey and Hart, Philadelphia. Poe had reviewed the first volume in Graham's Magazine in June, 1841, (for text see Works , XI, 156-160 ).

Page 61, Line 30

The address of the Broadway Journal is given as 135 Nassau Street in the New York Business Directory for 1845 and in the [page 114:] magazine itself, Volume I, issues 18-26. Other periodicals had offices at the same address.

Page 62, Line 4

The partnership was actually dissolved by July 12, for on that date the Broadway Journal carried a notice that the editorial department was now “under the sole charge of Edgar A. Poe,” with Watson, as heretofore, “controlling the Musical Department” (see Quinn, Poe , p. 463 and Allen, Israfel , 1934 ed., p. 521). For Briggs’ letters to Lowell giving his side of the matter (and incidentally bearing witness to Poe's praise of Horne's Orion in private conversation), see Woodberry, Life , II, 140-148 .

Page 62, Line 7

Was it this visit to Providence Poe referred to in his second “To Helen,” addressed to Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman? Apparently it was. See Killis Campbell, ed., The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe , Boston, 1917, p. 284 and Poe's letter to Mrs. Whitman of October 1, 1848, ( Letters , II, 384 ) in which he refers to the time he “passed through Providence with Mrs. Osgood.”

Page 66, Line 4

January 4, 1848, from New York. For full text see Letters , II, 354-357 . The letter has been published in whole or in part many times.

Page 67, Line 19

Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton to Maria Clemm, October 11, 1849. The letter is in the Huntington Library, MS. HM. 253. It is given in full by Woodberry, “Poe-Chivers Papers,” loc. cit. , pp. 551-552 .

Page 68, Line 15

The three clippings which form Chivers’ quotation here appear in the Southern Literary Messenger , XVI, No. 3 (March, 1850), 177-178 , under an article entitled “Edgar Allan Poe.” As noted above (see reference to page 28, line 16) the criticism was not written by Cooke at all, but by John M. Daniel, Richmond editor. Daniel begins his interesting essay with a biting blast against the condescension of tone of the memoirs by Willis, Lowell, and Griswold included in the authorized edition of Poe's works. Despite its incorporation of some of the errors and prejudices of Griswold's “Memoir,” it is on the whole, a discriminating critique of Poe's life and work by a man who knew him. [page 115:]

Page 70, Line 3

“Memoir,” pp. xlv-xlvi . Evidently Chivers intended to make this dark matter clear by printing here the letters now in the Poe-Chivers Papers in the Huntington Library from 1) William J. Pabodie of Providence to Griswold, June 11, 1852, denying the truth of Griswold's assertion regarding this Providence episode of Poe's life; 2) Pabodie's letter to Chivers, July 14, 1852, concerning his “much slandered friend, Mr. Poe”; and perhaps 3) Sarah Helen Whitman to Mrs. Clemm, June 2, [1852]; and 4) Mrs. Whitman to Chivers, August 9, 1852. Pabodie's letter to Griswold and several other letters from Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Clemm are printed in Works , XVII, 412-415 , 417-427 .

Page 70, Line 22

“Memoir,” p. xliii . Griswold is speaking of Eureka .

Page 70, Line 23

Ibid. , p. xlvii [[xiv]] [[ and xl ]].

Page 70, Line 28

Chivers apparently borrows here, without acknowledgement, from Poe, who began his review of Elizabeth Barrett's Drama of Exile ( Works , XII, 1 , originally in Graham's Magazine , March 1846) with the following: “In the way of original, striking, and well-sustained metaphor, we can call to mind few finer things than this — to be found in James Puckle's ‘Gray Cap for a Green Head’; ‘In speaking of the dead so fold up your discourse that the virtues may be outwardly shown, while their vices are wrapped in silence.’ ” Professor T. O. Mabbott believes Poe read Puckle's The Club, or a Grey Cap for a Green Head (1711) about 1841 (see “Puckle and Poe,” Notes Queries , CLXIV, [March 25, 1933] 205). Actually the first American edition of Puckle with a title omitting The Club appeared in Philadelphia in 1798.

Page 71, Line 26

As indicated in the textual notes, Chivers did not plan to publish the letter as it now stands, though his editing is primarily cutting.

Page 73, Line 26

The poem appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in March, 1836, earlier in the 1831 edition of Poe's Poems , and in several other places. Of course the changes in lines 9-10, 11, 13 are well known. For a variorum text of the poem, see Campbell, ed., [page 116:] Poems , pp. 56 , 199-203 . Chivers is correct in stating that this is the Southern Literary Messenger version.

Page 74, Line 14

II, No. 1 (July 12, 1845), 7.

Page 74, Line 24

According to Campbell, ed., Poems , p. 302 , Chivers attributed the poem to Poe in the Waverley Magazine of July 30, 1853, (p. 73) . For Campbell's discussion of the poem, with the conclusion that it is probably not Poe's, see op. cit. , pp. 302-303 , and his later “A Bit of Chiversian Mystification,” University of Texas Studies in English , X (1930), 152-154. Professor Campbell feels that Chivers wrote the poem himself and may have been taking revenge for Poe's “plagiarism” through this bit of mystification. Professor Campbell cites similar lines (9-11) from “The Departed” and “The Vigil in Aiden” in Chivers’ Eonchs of Ruby (1850), but he admits that Chivers may be borrowing from Poe, as he may have done in the past (actually the “Vigil” is an elegy of tribute to Poe). Professor Campbell also admits (in agreement with Professor Damon) that Chivers is usually “exceptionally devoid of guile.”

Page 76, Line 18

For other surmises as to the meaning of the title of this poem, see Campbell, ed., Poems , p. 273 . Mr. Kenneth Jackson, Professor of Celtic in the University of Edinburgh, assures me that Chivers did not know what he was talking about here. The “Ul-Erin” was conceived either in Chivers’ own brain or in that of some Irish or Scottish eccentric who knew nothing of Celtic.

Page 77, Line 8

Griswold follows substantially the text of the Providence Journal and the MS. copy presented to Miss Susan Ingram. He omits the tenth stanza and includes a few verbal changes from that of the first printing of the ten stanzas in the American Whig Review , VI, No. 6 (December, 1847), 599-60o. See also Campbell, ed., Poems , p. 267 . Apparently Chivers had clippings of two versions of the poem and had difficulty making up his mind which to use. Both are ten-stanza texts.

Page 78, Line 6

Chivers’ information is correct here. See Campbell, ed., Poems , pp. 77 , 221 . [page 117:]

Page 78, Line 13

“The Visionary,” later called “The Assignation,” was first published in Godey's in January, 1834.

Page 78, Line 14

As Chivers says, this stanza was rejected (in all save the versions of the Southern Literary Messenger [July, 1835], Tales [1840], and Broadway Journal [June 7, 1845]). His transcription, however, is careless. Campbell quotes the stanza ( p. 78n ) thus:

Alas! for that accursed time

They bore thee o’er the billow

From Love to titled age and crime,

And an unholy pillow —

From me, and from our misty clime,

Where weeps the silver willow!

Page 82, Lines 13-14

Bayard Taylor, Rhymes of Travel, Ballads and Poems (New York, 1849), p. 134, gives these lines as the concluding verses of the sixth stanza of “The Continents.” Poe discussed the matter in Marginalia,” Southern Literary Messenger , April, 1849, ( Works , XVI, 146 ).

Page 83, Lines 3-6

These are lines 15-18 of “L’Envoi: Chant of a Soul,” in William Ross Wallace, Meditations in America, and Other poems (New York, 1851), pp. 139-143.

Page 84, Line 17

Tohoo Vabohoo is a variant of Tohu-bohu , Hebrew in Genesis , I, 2, rendered in the 1611 Bible as “without form and void.” Voltaire in the eighteenth century and Gladstone and Browning in the nineteenth were among those employing the term.

Page 84, Line 21

These Shelleyan lines are unlocated. A search has been made in the Chivers manuscript poems and in the seven volumes of Chivers published verse in the Duke University Library without success. Chivers’ obvious indebtednesses to Shelley are frequent.

Page 86, Line 12

The exact quotation has not been located. In two places, at least, Balzac referred to Buffon's remark “Le genie, c’est la patience” [page 118:] ( Ouevres completes , Paris, Michel Levy, 1864, XVI, 223; and Ouevres completes , Paris, Houssiaux, 1874, XI, 141).

Page 86, Line 19

Lodovico, Agostino, and Annibale Carracci, distinguished Bolognese artists of the sixteenth century, were founders of the “eclectic school” of painting, which studied the great masters for their particular excellencies and combined these in their own productions.

Page 86, Line 20

Claude (1600-1682) Lorrain or Gelee, French landscape painter of the classical school, bathed his scenes in light and atmosphere.

Page 87, Line 17

Probably Bellori, who is quoted ( Encyclopaedia Britannica , 11th edition, VIII, 397) as a commentator on Domenchino's genius.

Page 87, Line 18

Zampieri Domenchino (1581-1641) was an Italian painter and disciple of the Carracci.

Page 87, Line 20

Francesco Albano or Albiani (1578-1660) was also a disciple of the Carracci. He did many frescoes on mythological subjects.

Page 87, Line 24

Fons ingeniorum is perhaps best translated as fountain or source of genius (see Homerus Pliny, Natural History, XVII , 37). Fons Pythonis , probably late Latin, means the source of oracular expression. Festina lente is given as a favorite motto of Augustus, probably a folk motto (see Suetonius, Twelve Caesars , under “Augustus,” XXV, 4).

Page 91, Line 11

Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868), Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901), George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), and Ludwig Von Beethoven (1770-1827) hardly require comment.

Page 91, Line 14

The “quotation” from Beethoven is very similar to a statement attributed to the composer concerning Handel, “I would uncover my head, and kneel down on his tomb!” This follows the exclamation [page 119:] that “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived!” See “A Day with Beethoven. Extract of a Letter from Vienna to a Friend in London,” The Harmonicum , II, Part I, London 1824, pp. 10-11I. There was also a German edition by Moscheles of Schindler's biography of Beethoven in 1840, and an English translation in 1841, both of which contain the allusion. Chivers’ use of a German source may account for his awkward rendering “This is the true!”

Page 92, Line 4

Poe mentions Mrs. Welby as a poetess of passion in “Marginalia” in the Democratic Review , December, 1844, ( Works , XVI, 54-59 ; XI, 277 ). The quotation appears in Works , XVI, 56 .

Page 92, Line 31

The clipping ending here is a part of one of Chivers’ “Letters from the North,” included in the October 18, 1851, issue of the Georgia Citizen , a warm defense of Poe in which he refuted Griswold's whole description of Poe. Chivers also quotes the epitaph he wrote immediately after Poe's death and states his intention of having it engraved on Poe's tomb.

“The following Epitaph, which I wrote immediately after Poe's death, I intend to have engraved upon his Tomb Stone:

Like the great Prophet in the Desert lone,

He stood here waiting for the GOLDEN MORNING;

From death's dark Vale I hear his distant moan —

Coming to scourge the World he was adorning —

Scorning, in glory now, their impotence of scorning.

And now, in Apotheosis divine,

He stands, enthroned upon the Immortal Mountains,

Of God's eternity, forever more to shine —

Star-crowned, all purified with oil-anointings —

Drinking with Ullalume from out th’ Eternal Fountains.

P.S. He who teaches that the only Panacea for the ills of life is universal love, is the Preacher of immortal truth.”

Page 93, Line 21

E.g. , see “Letter to B—,” Works , VII, xxxvi .

Page 94, Line 2

For Tennyson as the greatest of poets see “Marginalia,” Democratic Review , December, 1844, ( Works , XVI, 28 ). [page 120:]

Page 94, Line 15

I.e. , Aristotle's Art of Creating , in literature or elsewhere. See the Poetics .

Page 94, Line 16

E.g. , in “Marginalia,” concerning Tennyson, Poe says ( Works , XVI, 29 ): “I know that indefinitiveness is an element of the true music — I mean of the true musical expression. ... ”

Page 95, Line 5

See Poe, Works , XVI, 29 , 138 etc. In the same paragraph as the quotation given in the note just above, Poe gives the quotation Chivers here uses to confute him. Poe quotes his authority against the attempts at absolute imitation in music (including instrumental ), as in the “silliness” of the “Battle of Prague.”

Page 95, Line 9

This is a reference to Cooke's remark in the Southern Literary Messenger , XIV, No. 1, (January, 1848), 37 : “For my individual part ... I would like to read one cheerful book made by his invention , with little or no aid from its twin brother imagination — a book in his admirable style of full, minute, never tedious narrative — a book full of homely doings, of successful toils, of ingenious shifts and contrivances, of ruddy fireside — a book healthy and happy throughout, and with no poetry in it at all anywhere, except a good old English ‘poetic justice’ in the end. Such a book, such as Mr. Poe could make it, would be a book for the million, and if it did nothing to exalt him with the few, would yet certainly endear him to them.”

Page 95, Line 11

J. R. Thompson (1822-1873) was editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in 1847-1854, 1855-1860.

Page 96, Line 16

The quotation is from J. R. Thompson's article in the SLM , XV, No. 11 (November 1849), 694 : “Now that he is gone, the vast multitude of blockheads may breathe again, and we imagine that we hear the shade of the departed crying out to them, the epitaph designed for Robespierre,

Passant! ne plains point mon sort

Si je vivais, to serais mort.” [ sic ]. [page 121:]

Page 97, Line 2 to Page 98, Line 11

For Poe's conception of genius, see “Marginalia,” Works , XVI, 123 , 126 , 163 etc., and his discussions of poetic theory.

Page 98, Line 12

According to Quinn, Poe , pp. 681-682 , Graham himself wrote the article in Graham's Magazine , XLIV (February, 1854), 216-225 .

Page 99, Lines 6-15

The two pieces of clipping here used are parts of a reprint from some other paper (for the paragraphs are rearranged) of a “Review of Poems. By H—— W—— L—— Philadelphia,” New-York Weekly Tribune , V, No. 14, Whole Number 222 (December 13, 1845), 1. The review is a reprint of Margaret Fuller's essay appearing originally in the Daily Tribune of December 10, (see Mason Wade, ed., The Writings of Margaret Fuller , New York, 1941, pp. 38-388, 599, for text of the review). It unmistakably damns with very faint praise, assigning him a place among the second-rate poets and observing that everywhere he is exceedingly derivative.

Page 99, Line 16

See “Editor's Note” in text. Chivers returns here to the subject of Poe vs. Longfellow, but is referring to a passage in John R. Thompson, “The Late Mr. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger , XV, No. 11 (November, 1849), 696 . Thompson's allusion is to a letter addressed to himself by Longfellow: “ ‘What a melancholy death,’ says Mr. Longfellow, ‘is that of Mr. Poe — a man so richly endowed with genius! I never knew him personally. ... The harshness of his criticisms, I have never attributed to anything but the irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong.’ ”

Page 100, Line 3

Lowell in his sketch of Poe states that the poem was written when Poe was fourteen ( Griswold, ed., Works , I, ix ) though the statement is hardly credited today. See Campbell, ed., Poems , p. 199 . Lowell said the poem had “the smack of ambrosia about it.”

[S:0 - TCH52, 1952] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Articles - Chivers' Life of Poe (R. B. Davis) (Explanatory Notes)

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