[APPLAUSE]
Wow, that was something.
Thank you, Lee.
I like being introduced, I just discovered.
[LAUGHTER]
I should begin by thanking Daniel and Dana at Literacy
Connects, and Hannah and Tyler here at the Poetry Center.
It's really a pleasure.
As I was telling them over dinner,
actually, right before we came--
Am I good?
If you could just be a little bit closer.
I could be a little bit closer.
As I was telling them right before we came over,
it's kind of like a dream come true
when you spend a lot of your life
studying one not particularly popular topic,
and becoming an expert on it, and forming
your career around it.
And wondering, well, one day will this knowledge be useful?
And then your community says, we're
celebrating the very thing that you've
spent your life working on.
We need somebody who's a Poe expert.
And I'm like, I'm your guy!
[LAUGHTER]
I'm there.
So anyway, it really has been a pleasure.
But with that said, what I'm talking about today
is not going to be the Poe that you might
know from popular culture.
I'm going to try to introduce you to a different Poe.
So with that, let's get started.
If he can be believed, which is no sure thing,
on Sunday, November 5, 1848, shortly after arriving
in Providence from New York, Edgar Allan Poe
tried to kill himself by ingesting
a large quantity of laudanum.
If he made the attempt, he was not successful,
as he would spend the following days making desperate, voluble,
and repeated propositions of marriage
to a 42-year-old poetess, Sarah Helen Whitman,
to the increasing consternation and alarm of both Whitman
and her mother, with whom she lived.
So that was Sunday through Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the still hesitant Whitman shows Poe some letters
that she has received warning her against marrying him.
This frustrates Poe, and sends him
to the hotel bar, where he writes Whitman
a drunken scrawled note of renunciation and farewell,
and then continues to drink with a stranger, who
becomes, in the way that drinking with strangers
will do, his new best friend.
The next morning, this new friend
takes Poe to the daguerreotype studio,
where this well-known portrait is taken.
This would later be dubbed the Ultima Thule daguerreotype.
That same day, we are now up to Thursday,
Poe makes his way back to Whitman's house to the surprise
of everyone, because he had said,
I'm leaving you forever earlier-- actually the night
before when he got drunk.
And then, anyway, he's back.
And in a, quote, "state of wild and delirious excitement,"
calls on Whitman--
calls on Whitman to save him from
some terrible impending doom.
Whitman hears these calls from her bedroom,
and recalls later that the tones of his voice were appalling.
Quote, "never had I heard something so awful
even to sublimity."
Therefore, Sarah Helen Whitman--
that work? yeah--
42 years old, a respected and self-confident poetess,
chose quite sensibly to stay in her room.
But Poe wouldn't quit.
And perhaps to rescue her mother, perhaps out
of curiosity, perhaps out of exhaustion, after two hours,
Whitman relents and goes to the parlor to greet him.
When she walks in, Poe hails her, to her embarrassment,
as an angel come to save him from perdition.
Her mother suggests that Sarah make him a cup of coffee.
And that's true.
[LAUGHTER]
So after some time, Poe calms and they take him
to the doctor, who diagnoses him with cerebral congestion,
and sends him back to his hotel with a nearby friend.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, somehow miraculously, and this
may serve as a testament to Poe's rhetorical powers,
by Monday, November 13, one week after Poe
had arrived in Providence, tried to kill himself,
failed in his desperate marriage proposition,
drank himself to stupor, sat for what
has become the most defining portrait of his legacy,
and then made an unhinged display for over two
hours in her parlor, Sarah Helen Whitman
accepted his proposal of marriage--
[LAUGHTER]
-- on the condition that he never drink again.
And he would drink again.
And they wouldn't get married.
Anyway, but that's another story.
So to commemorate the event, Poe has another daguerreotype
taken that day, just before going back to New York,
and gives it to Whitman before leaving that evening
to return to New York.
Thus ends just another week in the life of Edgar Allan Poe.
[LAUGHTER]
But why, you may be wondering, did Poe
take the laudanum in the first place
before being rejected, and then finally accepted by Whitman?
Well, Poe gives two conflicting accounts
of why he took the laudanum, each account
to a different woman whom he professed love.
To Sarah Helen Whitman he says he
was so nervous about proposing to her
that he went to the druggist for something
to, quote, "calm his nerves."
But taking too much of it made him sick so
that he couldn't see her for two days.
But to Annie Richmond, a young 28-year-old married woman who
doted on Poe, and whose husband apparently had no objection
to the flirtation, Poe writes the following account--
"I arose," this is Poe, "I arose in Providence,
and endeavored to quiet my mind by a rapid walk
in the cold keen air.
But all would not do.
The demon tormented me still.
"Finally, I procured two ounces of laudanum,
and without returning to my hotel,
took the cars back to Boston.
When I arrived, I wrote you a letter in which
I opened my whole heart to you.
To you, my Annie, whom I so madly, so distractedly love!
I told you how my struggles were more than I could bear,
how my soul revolted from saying the words which
were to be said to Mrs. Whitman, and that not even
for your dear sake could I bring myself to say them.
"I then reminded you of that holy promise,
which was the last I exacted from you in parting,
the promise that under all circumstances
you would come to me on my bed of death.
I implored you to come then, mentioning the place where
I should be found in Boston.
Having written this letter, I swallowed
about half the laudanum and hurried to the post office--"
[LAUGHTER]
-- "intending not to take the rest until I saw you,
for I did not doubt for one moment that my own Annie would
keep her sacred promise.
But I had not calculated on the strength of the laudanum,
for before I reached the post office,
my reason was entirely gone and the letter was never put in."
So.
So let's be clear about this.
Poe was at nearly the same time professing his impossible love
for Annie, and suggesting he was going to kill himself in order
to see her one last time rather than have to marry Sarah Helen
Whitman.
And professing that he needed to be saved by Sarah Helen
Whitman in the most dramatic terms,
and feeling so anxious about her possibly
denying him that he almost overdoses on drugs
meant to help calm him.
No one ever accused Poe of being dull.
So why would he--
OK, why would he, given his apparent reservations
about marrying Whitman, be so insistent upon it?
The answer is that Poe, for most of his adult life,
had a single professional dream, to be the editor and proprietor
of his own literary magazine.
Whitman had, or at least Poe thought she had,
money and connections.
And in their marriage, he saw the prospect
of finally realizing his dream.
It may seem mercantile and self-serving,
but when you consider how many times Poe had sabotaged
his own self-interest in his life,
gambling away all his money in college,
quarreling with his adoptive father
to the point of being written out of the sizable will,
getting fired or quitting from various jobs
over either conflict of principle
or, which is just as likely, consumption of alcohol,
his choice to privilege his career over ill-fated romance
seems like the first time Poe did something
for his own best interest.
I find that whatever happened on November 5, 1848,
we get a sense of two different Poes.
The one we know is Annie's Poe, the romantic Byronic figure
who is madly and fatally in love with an unreachable woman.
One who is dramatic to the point of suicide,
and whose tortured imagination conjured up
poems and stories of Baroque death and grotesque love.
In a way, we know best the Ultima Thule Poe,
the one on the right.
The Poe we know less about is the one who swears to sobriety,
who determines to marry a much older, well-established woman,
and who is prepared to commit himself body and soul
to the prospect of changing the world of literature
through an upscale literary journal of his own creation.
This is the Poe of the Whitman daguerreotype, refined,
professional, and deeply embedded
in the tumultuous world of periodical publishing
in the 1830s and '40s.
And that is the Poe that I would like to discuss today.
This is something of a risk.
The Poe on the right is so much more, I guess--
it's your left--
the Poe on your left is so much more resplendent
in drama, excitement, and horror.
That Poe is like a character out of one of his own stories,
orphaned when he was very young, adopted by a wealthy Virginia
trader who would later write him out of his will,
married to his 13-year-old cousin
when he's 26, an alcoholic, a renowned swimmer, a poet,
a hilariously unskilled gambler, an amateur astronomer who
correctly predicted some of the most startling discoveries
about the universe but mainly for incorrect reasons,
the American poet who was rejected by America,
but cherished by France, primarily because he
was rejected by America.
[LAUGHTER]
That Poe is romantic, and wild, and fun to talk about.
So when choosing the topic for the Big Reads Connects Tucson
event, why did I choose the other Poe, Poe the critic?
I did so because Poe was best known in his own day
not really for his poetry, of which only "The Raven" became
a giant hit, or his tales, though many of them,
especially the detective fiction, were very popular.
Poe was best known in his own day
for his criticism, by which I mean his book reviews
and his essays on literature.
And Poe's enduring influence on literature
is not only in his invention of the psychological Gothic tale,
the modern detective tale, and his pioneering science fiction,
but in his literary criticism.
Plus, his literary criticism shows a sense of humor,
acidic, dry, but humor nevertheless,
that is little known about outside of Poe enthusiast
circles.
I hope I made the right decision.
There are hundreds of books, and articles,
and websites out there that can give you the romantic Poe,
but my challenge is--
my challenge is to introduce the editorial Poe, who, to my mind,
is no less fascinating, but much less well known.