Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 2

Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford

Family Troubles

Meantime, Nicholas Power, rebuffed from the attractive red house on Benefit Street, had set up lodgings in a Providence hotel and began his new, disreputable existence, pursuing ladies of the theater. The prejudice against theater people was so strong in America at this time that actors were routinely forbidden the use of churches for weddings and funerals. So it is possible that the contemporary reference to "actresses" was a euphemism implying all kinds of women, including prostitutes.
At this time, the Power-Whitman household probably assumed its frozen triangle of control, dependence and artistic defiance. Mrs. Anna Power held the purse strings. She would make certain that no man ever got near the modest fortune that had come their way through the Marsh family.
The younger sister, Susan Anna, careened between manic highs and long periods of sullen silence. One episode reportedly led her to a sanitarium stay, for "mania," but Mrs. Power evidently preferred the cheaper long-term solution of keeping her daughter at home, under constant supervision.
Mrs. Power probably established some stern rules about the extent to which Susan's mood swings would be humored — though after their mother's death, Sarah Helen seemed to surrender control to her reclusive "patient." During Susan's depressive periods, the house would be darkened and visitors turned away. Her need for silence, darkness and solitude were pampered, and if visitors were by some necessity admitted, Susan would hide in a closet. In her manic phases, Susan Anna collaborated on some well-wrought fairy-tale poems with Sarah Helen, and amused visitors with impromptu verses about the wandering Nicholas Power.
Although Whitman would accept the burden of living with her embittered mother, and helping to care for her sister, her mind, and her writing, were unfettered. She was with the gods — Goethe, Schiller, Shelley, Byron, Emerson. She studied occult lore and learned about mesmerism and (later) spiritualism, as interest in these phenomena swept across the New England states. And when universal male suffrage, women's suffrage, and the abolition of slavery became New England's predominant issues, Sarah Helen was there. Séances, poetry and political activism, all went hand-in-glove.
An avid reader, she frequented the wonderful Providence Athenaeum, a membership lending library which opened its new Greek-revival  temple only a few blocks away on Benefit Street in 1838. She became a local celebrity, and parties and salons at her home drew not only the locals, but visiting celebrities such as Emerson. John Hay, a young poet later famed as Abraham Lincoln's secretary, was a devotee at the Power salon, which came to be called "The Phalanstery."

Her Published Poetry

Among the fine later poems, Sarah Helen Whitman's "Proserpine, [On Earth,] To Pluto, In Hades" (Whitman2, 158)  deserves special attention for its allegory of the characters in the Poe-Helen-Mrs. Power love drama. The poet uses the familiar mythical story of Ceres' daughter, Proserpine (Persephone in Greek), who must spend six months of the year with her brooding husband, Pluto, lord of the dead, and six months of the year above ground. This ancient fable explaining and symbolizing the seasons is turned topsy-turvy by Whitman. Her Proserpine loves Pluto and prefers to sit by his throne in the dark underworld. Her angry mother Ceres comes in a chariot drawn by two dragons to reclaim her. Here we have, a trio of archetypes: Helen, Poe, and the ever-angry Mrs. Power. The Persephone symbolism even carried to Helen's funeral in 1878: her coffin was decorated with a green wreath, and a stalk of wheat.
Whitman's longest and most ambitious poem is "Hours of Life" (Whitman2 101). The middle section of that poem, "Noon," is a spiritual saga and romantic quest — the poet's search for meaning and truth through the realms of myth and antiquity. In this long poetic odyssey we see: Echoes of Goethe in a passage that is almost a paraphrase of the famous scene of Faust alone in his laboratory, before he makes the acquaintance of Mephistopheles … A fascinatingly brief flirtation with the vengeful god of the Old Testament, whom she rejects … A wise examination and rejection of the sad religion of the Hindu … as well as the death-obsessed Egyptian … A passionate, almost Shelleyan plunge into the world of Ancient Greece, where she obviously feels close to the very origins of myth and meaning. Her use of the Dionysian Maenads — fierce, wild, drunken women, running down the mountain slope toward her as in a nightmare, crying out "Evoe — ah — Evoe!" is the most elemental, and frankly terrifying thing in all her writing. Here she is throwing herself into the world of Euripides' The Bacchae, probably the most Chthonic and unnerving of all the texts to come down from antiquity (Euripides 401).
She wrests herself away from the refrain of the Maenads only by turning to Nature. Here she waxes almost Byronic in taking comfort from the rude, natural world. She finds that she can accept this transcendental, all-encompassing Nature, free of the eidolons of ancient gods.
One thing only troubles her, though — the doubt that would bring her back to a more conventional, if still highly individual, resolution, in the third part of the poem. What about the abyss after death? she asks. Nature is not enough if the spirit does not survive and transcend the body. Thus she leaves her quest, Faust-like, with no satisfaction from all she has seen on her journey.
The beauty and power of "Noon" is easily obscured by the more conventional opening, and the rather spiritualist closing of the longer poem of which it is part. But "Noon" itself is a remarkable production, a piece Romantic in the purest sense. The very idea of a Providence widow in her darkened rooms on Benefit Street writing such an impassioned, fully-worked out quest in verse is amazing. Whatever the poem lacks in originality in its occasional mimicry of Shelley and Byron, it makes up for in its economy, intellect and power. George Ripley, founder of The Dial, here being quoted by Mrs. Whitman's posthumous editors from a New York Tribune review, called it "remarkable for the life-like reality with which it weaves the recollections of a profound and intense experience into the natural materials of song. … a taste ripened and enriched by exquisite culture … uniting spontaneous grace and freshness with classical finish. … Rich as it is in characteristics that would establish an enviable poetical fame for any writer…" (Whitman2, xi).
Her first book, Hours of Life and Other Poems, published in 1853 (her fiftieth year), was printed by Knowles, Anthony & Company under the aegis of George H. Whitney, a Providence bookseller. The edition was small and the poet was still giving away copies twenty years later. The volume includes the major poems she had written to and about Poe.
We will never know if the bookseller published and underwrote Hours of Life, as Helen insisted, "at his request" (Miller 97) or whether she subsidized the venture. We know that she wrote to Poe's biographer Ingram many years later: "I am utterly & entirely ignorant of all transactions with publishers. I have no relations with any publishers & never made a contract in my life" (Miller 29) At another time, however, she wrote: "Mr. Whitney, the publisher, surrendered to me the copyright before he gave up business as bookseller and publisher. Mr. Carleton also gave up to me his copyright of Edgar Poe and His Critics" (Miller 97)
Edgar Poe and His Critics was published in 1860, not coincidentally soon after her mother died. Mallarmé, discovering the book in 1877, wrote to Whitman of the book's "unexpected charm and a penetrating beauty" (Lloyd 102). Arthur Hobson Quinn, in one of the best Poe biographies of the first half of the 20th century, appraised her book as "not only a convincing personal tribute, but also one of the most sympathetic and brilliant interpretations of his poetry and fiction" (Quinn 572).
Sarah Helen Whitman's collected poems were issued in a memorial edition a year after her death, in 1879, by Houghton, Osgood and Company, printed by The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The third and last printing was in 1916. Her poetry remained out of print until the publication of Last Flowers: The Romance Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman in 1985 (Rutherford).
Sarah Helen Whitman left $2,000 in her estate for the posthumous publication of her poems. No doubt this sum was applied to the 1879 edition of her poems. The 1916 reprint, the same year as Caroline Ticknor's biography, Poe's Helen, was probably a spontaneous production.
The present volume includes a selection of Mrs. Whitman's poetry, ranging beyond the Poe-related works included in Last Flowers. Posterity has been somewhat unkind to her reputation, both in dismissing her as the ether-sniffing "poetess" once engaged to Poe, and because her poetry is at times less original. That many poems were written for friends and for her literary circle, meant that she had no qualms about inserting a quoted line here and there from another poet (with quotation marks), assuming that her readers would understand her use of a familiar line or phrase. The ego of the male poet would seemingly never condone this kind of collaborative poesy.
-- To be continued --

SUBJECTS: antebellum literature, Providence, Sarah Helen Whitman, Hours of Life, Edgar Poe and His Critics