Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 5
by Brett Rutherford
Poe – Briefly
In January 1848, Mrs. Anne Lynch, a Providence-born poet who had moved to New York, invited Whitman to contribute poetic greetings to a Valentine's Day party she was planning for the Manhattan literati. Helen and her sister Susan both sent poems. Helen's was addressed to Poe.Only after the February 14 party was over did Sarah Helen learn that Poe had not been invited, and was now in fact persona non grata. Anne Lynch then submitted 42 poems that had been read at her party for publication in The Home Journal. Helen's poem was not among them.
It took two more communications to a reluctant Anne Lynch to get her to pass along the Poe valentine for publication. The Home Journal published it separately (Whitman3). This publication commenced the famous Poe-Helen romance.
Whitman revised her valentine poem substantially in later years, making its imagery encompass more of Poe's tales.
In 1853, she published the poems she had written to and about Poe in her first book. In 1860, after the death of her mother, she published Edgar Poe and His Critics as a book. Her loyalty to Poe and her unselfish help to Poe biographers over the decades helped turn the tide of popular opinion against those who had depicted him as an amoral villain. Whitman's achievement, triumphing over Rufus Griswold's defamation of Poe, is one of the great vindications in literary history.
In the years until 1860, Helen was generally silent about her relationship with Poe. She relied upon friends to defend her honor — and Poe's. After the infamous "memoir" of Poe published by Rufus Griswold circulated wild and exaggerated stories about Poe and his conduct, William Pabodie published a letter in The New York Tribune in 1852, refuting some of Griswold's slanderous and distorted history. When Griswold threatened Pabodie with a libel suit in return, Pabodie defied him and published another letter showing further falsehoods in Griswold's writing. (It is a touching irony that Griswold's later life would be ruined by Mrs. Ellet, who had been Poe's principal nemesis among the New York literary women.)
At the time of writing Edgar Poe and His Critics (the copyright page of the book is 1859), Mrs. Whitman was also unaware of Poe's attention to another woman during their courtship, and to his torment over that conflicted state, so she quite innocently regarded herself as Poe's last love, in effect his literary widow. Although she writes as his "friend," there is much more at stake for her. (I have detailed the day-by-day convolutions of Poe and Helen's romance and engagement in my book, Last Flowers: The Romance and Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman.)
Suffragist, Abolitionist and Spiritualist
Whitman also wrote on abolitionism and women's rights, and was honored for her work at New York suffragist conventions in 1870 and 1871. In 1868, she was elected vice-president of The Rhode Island Suffrage Association (Baker, 37). Her writings on this and on political topics were not included in Baker's bibliography, and have apparently never been researched.Whitman endorsed a refined and individual brand of spiritualism. She attended the first recorded séance in Providence in September 1850, an event described as "not successful." Whitman did attend other séances, and contributed several highly intellectual letters and essays on the subject to The New York Tribune and to The Spiritual Telegraph. Their texts can be found in Capron's 1855 book, and the author-enthusiast characterizes her thus: "Among the friends of the spiritual cause of Providence no one has exhibited more firmness, and none more readiness to defend in public and private the spiritual theory [emphasis mine] of these manifestations, than Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the poetess. … She always writes with vigor when reasoning on any subject, and does not forget to fortify herself with a strong array of facts." Both Capron and Whitman seem eager to distance themselves from the Biblical spiritualism that seemed to come all too easy to fanatical Protestants.
Essentially, Whitman nodded assent with the Christians only on the issue of the immortality of the soul. But her afterlife is more pagan than Christian — a place where lovers are reunited, justice prevails, and punishment — that favorite bugaboo of Puritans — is not even mentioned. It is a benevolent vision of a "here and now" survival of souls — a comforting and harmless dream. She makes it clear in her poetry that she rejects the smiting God — the Old Testament Jehovah whose shadow still darkened New England. The metaphysics of 19th century spiritualism has many aspects that resemble latter-day "New Age" movements, including a startling tolerance for diversity of behavior (including a strong "free love" component.)
Although much has been made of Whitman's involvement with mediumship, the veracity or accuracy of some of these claims are suspect. Richard P. Benton, for example, describes Whitman as already involved in séances at the time of her romance with Poe, wearing a wooden coffin around her neck as a memento mori (Benton 17). This somewhat trivializes and ridicules her — in 1848, no séance had as yet occurred in Providence, and in fact the Spiritualist movement was then just starting in upstate New York. Whitman's interests in 1848 were purely literary.
Spiritualists like to claim Whitman as a celebrity member of their movement, and there is a famous photo of her with her face covered in a dark veil, in "séance attire." Her recognition in the field is from her occasional correspondence and journalism; yet I could not find her name among officers or attendees at various spiritualist conventions held in the Northeast. It is also significant that, even if she hosted and attended séances, she makes no claims of mediumship in her poetry, or in her correspondence with Poe's biographer Ingram. Not one syllable of her work is "dictated" by spirits.
This makes Eliza Richard's fascinating essay on Poe, women poets and spiritualism all the more problematic. Richards has Poe "dictating" ideas and images into Whitman poems that were written before they met, and turns Whitman's passing allusion to spiritualism in Edgar Poe and His Critics into a claim that Poe was a medium himself, astonishing since Poe died in 1849, and there is little in Poe's writing or criticism to suggest such an attitude. Poe's fiction does deal with souls that might transmigrate, but he does not summon ghosts. In his "Case of M. Valdemar," a dead man's body imprisons his dead soul, and the "news" from beyond is not soothing, but horrifying.
When Richards asserts that "Whitman experimented with spirit channeling after Poe's death to forge an echoic poetry haunted by his ghost" (270) she is ignoring the major poetry Whitman wrote before meeting Poe, as well as denigrating Whitman's own talents. Except in the parody poem, "The Raven," Whitman in fact never imitates Poe in style, and her influences are British and Classical through and through.
In Whitman's defense of Poe's character, she is cautious to fend off charges of atheism against Poe, and she goes to awkward lengths when she attempts to accept Poe's "Eureka" with its idea of the absolute annihilation of the soul, even while re-interpreting it in more hopeful Spiritualist terms. Her first assessment of how radical Poe's ideas were showed that she understood him entirely; her attempt to explain it away is not convincing. When she writes, "[H]is works are, as if unconsciously, filled with an overwhelming sense of the power and majesty of Deity; they are even dark with reverential awe," she is not describing the Poe she knew nor the Poe his readers experience.
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