The Sarah Helen Whitman Book is Now Available

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe’s posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916. As critic, she was a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson, yet none of her literary essays other than her defense of Poe have ever appeared in book form. She and her friend Margaret Fuller are credited with being the first American women literary critics.This volume presents Whitman’s literary essays with more than 500 annotations and notes, tracing her literary sources and allusions, and revealing the remarkable breadth of her readings in literature, philosophy, history, and science. Brett Rutherford’s biographical essay is rich in revelations about Whitman’s time and place, her family history, and her muted career as poet, essayist, and den mother to artists and writers. Exploding the standard view of her as the secluded “literary widow,” we can now perceive her as a literary radical pushing against a conservative milieu; a suffragist and abolitionist who dabbled in séances; and a devotee of the New England Transcendentalists and the German Idealists who inspired them.The complete text of Edgar Poe and His Critics presented here, includes the opposing texts by Rufus Griswold, whose libels provoked her landmark defense of Poe’s writing and character. This annotated version identifies all the contemporary press reviews and books Whitman read and critiqued, making it indispensible for students of Edgar Allan Poe.The selected poems in this volume include the hyper-Romantic traversal of rival mythologies in “Hours of Life,” her most ambitious work; her poems to and about Edgar Allan Poe; sensitive and atmospheric nature portrayals; a defense of the then-reviled art of the drama; a love poem from Proserpine to Pluto; an occasional poem about Rhode Island penned in the after-shadow of the Dorr Rebellion; and translations from French and German poets, most notably the most famous of all European ghost ballads, Bürger’s “Leonora.” Whitman’s allusions and unattributed quotations from other poets are all annotated, making this book a must for scholars and students.

Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet and Critic, Part 6 (Final)

Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet and Critic, Part 6 (Final)

by Brett Rutherford

Whitman As Literary Personality

By the 1830s, Whitman had already settled into the eccentric style of dress and speech that a friend, Sarah S. Jacobs, describes thus: "deep-set eyes that gazed over and beyond, but never at you ...her movements were very rapid, and she seemed to flutter like a bird. … Her spell was on you from the moment she appeared… when she spoke, her empire was assured. She was wise, she was witty … her quick, generous sympathy, her sweet, unworldly nature, her ready recognition of whatever feeble talent, or inferior worth another person possessed"  She had also been blessed with, "a succession of adorers." Of her style, Ticknor tells us further, "[S]he loved silken draperies, lace scarves and floating veils … always shod in dainty slippers … [she] always carried a fan to shield her eyes from glare. Her rooms were always dimly lit."(??)
The latter-day figure of Isadora Duncan comes to mind in this description, not surprisingly. Sarah Helen identified with Athena, so it was only natural that she should don the goddess' helmet for an occasional party. Poe biographers have made sport of Helen's appearance, describing how friends trailed her on the street, retrieving for her the various scarves and parts of her costume that always seemed to be falling off. Helen's pagan garb was pretty daring in a very conventional city.
Although, with the publication of the non-Poe articles in this volume, as well as the publication of Whitman's poems, and some of her letters, we can now perceive her as a keen observer of letters and politics and a friend of artists, suffragists, spiritualists, poets and musicians. She was keen in her enthusiasms, yet reticent to lend her name to outlandish ideas and claims. Despite this, the prevailing impression of her is that of Poe's literary widow, as exemplified by this passage from Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

I like best to think of Poe as associated with his gifted betrothed, Sarah Helen Whitman, whom I saw sometimes in her later years. She had outlived her early friends and loves and hopes, and perhaps her literary fame, such as it was; she had certainly outlived her recognized toes with Poe, and all but his memory. There she dwelt in her little suite of rooms, bearing youth still in her heart and her voice, and on her hair also, and in her dress. Her dimly-lighted parlor was always decked, here and there, with scarlet; and she sat, robed in white, her back always to the light, with a discreetly-tinted shadow over her still thoughtful and noble face. She seemed a person embalmed while still alive; it was as if she might swell forever there, prolonging into an indefinite future the tradition of a poet's love; and when we remembered that she had been Poe's betrothed, that his kisses had touched her lips, that she still believed in him and was his defender, all criticism might well, for her sake, be disarmed, and her saintly life atone for his stormy and sad career.

For many years, Whitman's parlor was home for "The Phalanstery," a circle of artists, writers and musicians who were the Bohemia of Providence. Enlivening this circle of friends were the many visitors, from literary lions to dilettantes, who craved admission into this charmed circle in an otherwise drab and disapproving city. No literary person in Providence, then or since, has achieved a similar esteem and centrality.
After Mrs. Power's death in 1858, Helen and her sister purchased another house, which was moved in the 20th century from its original location on Benevolent Street to 140 Power Street. The home was Sarah Helen's literary salon, séance parlor and sanitarium for her sister. Susan Anna Power — who seems to have drifted, like her forebear Jemima Wilkinson, into religious mania — lived until December 8, 1877. Sarah Helen Whitman fell ill shortly after her sister's death, and was moved to the home of friends on Bowen Street, where she died June 27, 1878. Providence had lost its Muse.
*** ***
Break Every Bond: Sarah Helen Whitman In Providence, will be available in late 2018.
Picture: St John's Churchyard, behind Sarah Helen Whitman's home of the 1840s.

Subjects: Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Providence

Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 5

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. 

Subjects: Sarah Helen Whitman, spiritualism, seances, Edgar Allan Poe, Valdemar

Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 4

Sarah Helen Whitman as Poet and Critic, Part 4

by Brett Rutherford

Following is a bibliography of the critical articles which Baker has established as Whitman's writing:

• Egeria (pseud. Sarah Helen Whitman). "Character and Writings of Shelley." The Literary Journal, and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts. 1:32 (Providence, Sat Jan 11 1834): 252-253. 
• Egeria (pseud. Sarah Helen Whitman). "On the Nature and Attributes of Genius. The Boston Pearl: A Gazette Devoted to Polite Literature. 5:14 (Saturday, Dec 19 1835) pp. 107-108. 
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. "Review of 'Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life' translated from the German of Eckermann." Boston Quarterly Review. January 1840. 3:20-57 [By-lined as 'Providence, August 15, 1839']. 
• A Disciple (pseud. Sarah Helen Whitman). "Emerson's Essays, by a Disciple." United States Magazine, and Democratic Review. Vol 16 No 84. June 1845.
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. Edgar Poe and His Critics. 1860. New York: Rudd & Carleton. 
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. "Tablets." [Review of Alcott]. Providence Daily Journal. Vol 39 No 261. Friday morning, October 30, 1868. 
• Whitman, Sarah Helen. "Byronism." Providence Daily Journal. Vol 41 No 93. October 18, 1869. 

Edgar Poe and His Critics, Whitman's only critical work to appear in book form, has been praised as a great work of literary vindication. Whitman had to wait until her mother's passing to publish her defense of Poe. Moulton, writing at the time of Whitman's death in 1878, noted the little book's continued high place: "a little volume of passionate and superb prose, in defense of the dead man ... remarkable for its self-restraint... criticism, not eulogy"
Whitman's critical appreciation of Shelley, published in 1834, defends genius against religion, yet Whitman's defense is timid, reduced in essence to the argument that kind Christians should have remonstrated gently with the poet and brought him back into the fold, rather than casting him out for his atheism. This alone sufficed to make Whitman an outcast among some families in Benefit Street, and the British blasphemy trial against Shelley's poetry was still to come.
At the time Whitman wrote her appreciation of Goethe in 1840, the second part of Faust was little-known, and only those able to read German could plumb its depths (she and Margaret Fuller were among them). Earlier, Thomas Carlyle had lamented the lack of a worthy Faust translation, thus:

A suitable version of Faust would be a rich addition to our literature; but the difficulties which stand in the way of such an undertaking amount to almost an absolute veto. The merits of a good translation, especially in poetry, always bear some kindred, though humble, relation to those of the original; and in the case before us, that relation approaches more nearly to equality than in any other that we know of. To exhibit in a different tongue any tolerable copy of the external graces of this drama, — the marvelous felicity of its language, and the ever-varying, ever-expressive rhythm of its verse, would demand the exercise of all that is rarest and most valuable in a poet's art; while the requisite familiarity with such thoughts and feelings as it embodies, could not exist but in conjunction with nearly all that is rarest and most valuable in a poet's genius. A person so qualified is much more likely to write tragedies of his own, than to translate those of others: and thus Faust, we are afraid, must ever continue in many respects a sealed book to the mere English reader.

The vigor and philosophical penetration of her thought come through most strikingly in her 1845 explication and defense of Emerson, a work that must have dazzled Poe even if he recoiled from New England Transcendentalism. After a wide-ranging discussion of Emerson's influences and innovations, Whitman closes with a new self-confidence:

In asserting that the fontal idea of Emerson's writings, as of the philosophy of the age, is absolute identity, I have not been careful to avert from them the imputation of Pantheism, Platonism, Spinozism, &c., &c. It matters little how we designate this manner of interpreting the phenomena of being, since it contains an inherent vitality which alike survives neglect and defies ridicule.

Superficial and timid men may decry these ideas as unintelligible or profane; but what rational ground of faith is left to him who doubts that God is over all and in all, that evil is but the absence and privation of good, and that all apparent evil must give way before a fuller development of the life that is within us? Only when the knowledge that the highest dwells ever with us becomes "a sweet enveloping thought," shall we be enabled to lead a single and trustful life, "to live in thoughts and act with energies that are immortal."

Sadly, her literary essays and letters, other than Edgar Poe and His Critics, remained unpublished in book form. Whitman left $1,000 in her estate for the publication of her prose works. Moulton (804) confirmed this in the London Athenaeum obituary. Baker found heavily annotated copies of the reviews prepared by Whitman and/or an amanuensis, so the manuscript was at hand. The prose volume never appeared.
Why did Whitman not publish her non-Poe criticism during her lifetime? The experience of Margaret Fuller might be helpful. Fuller, Whitman's friend and a one-time resident of Providence, had published her own critical essays on literature, Papers on Literature and Art, in 1846, but the timidity of her publishers, Wiley & Putnam, prevented this volume from containing the full range of her controversial political and social thinking. Judith Bean tells us "Her proposed collection was cut in half for publication, obscuring her political critique and the range of her work as a critic." The excisions included a review of Shelley's poetry, and Whitman could have anticipated a similar problem, since her own essays centered on Shelley, Byron and Goethe. A criminal conviction in England charging a publisher with blasphemy for reprinting Shelley's "Queen Mab" is one possible factor in this case of publisher's panic, and in 1844, two Edinburgh booksellers were imprisoned for selling works by Thomas Paine and Shelley.

Subjects: antebellum literature, Edgar Allan Poe, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Percy Shelley, Sarah Helen Whitman.

Sarah Helen Whitman, Poet and Literary Critic, Part 1

Sarah Helen Whitman, Poet and Literary Critic, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

This essay will appear in my forthcoming book collecting Sarah Helen Whitman's literary essays and selected poems. The footnote references and citations are not included here. Today's posting will be the part of my essay about Whitman's family history and early life. More installments will follow.

SARAH HELEN WHITMAN (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe’s posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916, the same year the only full-length biography of her, by Caroline Ticknor, appeared. The full text of Whitman’s critical writings, most published under pseudonyms, has only recently been correctly identified and attributed to her. A reassessment of Sarah Helen Whitman as poet places her squarely in the Romantic tradition; and, as critic, as a ground-breaking American defender of Shelley, Byron, Poe, Goethe, and Emerson. Whitman’s literary accomplishments were small but significant, given the limits placed upon her success by the social, gender and religious norms of the time and place in which she lived — Providence, Rhode Island in the antebellum decades, as well as in the 1870s, when she published little, but carried on an extensive literary correspondence and served as her city’s literary den mother.

Providence at Mid-Century
Providence had little significance in America’s literary and publishing history in the 19th century. Boston and New York had the lion’s share of literary fame and virtually all of the nation’s publishing firms. It is easy — but hazardous — to assume that female writers had virtually little chance of being published or recognized in this milieu, and even less if they hailed from places other than New York or Boston. 
A glance at published statistics help give us a better feel for the Providence in which Sarah Helen Whitman and her contemporaries lived and wrote. The demographics suggest a society with very distinct class and race boundaries, but still one in which women were often the heads of households. The Census of 1855 documented 8,260 households in the bustling seaport and mill town, of which 1,315 were headed by women (about one in six.) About one in five houses in the city consisted of family groupings or boarding houses in which there were no children. Of the population of 46,400, only 1,390 were listed as “colored,” and the town fathers were in a state of perpetual alarm about foreigners: 22 percent of the residents were recent immigrants from Ireland. 
Providence was a rich city. As the birthplace of America’s industrial revolution, it contained six cotton mills and four textile printing works. More than 5,000 vessels arrived that year in the port, and the city was connected to Boston, New York, and to other parts of New England with railroads, steamboats, stagecoaches and an “express steamer.” If anything, Providence was more interconnected with the other cities of the Northeast than it is today.
A writer living in Providence, however, could look forward to little local success. Although, at the time of the 1855 Census, there were four daily newspapers and six weeklies, and one semi-weekly, literary magazines did not thrive in the city. Albert Greene edited the short-lived title, The Literary Journal, and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts (1833-34), and efforts to establish another around 1840 were greeted with ridicule by locals.  Many local men attended Brown University, but that institution exerted little influence on the literary life of the city, and the leading families were notoriously conservative in taste. In the late 1870s, Whitman wrote this to John H. Ingram, her British correspondent: “Though called the wealthiest city of its size in the Union, it [i.e., Providence]  has no magazine or other literary periodical. ” 
According to the 1855 Census, the Brown University library had 26,000 books that year, and The Providence Athenaeum, a membership library, had 19,000 titles. The major vehicle of cultural transmission other than reading books and journals, was the extensive Lyceum movement, which brought authors and speakers on many topics to all the cities and large towns, where large audiences came to hear them lecture or read from their works.

Sarah Helen Whitman’s Family History
Just as it would be impossible to understand fully female writers like the Brontës (captives of class, geography, and familial stricture) without knowing their family history, we must look to Whitman’s genealogy and family history to grasp some of the social and gender pressures against which she had to strive as a writer. 
The following is mostly derived from the work of John Austin, published in 1889, the only known genealogy of her family. (A 1974 genealogy by Franklin Powers mostly repeats the facts gathered by Austin.) I include genealogy here, despite its slight tediousness, because the information is, first of all, rather difficult to obtain, and, second, because it puts the Power family and its fortunes squarely in the “Triangle Trade” era.
 The Powers were in Rhode Island almost from the beginning. There would be six Nicholas Powers in the family, the last of them Sarah Helen Whitman’s father.
The first Nicholas Power received a home lot in Providence in 1640. He was in trouble briefly with the British authorities for trying to purchase Indian lands in Warwick (RI) — expressly forbidden in the treaties with the local tribes —  and was “dismissed with an admonition.”
Nicholas died in 1657, leaving his widow, Jane Power, a daughter, Hope, and the next Nicholas Power. This Nicholas died in the catastrophic King Phillip’s War in 1675. He is not found in lists of combatants, but Austin explains: “He was killed in The Great Swamp Fight in Narragansett, by a shot from the command in which he was serving.”
His son, Captain Nicholas Power, was born in 1673. This Nicholas’s  second wife was Mercy Tillinghast, daughter of the ominously-named Rev. Pardon Tillinghast. Captain Power died in 1734. He had four slaves: Cuffy, Tony, Caesar, and Peg. 
The next Nicholas Power was a merchant and distiller. He married Anne Tillinghast, and died in Surinam in 1744. He sold his estate and distillery in Dutch Guiana to Captain John Brown in 1743. A family that owned slaves and­ a distillery would almost certainly have been involved in the notorious Triangle Trade of rum, slaves, and molasses.
In the next generation, we have another Captain Nicholas Power, a merchant and rope-maker. He was married to Rebecca Corey, and died January 26, 1808. The records indicate he freed a slave named “Prince” in 1781. 
The Nicholas who figures in our story is the sixth, known as Nicholas Power, Jr., born September 15, 1771. He married Anna Marsh, daughter of Daniel and Susanna (Wilkinson) Marsh on August 28, 1798 in Newport. He was a merchant, going by the title of Major for some part of his life. 
His mercantile life seemed to be land-locked: he formed a partnership as “Blodgett and Power” and opened a store near Providence’s Baptist Meeting House. The goods sold there began with fabrics, linens, threads (English, Indian and Scottish), then dry goods, hardware and groceries. From 1808 to 1810 the store ran auctions of goods. Then, in 1812, the partnership terminated. The war with the British almost certainly interrupted their trade.
The genealogy notes, cryptically: “He was absent from Providence much in later years.” It was a case or adventure and spousal desertion. Nicholas Power had gone to sea to build back his fortune, and was captured by the British during the War of 1812. He was not released until 1815, at which time he did not return to Providence. He was not seen or heard from in Rhode Island until around 1832 or 1833, when he made a sudden return to make amends and presumably resume his family life. 
Indications are that his nineteen-year “widow” was aghast at his return and threw him out of the house. He took up residence in a Providence hotel, and, to the dismay of all, spent the years until his death on April 28, 1844, in conspicuous dissolution. In 1842, he got around to placing a marker on his mother’s grave with an inscription lamenting the effect of his long absence on his parent’s well-being. (Rebecca Corey Power had died in 1825, and it is likely that she never knew what became of her son).
The Power children who, for a time, regarded their father as dead, were three sisters. Nicholas and Anna’s first child, Rebecca, was born in 1800. Sarah Helen Power, our and Poe’s “Helen,” was the second daughter, born in Providence on January 19, 1803. The house where she was born was that of her grandfather, Captain Nicholas Power, at the corner of South Main and Transit Streets. They lived in this house until her grandfather’s death in 1808. 
As Nicholas Power’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, the young family moved to a succession of houses and lodgings: a house at the corner of Snow and Westminster (now a parking lot in a depressed corner of downtown Providence); “the Grinnell House,” and “the Angell Tavern,” which had a garden leading to the water.
Sarah Helen’s younger sister, Susan Anna, was born in 1813. Hers was a dark-shadowed life: daughter of a merchant euphemistically “lost at sea,” she would mature into a willful manic-depressive, the classic mad relative without whom no New England house seemed complete. Since her mother was descended from the Wilkinson line that had produced the religious cult founder Jemima Wilkinson, there is the possibility of a genetic predisposition for bipolar disease if not schizophrenia. Jemima Wilkinson, declaring herself dead and resurrected, took the name “Public Universal Friend” and persuaded a number of people to forsake community and property and go off to live with her in upstate New York, where she preached to Indians, led a sexless commune, and promised (but) failed to walk on water.
After 1816, Mrs. Power, regarding herself as a widow, purchased the house at 76 Benefit Street (now No. 88) as a residence for herself and her daughters. It would be their home for more than four decades. The family was well able to live on the stocks and mortgages Mrs. Power had inherited from her mother, funds happily untouched by the impecunious Major Power.
Although Benefit Street was then fashionable, it had been built over grave plots.  The original settlers of Providence owned long, parallel strips of land starting at the river and running up over College Hill. Until 1710 or so, most families buried their dead on this hillside, and a lane that threaded among the family burial plots was ultimately straightened and paved to become Benefit Street. For some years, the street terminated with a gate, to ward off the denizens of the sinister North End.
With the creation of Benefit Street, the city fathers persuaded families to exhume and relocate their moldering ancestors to the North Burial Ground. A number of gloomy and derelict churchyards were also relocated there gradually, but St. John’s churchyard remained, its wall abutting the Powers’ rose garden. Like the Brontë sisters, the Power sisters’ vista always included a graveyard.
Although a proper Providence upbringing in those days was probably rather stifling to the intellect, Sarah Helen had a few escapes during her younger years: she visited relatives on Long Island, New York and briefly attended a Quaker school.10 Despite the Puritanical suspicions and prohibitions of her relatives, she developed an early passion for poetry. She mastered Latin and would later be sufficiently adept in languages to read and translate both German and French.
In 1821, Sarah Helen’s older sister Rebecca married William E. Staples. Two children were born to them in rapid succession. There is a Judge William Staples home just up the block from the Power house on Benefit Street, and this may be where the couple lived.
Despite her mother’s deep-set mistrust of the male gender, Sarah Helen, too, was wooed and won away from the Benefit Street home. In 1824, during her twenty-first year, she was engaged to attorney John Winslow Whitman. Urged to assume the proper responsibilities of womanhood, Helen was pressured to put aside her literary ambitions. As Ticknor tells it, “Mrs. Whitman’s taste for poetry was frowned upon by certain relatives...[She received] reproving letters, expressing the hope that she ‘did not read much poetry, as it was almost as pernicious as novel-reading’.”
Mr. Whitman seemed a good match. He was not one of those lawyers whom Shakespeare would have us kill. The third son of Massachusetts Judge Kilborne Whitman, he graduated from Brown University in 1818. He started a law practice in Boston, and practiced later in Barnstable.
During their long engagement, in 1825, Sarah Helen’s grandmother, Rebecca Corey Power, died.
Sorrow struck again that year when Sarah Helen’s older sister Rebecca died on September 14th. She had been married only four years, and then her two children, according to the Power family records, “died young.” Was her death childbirth-related, or did a contagion such as tuberculosis (”the galloping consumption”) sweep through the Staples home, taking the young mother and then the children? This tragedy must have made a deep impression on the poetical Sarah Helen, who would have followed four coffins to the North Burial Ground in swift succession.
Sarah Helen’s respectably-delayed marriage took place in 1828, with a Long Island wedding held on July 10th at the home of Sarah Helen’s uncle, Cornelius Bogert. A four-year engagement may seem excessive by today’s standards, but Mr. Whitman may also have needed time to establish his law practice and set up a suitable home.
John Whitman turned out to have a creative side, too. It is interesting to note that Mrs. Whitman’s biographers, and most of Poe’s, seem to know her husband only by his profession. I was startled to discover, during an Internet search, that John Winslow Whitman had another persona altogether: he seems to have had some involvement with the Boston-based magazine, The Ladies’ Album. He was also, briefly, partner in a weekly Boston newspaper titled The Times. 
The Ladies’ Album published some of Whitman’s poems, under the name “Helen.” Ticknor, incorrectly, writes that Whitman’s first published poem was in that journal in 1829, a poem titled, “Retrospection.” Actually, Whitman published two poems there in 1828, the year of her marriage. It is telling that her second published poem, “To the Spirit of Poetry,” is a direct refutation of the religious admonitions against poetry that her family and friends had pressed upon her, as these lines reveal:

Thou art religion, virtue, faith;
Through thee the martyr conquers death;
Thy voice, like solemn music leads
To godlike thoughts, and glorious deeds.
Borne upwards on thy radiant wings,
Man’s soaring spirit heavenward springs,
And burst the ignoble chains that bind
To earth’s dull dross the immortal mind.

To thee alone, the power is given,
To render earth a present heaven:
Oh! may thine influence elevate
My soul above the ills of date:
May thy pure present ne’er depart,
But, treasured deep within my heart,
There may the spirit ever be,
A beauty, and a mystery.14

Through her husband’s Boston affiliations, she met and came to know the circle of Transcendentalists, and started writing and publishing essays on Goethe, Shelley and Emerson. Articles and poems in other magazines soon followed. Mrs. Whitman was clearly not going to vanish into the draperies, and she was fortunate to have a literary ally in her husband.
A few years later, a new kind of turmoil roiled the family. Sometime between 1831 and 1832, Sarah Helen’s mother lost the right to wear her widow’s bonnet, with the sudden reappearance of the wandering Nicholas Power. Did the Major return in a remorseful state, wanting to make amends and restore his family’s fortune? Or was he ruined again, returning to old haunts to nibble away at his wife’s property? Another legend has it that he had a second wife and family in the Carolinas, and had now abandoned them, too.
Sarah Helen, who had cherished a somewhat heroic image of her father, was crushed — and one can only imagine the effect of all this on the younger sister. 
Like her errant father, Sarah Helen’s husband was not destined for commercial success. Money vanished into failed inventions, and several business ventures went belly-up. Mr. Whitman even appears to have gone to jail for a few months in a legal upset involving a bad loan — not a happy career turn for a young attorney. His name also appears as co-author of a series of booklets that appear to be transcripts of controversial Boston lawsuits, including one libel suit that involved a clergyman.
Worse yet, John Whitman also turned out to have a frail constitution. He caught colds frequently, and one of them, contracted in 1833, lingered and worsened into a total collapse and sudden death.  There is a mystery here, and much more needs to be learned about Mr. Whitman. Ticknor disposes of Mrs. Whitman’s youth and marriage in a mere 13 pages, and Mrs. Whitman pulls a veil of silence over the subject for the rest of her life. Husband and wife were clearly partners in the literary life they found in Boston, and one can only assume that inordinate family pressures back in Providence created the virtual cover-up that ensued.
In 1833, then, Sarah Helen Whitman found herself a widow after only five years of marriage. She donned the official “widow’s bonnet” and moved back in with her mother and younger sister on Benefit Street. Her defense of Shelley, published in Providence’s first and only literary journal early in 1834, bore the Roman-Etruscan pseudonym of “Egeria.”
Although she would resume the role of dutiful daughter, Sarah Helen was now a published literary figure in her own right, confident in her worth and powers, and acquainted with many of the best minds of New England.

SUBJECTS: Edgar Allan Poe, Providence, Rhode Island, Sarah Helen Whitman.

With Poe on Morton Street Pier

One gloomy autumn night, I sat with my hand-scribbled poetry journals on Manhattan's Morton Street Pier. I had $4.50 to my name. It turns out that this was the pier where Edgar Allan Poe first landed in his New York adventure, which ended in lodgings nearby in Greenwich Village, and then near-starvation in the Bronx. The poem I wrote has been revised several times. Poets read on the piers on Sundays; at night, lonely men trysted there; you could sit alone, a solitary poet, watching the blinking lights on the Hudson, the night chill rising around you. The river lapped at the pier, and wanted you to hurl yourself in and end it all.

Sunset at the Manhattan piers: gray-black,

the iron-cloaked sky splays vortices of red

into the Hudson’s unreflecting flow.

Blown west and out by a colorless breeze,

the candle of life falls guttering down

into a carmine fringe above oil tanks,

a warehoused cloud of umber afterglow,

hugging the scabrous shore of New Jersey,

a greedy smoker enveloped in soot.

To think that Poe and his consumptive Muse

stood here in April, Eighteen Forty-Four,

his hopes not dashed by a rainy Sunday —

an editor thrice, undone, now derelict,

author of some six and sixty stories,

his fortune four dollars and fifty cents.

Did he envision his ruin, and ours?

Did his Eureka-seeking consciousness

see rotted piers, blackened with creosote?

Did rain and wind wash clean the Hudson’s face,

or was it already an eel-clogged flux

when he came down the shuddering gangplank?

Who greeted him? This feral, arched-back cat,

fish-bone and rat-tail lord of the landing?

Did he foresee the leather’d lonely wraiths

who’d come to the abandoned wharf one day

in a clank-chain unconscious parody

of drugged and dungeon-doomed Fortunato

and his captor and master Montresor?

He gazed through rain and mist at steeple tops,

warehouse and shop and rooming house — to him

our blackened brickwork was El Dorado.

He needed only his ink to conquer

the world of Broadway with his raven quills —

Gotham would pay him, and handsomely, too!

Did the lapping waters deceive him thus —

did no blast of thunder peal to warn him

that this was a place of rot and rancor?

The city shrugs at the absolute tide.

I am here with all my poems. I, too,

have only four dollars and fifty cents

until tomorrow’s tedium pays me

brass coins for passionless hours of typing.

I am entranced as the toxic river

creeps up the concrete quay, inviting me,

a brackish editor hungry for verse,

an opiate and an end to breathing.

Beneath the silted piles, the striped bass spawn,

welfare fish in their unlit tenements.

A burst of neon comes on behind me,

blinks on the gray hull of an anchored ship —

green to red to blue light, flashback of fire

from window glaze, blinking a palindrome

into this teeming, illiterate Styx.

Empire State’s cool spire, clean as a snow-cap,

thrusts up its self-illuminated glory;

southward, there’s Liberty, pistachio

and paranoid in her sleepless sunbeams,

interrogated nightly, not confessing.

It is not too dark to spy one sailboat,

pass by swiftly, lampless, veering westward;

one black-winged gull descending to water,

its quills immersed in the neon mirror.

Now it is dark. Now every shadow here

must warily watch for other shadows

(some come to touch, to be touched, but others —)

I stay until the sea chill shrivels me,

past the endurance of parting lovers,

beyond the feral patience of the cat,

until all life on legs has crept away.

Still, I am not alone. The heavy books

I clasp together, mine and Edgar Poe’s,

form a dissoluble bond between us.

Poe stood here and made a sunset midnight.

Poe cast his raven eyes into this flow

and uttered rhymes and oaths and promises.

One night, the river spurned his suicide.

One night, the river was black with tresses,

red with heart’s blood, pearled with Virginia’s eyes,

taking her under, casting him ashore.

One night, he heard an ululating sob

as the river whispered the secret name

by which its forgetful god shall know him,

his name in glory on the earth’s last day.

[Minor revisions May 3, 2019)