October Is Coming! (Anniversarius 16)

 

by Brett Rutherford

1

Listen! There is a sudden pause
between my words and the surrounding
silences: no breeze, no hum
of street lamps, no tread of tire —
even the birds have missed a beat.
It is the first self-conscious tinge
of maple leaf red, the first
night-chill of the season.
It is the caesura of equinox —
it whispers a prophecy:
October is coming.

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from the things that bind you.
You will follow a strange wind northward.
You will tread the edge of glaciers
  and blush with the iron tinge of destiny.
You will come to earth in a strange place
where you will be known as a leaf from an alien tree
    and be feared for it,
where you will seek the tongue-touch of another
    rasping exile — and find it.

Not for you the comfort of old trees,
    old branches, old roots — 
now at last the buoyant freedom of the nearly
    weightless,
the eyrie-view above pine-tops, eddied above
    rain troughs and lightning rods,
bird-free,

drifting ghostlike and invisible on graveyard mound,
grazing the cheeks of grievers, pausing
    upon the naked backs of lovers,
tracing the mysterious barricades between 
    the kingdoms of strays,
colliding with children in their chaotic play — 

Hearing at night with brittle ears the plaintive sea,
    the wearing away of shoreline,
the woeful throb of the requiem of whales,
the madrigal of feeding gulls, the thrust beat
    of the albatross in its pinioned flight,
the hideous slurring of squids,
the inexorable gnashing of the machinery of sharks —

Mute, passive, dumb as a dead leaf 
    you shall hear them all —

You shall move among the avalanche of first snow,
amazed at the shattering of perfect ice,
its joyous crystalline tone as it falls,
the utterly new dimension of its remaining,
endlessly crushed and compacted and moved,
singed to a fog and sublimed away
as if it had never been, while you
still lay like an old coat in a hamper —
grayer, crisper, more decrepit than ever.

And you suspect your lingering immortality —
a leaf, a brittle parchment that no one can read,
a shard, a skeleton of cellulose,
a thread, a string, a lichen roost, a bird-nest lining,
a witness of ever-advancing decay and assimilation,
by becoming nothing, becoming everything.

2

Yet this is such an insubstantial fate.
I can think of it now in the context 
    of this human frame,
hands to write it, lips to speak it
    as transcendental prophecy.
Not only the dead but the living
can pass to this realm beyond matter.
All who have lived or ever will are there already
but only one in a thousand suspects it.

Why, then, do I crave for touching,
for arm-enfolding tenderness on winter nights?
Why do I ache for the line of a slender neck,
a moist surrender, the firmness of flesh,
the drumbeat sonnet of another’s heart
loud in my ears, the harmony
of pacing my breath to another’s breath,
falling limbs entwined into a trusting sleep, 
or waking first and thanking the gods
for this wall of life between me and uncertainty?

I do not know, except that love
is the fluid of the Muses,
the enhancer of meaning, chariot of purpose,
that one plus one is not two
    but infinity,

that entropy, this modern malaise
    of the wasting leaf
is the false side of the coin of nature —
base metal welded to hidden gold.

3

Listen! October is coming!

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from your ease and comfort
by the one who loves you. You will follow
a strange wind northward, not as surrender
to an autumn urge, but as a warrior
for Spring. Glaciers will shudder back
at the green fringe of your beard. Your smile
will make strangers trust you, ask to know
what manner of tree sends youthful emigrants —
even the dry-leaf exiles will stir at your arrival.

You shall not pass the winter in random flight,
    nor cling to the steeples and chimney-tops.

Not for you the graveyard and its lying testaments,
not for you the vicarious touching of lovers and losers —

All shall know you and say of you:
Here is the one who loves and risks all.
You shall not heed the devious sea
and the night-call of Neptune’s ravenous hosts.
The owl, the raven, the whippoorwill,
    the squirrel, the cat, the sparrow
shall teach you the ways of their defiance of season,
their hidden thrust for continuance.

Boisterous, active, strident as a new tree
    you shall take root again,
defying the shadow master of winter,
    the devil of frost,
refusing to yield one leaf to the ache-long nights.

And you rejoice in your numbered mortality,
in love, at risk of happiness for a single embrace,
at risk of loss and denial, too —
but knowing it and caring not.

A love, an eye, a heart, a hand,
a witness to ever advancing hope,
one to the power of infinity —
one plus a fraction, approaching,
but never reaching, duality.

4

Which shall it be? This orient autumn
or this renascent spring? This painless slide
into the lush oblivion of ash, or wing beat
in Daedalus flight to a promised star?

I only know that October is coming.
It will not be like any other October.

 — September 1985, Providence, RI

Moving to Providence, 1985

by Brett Rutherford

This is Providence when it was still rather a hell-hole, but a very cheap place for writers to live. I moved there with my Siamese cat in 1985 and had eleven rooms in a Victorian house, for $450 a month. The unofficial state motto was "Mobsters and Lobsters" and the natives were exceedingly unfriendly. I lived there three years before I ever set foot in another person's house. I just found these poetic journal entries describing how awful it was, or seemed to be. For inexplicable reasons, I would spend almost half of my adult years in New England.

I have moved to Providence,

a writer’s paradise of low rents and large spaces.

The natives speak a dialect of broken English

conjugated with expletives. I have never heard

so many Fs and mother-F’s on a city bus.

They drive outdated cars, wide as bombers,

paint-scraped and dented,

leprous with rust-spot camouflage

turn corners with daring and macho screeches,

black trails of tires at every corner.

Boys at the corner loiter for cars, hand men
those little bags of powder they crave
as they furtively leave the off-ramp
for our disreputable neighborhood.
That the bags are full of baking powder
they will only learn later as even boys
know well the rules of cheat and sharp trading.

Eight of ten voters are Catholic,
virgins in little inverted bath-tubs adorn
the house fronts of the treeless side streets.
An old man tells me, “No trees. No birds.
No squirrels. No nuts. No leaves to rake.”

The heads of state and their families

control unmeasured tracts of property.

The governor’s name and picture adorn

each monolith and highway ramp.
Each sign must include “His Excellency”
before the current felon’s proper name.

The marble capitol is large enough

     to detain, if necessary,

     the entire electorate.

Well-known gangsters reside discreetly,

unperturbed by warrants or searches.
One tip-toes past the vending machine
storefront, the funeral home, the house
of the respected grandmother “of that name.”

Free enterprise is encouraged, narcotically.

Homes of the Anglo-rich are frequently burgled.

On a hill, the prestigious University

trains the sons of the rich

to assume their places of power.

The city is full of history, devoid of culture.

It drove out Poe, and tolerated Lovecraft
while watching him slant and starve.

It imports insults and toxic waste,

exports the simulacrum of itself:

cobblestones and shuttlecocks,

andirons and lightning rods and tassled shawls,

a horse, a red hen, a barrel of molasses

fresh from the Triangle trade.

The natives are known for aloofness,

their way of sidestepping foreigners.

Only family are invited to dinner.

Young men leave the state

to find a girl who isn't a cousin.

One must be introduced to a prostitute.

Despite all this, the artists come here.

Cheap is cheap. Besides, where else

can you find a Third World Country

without leaving New England?

Vanderbeck's Poem About Rhode Island Slime Mold

The following poem may be the only poem ever written about slime mold — if not the only, it is certainly the best. A few words of explanation should precede any reading of this remarkable "shaggy dog" poem. Rhode Island plays host to a large slime mold called fuligo, which grows around the roots and trunks of dead or dying trees. Although fuligo is believed to be stationary, there are other slime molds which display remarkable behavior: some can actually move from one place to another in quest of nourishment; others are capable of breaking up into thousands of smaller, mobile organisms, which can later rejoin to re-form the original slime mold. Fuligo is attractive in appearance at first, looking ever so much like a large loaf of French bread. Later, it bursts open, revealing yellow and purple patches, quite appalling. Pieter and I are both fascinated by this very Lovecraftian organism. Pieter's poem also plays on the re-division of life into three families: plants, fungi and animals. Some people resist this new classification, since they are convinced that anything alive must be either plant or animal. Biologists have now decided that fungi are so very, very different that they cannot be called plants at all. And slime molds may be something else yet again. Without further ado, here is Pieter's slime mold opus:

OF THE SAME MOLD

He sleeps uneasily —
really not at all.
One thing is on his mind.
It turns over and over.
He turns over and over.
He cannot get it off his mind.
He cannot go to sleep.
He must not.
Once again,
he opens his eyes.
It is still dark.
He looks at the clock.
It is three.
Only three.
He looks out the window
It is not there.
It was there.
He is worried.
He gets up,
throws back the covers,
slips on the slippers,
goes downstairs,
goes outside.

Then he sees it.
It is still there.
But it is not on the tree.
It has moved.
It is at the beginning of his front walk,
about to turn the right angle.
He calculates.
Five hours, five feet.
He can get in a night.
Nothing can happen.
He goes back in.
He must get to sleep.
This cannot go on.

Who would think?
What looks like an omelette turned inside-out,
yellow, white, brown , grey,
amorphous and variegated,
defying any term of description —
that.
Who would think?

He goes back in.
He must sleep.
The door is closed.
That will help.
He is on the second floor.
That is better.
His bedroom door is closed.
If necessary, he can stuff old undershirts beneath it.
Not now.
Not tonight.
He is sure.
The lights go out.
The night is dark.
Dawn. will be approaching,
but for now,
the stars are full out.

It turns.
The walk awaits.
The porch steps.
The porch.
The front door.
The others know.
The ones inside.
They await the joining,
the ones in the walls,
the basement,
the attic,
the contingent from the garage,
they all know.
They await.
Moving quickly now,
(now that he is not up to measure it,)
it slides up the rough walk,
picking up its trail behind it.
It needs every one.
It crosses the cracks.
There is a twig.
It consumes it.
Pemmican.
Trail food,
No stopping on the campaign.

They are gathering.
They know the way under the door.
The garage contingent has entered the back.
They will meet at the stairs.
It will require cantilevering.
No problem.
The threshold has been crossed.
The rug is being attempted.
It is rough,
but it contains a cornucopia of dust mites, and their mites.
Snacks along the trail.
It will leave a swath.

Along the way it encounters various molds.
All colors.
All shapes.
But stationary.
The lower ones.
What to call them?
There is a name,
but it is not polite.
It eats them and goes on.
That’s evolution.
As it gains mass, it accelerates.
They are nearly all gathered by the stairway.
The basement contingent is eating too much along the way.
The night is going fast.
They do not want to put this off for another night.
This was to be the night.
There are other houses.
The city is big.
They can be big too.
It.
Whatever.

 

He snores.
It echoes down the stairway.
He sleeps fitfully.
He is having dreams.
Let him have his dreams.
No more measuring.
He won’t need measuring.
What an empire will be started.
It can go in all directions.
It is only a matter of yards or meters.
A ladder has been established.
The stairway is full of mites.
It is that white carpeted tread,
Valley of Shenandoah,
They’ll, it’ll, whatever’ll, be there in good shape.
One cannot live by tree bark alone.
One, many , whatever.

He snores.
His dreams are over.
The crack beneath the bedroom door is large.
The others are already in there.
They came up through the hot-air register grate,
joined by the ones from the attic.
What a bunch they are.
It is. Whatever.
Why express a thing that changes shape?
It will soon.
It may not get through the door.
It will not need to.
It will be the house.

Only feet now.
Not even yards.
The bed clothes are hanging down.
On all sides they are touching the floor.
They can use Greco-Roman tactlcs.
Classical maneuver.
Right by the book.

He is not snoring now.
He is in deep sleep.
The sky turns slaty blue out the window.
They, it, forms a ring.
A yellow ring.
Brown and grey join white.
Their lack of form is its strength.
No shape, no confrontation.
No consistency, no injury.
No firm entityship, no name.
But one.
They have been called it.
But the terms are not agreed upon.
Is it, they, a plant , an animal, both, neither?
What does it matter?
It, they, gather, gathers.
E Pluribus Unum, E Unibus Plurum.
Soon the house, and then the street,
the so-called neighborhood.
Neighborhood, indeed.

He snorts his last.
His arm hangs over the side.
They will not modify its tactics.
The classical way turns best.
Gather all.
Wait for the strike.
The ascent.
The occupation.
Then they, it, and he will be no different.
There will be reconciliation.
The marriage of Fuligo.

Water Sprite (Providence)

Who are you, Water Sprite of the Seekonk? Who made you, this full moon night of lilacs, like spring itself a-burst, made you leap from the bulrushes of the park lagoon, your bare shoulders wet from the limpid waters, your long hair sun-gold (bleached white in lunary light, but sun-gold nonetheless!)?

Who made you so irresistibly beautiful. your visage the sculpted dream of surrender, your eyes the blue of hyacinth, of lapus lazuli?

As I rode by on my bicycle at midnight, who made you run naked to greet me, then leap into a clutch of chameleon trees?

Who made your fleeing soundless, as your bare feet sought stealth of moss?

Who, as I followed, bicycle laid flat on the clover grass and forgotten, made shards of you dissolve, in dapple of moonlight, in fall of blossom, uncurling fern and peeping mushroom?

Who made your soft voice beckon me, leading me deeper in woods. Circling, to come at you above and behind the lagoon edge, I came confounded to a rock at the other edge of the pool?

Was it your voice that whispered, as ripples subsided from a sinking point:

Follow me if you dare. I can be yours: mad angel of your destiny. Chase me forever – but I will always elude you — always escape to the other surface of water, of mirrors. Yours and not yours at the same moment, I will run through your hands like mercury.

I wait. Nothing rises to the surface to breathe. No bubble breaks the glass sheen of mirrored water. The night sky no longer wavers. The moon above, and the moon reflected, are equally still.

I ride home slowly, inhale the languor of cherry, the braggart bloom of magnolia, the luxury of lilacs. Who could resist this moon, this Dionysian spring? It draws us, real and unreal, mortal and mythical, quickens the water to form you, draws your spirit to my substance, my solitude to your incompleteness.

Were you some runaway, an escapee from the nearby asylum? A teen boy in moon-madness, seized by a sudden urge to plunge naked into the willow-fringed water? Or were you truly spectral, Ariel’s cousin?

Shall I return to find you some other spring first-night? Or shall you seek me out, coalescing from rainstorm? Will you press through my window-screen, cooling my night-heat with your smooth pale skin? Will you caress me with the patient ardor of ocean, the murmur of brooks in my ear? Will I taste dew on your lips?  And will you one day, as we stand at lake’s edge, pull me downward, arms strong as river currents?

Weeks pass. I keep seeing you in others, but others are not you. No one possesses the lilac scent of your impossible hair. No sight matches the clear blue window of your eyes above me.

To the Arc of the Sublime (Anniversarius 27)

In nights beneath the stars,
    sometimes alone — sometimes
    with one I loved
         (in futile or secret urgency) —
I have outwaited
    the rise and fall of Scorpio,
         arc of its tail
              stinging the treetops.
I have traced the inconstant moon,
    the indecisive Venus;
    feel more assured
by the long, slow haul of Jupiter,
the patient tread of Pluto
    (whom they pursue
         in their frigid outer orbits
I cannot guess)

Such solitude,
    millennia between
         the fly-bys of comets,
perhaps is why
    they need so many moons,
why rings of ice
    encircle them like loyal cats.
It is lonely in space,
    far out
where the sun is merely
    a star among stars.

It is lonely in autumn.
    I sit in midnight woods.
A trio of raccoons, foraging,
    come up to me,
black mask eyes of the young ones
interrogating the first cold night,
    the unaccustomed noisiness
         of bone-rattle maple leaf
              beneath their paws.

How can I tell them
    these trees will soon be skeletons,
    the pond as hard as glass,
    the nut and berry harvest over?
These two are young —
    they would not believe me.
Their mother rears up protectively,
    smells me,    scents out
    the panic among the saplings,
    the smell of rust and tannin.

We share a long stillness,
    a moment when consciousness 
    is not a passive agency.
Our sight invades the countryside,
    embracing everything —
    sleepers in beds in a concrete tower-
    earthworms entwining in humus rot —
goes up and out through the limpid sky,
    streaming past moon —
         — moon’s lava’d seas —
out, out, to the arc of the sublime,
    tracing the edge of great Antares,
leaping to other galaxies unafraid.


(Let space expand as though the worlds
    still feared their neighbors!
Let miser stars implode,
    their dwarf hearts shriveling
         to cores of iron!)
We are the scourge of entropy.
    We sing the one great note
         through which new being
              comes out of nothingness.

Does it have meaning,
    this seed-shagged planet
        alive with eyes?
Is earth the crucible,
    sandbox of angry gods,
or is it the eye of all eyes,
    ear of all ears,
the nerve through which the universe
    acquires self-knowledge?

But these are weighty thoughts 
    for man and mammal!
We are but blood and minerals,
    upright for an instant,
    conscious for but a moment,
    a grainfall of cosmic hourglass.
Yet I am not ephemeral:
    I freeze time,
         relive moments
              chronicle the centuries
    re-speak Shakespeare,
         beat out the staves of Mozart,
              read the same books
              my forebears knew
         make of old words
              my wordy pyramid.


I am the one
    snapping the pictures of solar systems,
    sending myself
         an outside-in self-portrait.
I send my name and signature
    on bottles spinning past Uranus.
I am the one who asks, Is it worth it?
I who hear the X-ray wind reply, It is!
I am the one who would not stay in caves,
    I was discontent in the treetops.
I wanted to be bird and whale and rocket.

Ever, o ever more mortal now —
     — friends falling away like withered leaves —
still I find joy in this subliminal shrine of autumn.
My hand is full of fossil shells
    picked up from the lake shore rubble,
scallops enduring with the same rock faith
    (implicit minimum vocabulary):
I live, and the increase of my consciousness
    is the span of my life.


 — February 19, 1991, Providence, RI

The Place of Attics

What they say about New England and all the people confined to attics is really true. It is really true.

THE PLACE OF ATTICS

by Brett Rutherford

Hard-rock New England
is a world of attic-dwellers:
spinsters and hermits,
bloodlines of schizophrenia,
tight-shut clapboards,
paint-peeled shutters,
a baleful eye behind
a soiled lace curtain.

Who passed the picket-fence
and glanced into the parlor
as Lizzie Borden
wiped clean the ax-edge,
returned to her bed
with a migraine?

Who idled in Salem
at the old spice shop
as Hester Prynne,
a half-moon frowning
upon her scarlet letter
took basket to market,
and who, averting her gaze,
passed by what locked door
to eavesdrop on Arthur Dimmesdale
self-flogging, his blood beads
spelling the eternal A?
In Adams Fall, We Sinnèd All.

What batly belfry, bell-less
shadowed the wily minister
and his impish daughters,
as they bent pins for the witch-trial —
the spitting pins
they plan to blame on the innocent hag
whose farm and lands they covet?

From what high steeples
does what avenger look down
as the merchant’s gold plate,
the fine furnishings,
the pastoral landscapes,
swell three floors high,
on gold from selling
rum to the Negroes,
molasses to the distillers,
slaves to the sugar planters? 

What starry owl repines
beneath a rotting gable
to survey with unblinking eye
as the miser millionaire
shuffles by, slow-paced
in phlegmy wheeze,
walking a mile in old shoes
to find the cheapest chowder?

Does any widow’s watch
stand guard at night
as trucks roll by,
as slit-eyed criminals
dump toxic waste
behind the schoolyard,
or a barge tips oily sludge
into the harbor?

Up on that mansard height
of City Hall, does even one
of those peregrine falcons
take count of a dollar’s passage
from crack-smoke car-seat 
to bicycle boy,
to the convenience store,
to basement warehouse,
to the unseen drug lord? 

No Athens, Providence:
madhouse-state capital. 
The roads are blocked. 
Hotel rooms lock from the outside in. 
Thieves smirk on the doorsteps; 
they boast of useless crimes, 
confess to hasty interments. 
A tree-squirrel once heard one say
to his baseball-capped brother:  
“I’m just going to rob and rob
      until someone stops me.”

Nothing on high does anything.
The steeples jab Heaven’s eye.
Monotonous, the bells ring on.
Men climb church walls on moonless nights
to steal the lightning rods,
the copper strips from roof to ground.
They’d scrape the gold-leaf halos
from off the painted saints if they could.
The sombre, brown, cathedral ceiling
looks like a never-cleaned toilet bowl.
Hordes hunch in rain each spring,
kneel in a shrine for guidance,
while priests’ hands inch unseen
toward the choirboys’ backsides.
Our Lady among the crawling rats,
tear-streaked in verdigris,
blesses all in diapason tone.

My neighbor, from rooftop eyrie
shouts out from his blackened windows:
“You’re all going to die! All of you!
You’re all going to die.” Another night:
“I want a brain! I want a brain!”
he howls till squad cars’ arrival,
then hurls his television to shards
on the sidewalk below.

On just my block, one attic dweller,
a landlady’s schizophrenic son, hacks
endlessly in smoker’s cough, tubercular;
another houses twin infants mongoloid;
another, a white-haired granny who thrusts
her head out, Medusa locks and all,
to scream at any long-haired man who passes.

I did not live in an attic there, the gods
be thanked, but I wrote in one.

[Revised and expanded May 2019]

SUBJECTS: attics, New England, Rhode Island, Hester Prynne, Lizzie Borden, Providence, insanity, Salem

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 3

Sarah Helen Whitman As Poet And Critic, Part 3

by Brett Rutherford

Her Published Criticism

Poe's most recent biographer, Kenneth Silverman, was one of the first scholars to acknowledge that Helen was a formidable intellectual match for Poe. Unlike the mostly dilettante female poets Poe knew in New York, Silverman observes, "Sarah Helen Whitman was a woman with sophisticated philosophical and literary interests — after her friend Margaret Fuller, perhaps the leading female literary critic in America" (Silverman 347).
Although she had no opportunity for formal education other than a brief period at a Quaker school on Long Island, Whitman was a well-read classicist, and her critical articles put her squarely in the league of the Harvard-trained Boston writers and reviewers. She knew Virgil and other Latin authors. She read Shelley and the Romantics, and she translated German supernatural ballads, as well as Goethe, and, from the French, Victor Hugo. Her many correspondents included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stephane Mallarmé and other British and continental writers, as well as domestic writers and editors.
Noelle Baker, who prepared the first critical edition of Whitman's critical articles, characterizes her subject thus: "[S]he should be studied with such established critics as William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge and Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman explicates transcontinental idealism within the context of American considerations of immorality, pre-Darwinian evolution theory, German Naturphilosophen, and the occult in her essays on Emerson, Alcott, Goethe, Shelley and Poe. She argued that these writers utilize literature, science and philosophy to recover individual spirituality in a time of inadequate traditional theology and doctrinal malaise. Almost invariably, Whitman defends her subjects from American critics who consider the byproducts of this secular faith irreligious or immoral" (Baker, iii).
Susan P. Conrad says that Whitman's essays "rank with those of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody as the most important literary criticism produced by women — and men — in the period [1830-1860]" (Conrad, 223).
Choosing "Break every bond" as her motto (Baker 12), Whitman intentionally chose some of the most controversial literary figures to write about. She defended Shelley's atheism, refused to throw out Byron's poetry even if he did have an affair with his half-sister, and championed the writing of Goethe even if Werther and Faust did seem to approve of seduction, vice, suicide, and bargains with the Devil. As Baker is quick to note, Whitman beat a trail-blazing path to Goethe's writing: "Whitman read German, and with Margaret Fuller produced the only American women's published analyses of German language and literature at a time when even most male critics read the Germans through Coleridge and Carlyle" (Baker, 3).
In her last years, Mrs. Whitman admired Swinburne's poetry, and in her correspondence with Mallarmé she offered the French poet advice on translating "The Raven" (Lloyd 103). She became "one of the most important mediators Mallarmé found between himself and Poe" (Lloyd 104). The French poet advised Whitman on her own translation of his "Tomb of Edgar Poe" (Ticknor 268-270).
Baker calls Whitman's criticism "a minor woman writer's programmatic attempt to publish a deviant, male-gendered authorial identity," but Baker seems to make too much of Whitman's pseudonymous publications. Her somewhat labored commentary about Whitman's attempts to "pass" as a male critic seem off the mark to me on three counts: first, criticism of the period tended to be highly intellectualized and almost genderless. Critics did not write as men or as women but as critics. Second, two of Whitman's key essays were published with the female pseudonym "Egeria," and most of Whitman's articles were circulated in manuscript among the literati and her identity was well known.
The name "Egeria" comes from Roman history. This is the name given to the prophetess (or, some say, consort) of the Roman king Numa Pompilius, the great Roman lawgiver. Since Whitman was the wife of a young Boston lawyer at the time, "Egeria" was a suitable name for the wife and muse of a young man who might hope some day to be a judge or lawmaker. Both articles by-lined "Egeria" appeared early in her widowhood, and this may have added to her reticence.
This raises yet again the question of the extent to which Whitman's literary fame was stifled or limited by her gender. The male writers and editors who encountered Whitman, from the Harvard circle, the Transcendentalist circle, and from New York, implored her to submit articles and poems for publication. According to Baker, Orestes Bronson "offered her an equal share in the profits of his Boston Quarterly Review if she would contribute an article to each number."
The discouragement that Whitman received from family and Providence society seems to have been mostly of female origin. In fact, men are not mentioned much at all in the family history, except when a male is required for legal purposes, such as arranging property transfers. Ticknor, Whitman's first biographer, alludes to family pressures that discouraged Whitman in her early years. Two of the original documents are at the John Hay library at Brown University — two letters from an older cousin who had been a "second mother" to Whitman during her stays on Long Island. Here we can see, first-hand, the kind of admonishment that Whitman had to endure in her teens, precisely when her passion for poetry was reaching its apex:

I am still as much your mother as ever. How do your studies come on? Do you go to school or not? if not, I hope that you study at home. Do not neglect this important facet of your life. It is now the springtime with you, my dear, and recollect that if you attend more to its enjoyments than its cares; if intent only on its flowers and birds, its fragrance and its harmony, you neglect the toilsome preparation and … your summer will be without fruit and your winter dreary indeed.
Of this be certain, that the only earthly foundation for permanent satisfaction is the utilization of the intellectual and moral faculties. Devote yourself, in the first place, to God, read his book, pray unto him and endeavor to increase in his knowledge. This, my child, is the only safe refuge in affliction, the only firm support in prosperity as well as in adversity, the only course of temporal as well as eternal happiness.
In the next place, cultivate a taste for solid and substantial knowledge; this only will tend to make you the sort of character I wish you to be. Poetry and novels, delightful as they may be to a youthful mind, are not only nugatory, they are not only void of all useful instruction, but they positively contaminate, and they occupy the time that ought to be devoted to better things (Marsh, Ms 204, HA1388).

Two months later, Whitman's cousin reinforces her argument in another letter:

I hear from your own account that you read too much poetry, dear Sarah. Indulged in to excess it becomes almost if not quite as pernicious as novels. Any kind of reading which tends to excite the fancy and raise up visions of romantic feelings unknown to this world is dangerous, except occasionally as a relaxation (Marsh, MS 204, HA1387).

This is probably the kind of regurgitated sermonizing that young Sarah Helen would have heard from her mother and the social circle of genteel old families into which she was born. Rebellion had its price, but the young poet was clearly drawn to the rebels' side. She exulted when her father, in his seventies, took up arms in the Dorr War and was briefly jailed. She chose a "conventional" husband, but her mother may not have known that John Winslow Whitman was actually a freethinker who had scandalized his class at Brown by giving a commencement address titled "The Atheist."

-- to be continued --

SUBJECTS: antebellum literature, Providence, Sarah Helen Whitman

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

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.