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
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 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
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
