When Aunt Maria\u2019s mother died her pension was also buried and that night Edgar Allan Poe raged to dig it up.\u00a0 Aunty and Virginia guided him into bed from which he two days later arose dazed but determined to be responsible.\u00a0 Aunty had become his real mother and Virginia, though only age thirteen, was already more vital than any cousin since antiquity.\u00a0 Weak souls all, they would sustain each other in a foreboding world, if Poe could support them.\u00a0 How could he not?\u00a0 Sincerity and intelligence he possessed as much as any man.\u00a0 Of course he could care for his new family.\u00a0 If not, there\u2019d be misery in life and life after death.<\/p>\n
Poe developed those themes in \u201cBerenice\u201d and \u201cMorella\u201d, and sent the tales to The Southern Literary Messenger\u2019s owner, Thomas Willis White, whom for months he\u2019d courted with his quill.\u00a0 He\u2019d also been offering White literary reviews and complimentary advice on a range of aesthetic and technical issues regarding the profitable publication of an incisive magazine.\u00a0 If White could pay even a pittance, Poe would delightedly come to Richmond, the town where his beautiful young mother was buried, and where John Allan abused, betrayed, and disinherited him and now lay rotting.\u00a0 In August 1835 White, a mere printer often intimidated by literary obligations, hinted he might need assistance but offered nothing.\u00a0 Poe rushed in and at once contributed another tale and pungent reviews as well as poems and erudite letters of acceptance to authors and tactful letters of declination, and read and edited proofs and tutored White on paper stock and layout and marketing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have but a few hundred subscribers,\u201d Poe said.\u00a0 \u201cI shall bring you ten times that.\u00a0 Meanwhile, sir, please banish yourself so I may fashion the finest periodical in the history of this troubled land.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve been drinking again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPreposterous.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my employ you will not degrade that chaste empress, temperance.\u00a0 And fool yourself not \u2013 No man who drinks before breakfast is safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Poe would in fact have been in greater peril sober and unsedated. His Aunty had just written him about the offer of his second cousin, Neilson Poe, to take Virginia into his home and provide a fine education and worldly social opportunities. \u00a0Her mother was inclined to accept.\u00a0 To save himself, Poe on August twenty-ninth responded: \u201cI am blinded with tears while writing this letter… My bitterest enemy would pity me could he now read my heart \u2013 My last and my only hold on life is cruelly torn away \u2013 I have no desire to live and will not\u2026 I love Virginia, passionately, devotedly.\u00a0 I cannot express in words the fervent devotion I feel towards my dear little cousin \u2013 my own darling… All my thoughts are occupied with the supposition that both you and she will prefer to go with N. Poe.\u00a0 I do sincerely believe that your comforts will for the present be secured \u2013 I cannot speak as regards your peace \u2013 your happiness.\u00a0 You have both tender hearts \u2013 and you will always have the reflection that my agony is more than I can bear \u2013 that you have driven me to the grave \u2013 for love like mine can never be gotten over.\u00a0 It is useless to disguise the truth that when Virginia goes with N.P. that I shall never behold her again \u2013 that is absolutely sure.\u00a0 Pity me, my dear Aunty, pity me.\u00a0 I have no one now to fly to\u2026 It is useless to expect advice from me \u2013 what can I say?\u00a0 Can I, in honor and in truth say \u2013 Virginia, do not go! \u2013 Do not go where you can be comfortable and perhaps happy \u2013 and on the other hand can I calmly resign my life itself.\u00a0 If she had truly loved me would she not have rejected the offer with scorn? \u00a0(And) if she goes with N.P. what are you to do my own Aunty?<\/p>\n
\u201cI had procured a sweet little house…on Church hill \u2013 newly done up and with a large garden and every convenience \u2013 at only $5 per month.\u00a0 I have been dreaming every day and night since of the rapture I should feel in seeing my only friends \u2013 all I love on Earth, with me there; the pride I would take in making you both comfortable and in calling her my wife.\u00a0 But the dream is over\u2026 What have I to live for?\u00a0 Among strangers with not one soul to love me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Poe stiffened to stress his encouraging financial prospects – $60 a month were imminent from The Messenger \u2013 and promised to shortly send Aunty money and would have already had the mail not been vulnerable to robbers.\u00a0 Finally, on a tightrope, he offered the essence: \u201cAsk Virginia.\u00a0 Leave it to her.\u00a0 Let me have, under her own hand, a letter, bidding me goodbye \u2013 forever \u2013 and I may die \u2013 my heart will break \u2013 but I will say no more.<\/p>\n
\u201cKiss her for me \u2013 a million times.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor Virginia,<\/p>\n
My love, my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey, think well before you break the heart of your cousin Eddy.\u201d<\/p>\n
This emotional crisis intensified pathologies always dwelling within Poe.\u00a0 In a fortnight he revealed to one of The Messenger\u2019s contributors that his feelings were \u201dpitiable\u201d and he had \u201cstruggled in vain against this melancholy\u201d and was \u201cwretched\u201d and \u201csuffering under a depression of spirits that will not fail to ruin (him) should it be long continued.\u201d<\/p>\n
Poe\u2019s torment also threatened the health of Thomas Willis White, who in September told his gifted new employee they must part.\u00a0 Poe did not believe it.\u00a0 He could not or he would\u2019ve spontaneously expired.\u00a0 Instead, he rallied to Baltimore and convinced Virginia and Aunty to return to Richmond with him, and wrote to assure White that only loneliness and family crisis had forced him to imbibe.<\/p>\n
The publisher responded: \u201cThat you are sincere in all your promises, I firmly believe.\u00a0 But, Edgar, when you once again tread these streets, I have my fears that your resolve would fall through \u2013 and that you would again sip the juice, even till it stole away your senses.\u00a0 Rely on your own strength and you are gone.\u00a0 Look to your Maker for help, and you are safe.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow much I regretted parting with you, is unknown to anyone on this earth, except myself.\u00a0 I was attached to you \u2013 and am still \u2013 and willingly would I say return, if I did not dread the hour of separation very shortly again.\u00a0 You have fine talents, Edgar \u2013 and you ought to have them respected, as well as yourself.\u00a0 Learn to respect yourself, and you will very soon find that you are respected.\u00a0 Separate yourself from the bottle, and bottle companions, forever.\u00a0 Tell me if you can and will do so \u2013 and let me hear that it is your fixed purpose never to yield to temptation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you should come to Richmond again, and again should be an assistant in my office, it must be especially understood by us that all engagements on my part would be dissolved the moment you get drunk.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like a man rescued from the gallows, Poe lived prudently and worked frenetically, impressing his Aunty and Virginia, who complained little that instead of a \u201csweet little house\u201d they lived in a boardinghouse.\u00a0 Rejuvenated by several weeks of their company, Poe felt he\u2019d entered an era of physical health, creative opportunity, and modest financial security.\u00a0 His tales would eventually earn what they deserved, he believed, but they \u201crequired much labor spent in their composition, or they will degenerate into the turgid or the absurd.\u201d \u00a0He needed to get famous faster, and generated attention by slashing those whom he discerned had not labored with sufficient ardor.<\/p>\n
In The Messenger\u2019s January 1836 issue Poe celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday by demolishing William Gilmore Simms and The Partisan<\/em>, his recent historical novel about the Revolutionary War. \u00a0While he often reviewed fairly and constructively, Poe occasionally couldn\u2019t refrain from obsessive and hypercritical commentary.\u00a0 Poor Simms is bushwhacked right after this short dedication to a Richard Yeadon:<\/p>\n \u201cDear Sir,<\/p>\n \u201cMy earliest, and, perhaps, most pleasant rambles in the fields of literature, were taken in your company \u2013 permit me to remind you of that period by inscribing the present volumes with your name.\u201d<\/p>\n In those few words Simms commits the \u201ccant of laconism\u201d as well as \u201cexcessive terseness, excessive appropriateness, and excessive gentility.\u201d \u00a0As punishment Poe places Simms in Yeadon\u2019s study where the host, upon hearing the author read the comma- and dash-delayed tribute, twitches into a rage and tosses Simms down the stairs.<\/p>\n Still merely unlimbering, Poe notes that Simms has written four other books, some in the second and third printing, and thus with \u201cour author\u2019s long acquaintance with the Muse, we must be pardoned if\u2026we make no allowances whatever on the score of a deficient experience.\u201d\u00a0 His saber thusly sharpened, Poe comments that Simms\u2019 book is \u201ctold in a language exceedingly confused, ill-arranged, and ungrammatical.\u201d\u00a0 While conceding the author\u2019s historical characters are \u201cwell-drawn (and some) positively unsurpassed by any similar delineations within our knowledge,\u201d Poe asserts \u201cfictitious existences in The Partisan<\/em> will not bear examination\u201d for among them are a \u201cnon-entity\u2026an idiot\u2026an ass\u2026 an insufferable bore.\u201d\u00a0 Furthermore, \u201cMr. Simms\u2019 English is bad \u2013 shockingly bad.\u201d\u00a0 Trust the reviewer.\u00a0 He unrelentingly hammers examples of dangling modifiers one would anticipate from a man who, in \u201cvillainously bad taste\u201d, writes \u201creprehensible\u201d and \u201cabominable\u201d passages distorted by \u201cmanifest blunders and impertinences.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite all this, Poe observes, \u201cThe Partisan<\/em> is no ordinary work. \u00a0Its historical details are replete with interest.\u00a0 The concluding scenes are well drawn.\u00a0 Some passages descriptive of swamp scenery are exquisite.\u00a0 Mr. Simms has evidently the eye of a painter.\u201d\u00a0 Alas, Poe concludes that Simms might \u201csucceed better in sketching a landscape than he has done in writing a novel.\u201d<\/p>\n Readers anticipated Poe\u2019s criticism more than his fiction or poetry.\u00a0 For admirers each piece carried the allure of a literary joust; others declared Poe a destructive force who envied the recognition and financial attainments of those he attacked.\u00a0 Despite his propensity for overkill, Poe was most passionate about improving American literature and insight of readers who\u2019d long yearned for writers at least comparable to those in England.\u00a0 Poe believed a recent wave of literary \u201cpuffery\u201d had inveigled Americans into embracing unworthy books, and thus by inference he scolded readers as well as writers.<\/p>\n Sources: Thomas Willis White to Edgar Allan Poe, September 29, 1835; Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s Review of The Partisan<\/em>, from The Southern Literary Messenger, January 1836; Edgar Allan Poe, A Critical Biography<\/em>, Arthur Hobson Quinn; Edgar A. Poe, Mournful and Never-ending Rem<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Aunt Maria\u2019s mother died her pension was also buried and that night Edgar Allan Poe raged to dig it up.\u00a0 Aunty and Virginia guided him into bed from which he two days later arose dazed but determined to be responsible.\u00a0 Aunty had become his real mother and Virginia, though only age thirteen, was already…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[127,181,216,128,129],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n