Buy Tickets
Shop
Donate
Become A Member

Tag: history

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Poe & Science with Murray Ellison

Harry Clark’s Illustration of Poe’s Ship in a Whirlpool
Harry Clark’s Illustration of Poe’s Ship in a Whirlpool

“M.S. Found in a Bottle:” A Look at Poe’s Skepticism of 19th-Century Science, Part II

Murray Ellison  |  August 31, 2017

By being unobserved, the unnamed narrator of Poe’s, “M.S. Found in a Bottle” is looking at the relics of science on the ship he is standing on as an outsider. He concludes that much of nineteenth-century science is outdated and largely based on theories of misguided scientists like Francis Bacon and Symmes. He describes the ship as having a “severely simple bow and antiquated stern,” that reminds him of “an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago.” The captain’s “gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. A Sybil is a witch or a harbinger of dark and dangerous times. The narrator observes that the “cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron clasped folios, moldering instruments of science and obsolete long-forgotten charts” (144). Poe believed that the tools of nineteenth-century science could not chart a course to the future and that the captain is sailing to an unknown destination and using outdated maps. The narrator’s assumptions about the inadequacies of the ship are confirmed as the journey reaches the frightening abyss Symmes imagined at the South Pole. Poe exploits and, perhaps satirizes Symmes’s theories and the fears that readers associated with such beliefs when the narrator encounters the Pole’s vortex:

Oh, horror upon horror!—the ice opens up to the right, and to the left, and suddenly we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round, the borders of a gigantic amphitheater, the summit of those walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles grow small—we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool—amid a roaring… and thundering of ocean and of the tempest, the ship is quivering—oh God! And—going down (146).

Poe uses the phrase, “whirling dizzily,” to show that those who believe in the systems of nineteenth-century science will soon be whirling around and too dizzy to understand what is happening when new technologies replace their antiquated belief systems. The dark and distant walls of the ship represent the barriers that are blocking progress to a more enlightened future. He regrets that, by associating with this ship and these antiquated ideas, he will have little time to “ponder about his destiny.”

Poe’s narrative flaunts the distinctions between the uncertainties and dangers of nineteenth-century discoveries, as well as his obsessions with death. He uses the term, “immense concentric circles” to mock the “Concentric Circles” theory. The antiquated approaches that scientists have thus far trusted, he suggests, will be inundated by the roaring, “bellowing, and thundering of the ocean and tempest.” The foundations that they have based their beliefs on are “quivering.” Poe’s use of the word, “God,” juxtaposed with “going down,” suggests that he believed that organized religion is also going down along with the antiquated beliefs of nineteenth-century science. However, this usage also indicates that Poe believed in a Supreme Being. The term “whirling dizzily” also indicates that he realized that the Universe is being controlled by a force greater than humans can ever control. As the ship is sucked into the Pole, the narrator thrusts his journal into the sea— hopefully for readers of the future to discover. Although this short story is Poe’s first published work, it foreshadows his most comprehensive views about science and the future of the Universe in his final work, Eureka: A Prose Poem.

Murray Ellison

About The Author

Dr. Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education from Temple University (1973), a Master’s Degree of Arts in English Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University (2015), and a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech (1988). He is married and has three adult daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. He is the founder and chief editor of this literary blog and is an editor for the International Correctional Education Journal. He is the Co-Editor of the 2016 book of poetry, Mystic Verses, by Shambhushivananda. He also serves as a board member, volunteer tour guide, poetry judge, and Facilities Planning Committee Coordinator at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia. He teaches literature classes at the OSHER, Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Richmond; is the organizer and coordinator of The First Fridays Classic Book Club; and is co-founder and organizer, along with Rebecca Elizabeth Jones, of the VCU English Alumni, Working Titles Book Club. Contact Murray at ellisonms2@vcu.edu.

Works Cited

    Gewirtz, Isaac. Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul, Ed. New York: New York Public Library, 2013.

    Levine, Stuart and Susan F. Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka. Eds. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2004.

    Poe, Edgar A.. Tales and Sketches, 1831-1849. Ed. Thomas O. Mabbott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

    Poe, Harry Lee. Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the Universe. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012.

    Pollin, Burton R. “Creator of Words.” Baltimore: Lecture delivered at the Fifty-first Annual Commemoration of the Edgar A. Poe Society, July 7, 1973.

    Seaborn, Captain Adam (pseudonym Captain John Symmes). Symzonia-a Voyage of Discovery. New York: Printed by J. Seymour, 1820.

    Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Sonnet-to Science: Poe’s Early Ambivalence About 19th-Century Technologies

By the time that Poe started writing professionally, the Industrial Revolution had already introduced many dramatic advancements that affected the lifestyles and culture of the nineteenth-century public. For example, the literacy rate had steadily increased in the United States, and many people were able to understand most articles written in the newspaper. They could also travel to many distant parts of the country by rail and communicate to almost anyone almost instantly via the telegraph. Through the development of the Daguerreotype (an early prototype of photography), family members could obtain realistic and long lasting images of their loved ones to remember for generations. The introduction of a new class of highly powerful telescopes demonstrated that the Universe is much larger than anyone had previously imagined. Even the most avid modern readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories may overlook that many of his works provide an informative account of many of these technological changes and how those events affected the public.

During this period, there was a need for a new class of writers who could write about emerging scientific information in a way the new consumers of science information could understand. The newly emerging professional scientists in the United States was neither equipped nor interested in communicating about science with the public. Lightman refers to those who did attempt to communicate to the public as the “popularizers of science,” and suggests that “Their success was partially due to their ability to present the huge mass of scientific fact in the form of compelling stories” (188). He contends that it is essential for our current understanding of nineteenth-century culture to explore writers like Edgar Allan Poe, who skillfully and prolifically commented on many of the significant popular scientific trends of his lifetime.  Similarly, John Limon writes that Poe engaged in literary “negotiation with science,” asserting that his works both foreshadowed and critiqued several emerging scientific developments and trends of the future (19). Paul Faytor argues that “there was a two-way traffic between science and science writers in the nineteenth century. He notes that many of the inventions of professional scientists helped to shape science fiction and that many ideas imagined by science fiction writers found their way into actual inventions. (256). Many scholars (Gewirtz, Hoffman, Willis, and Tresch) acknowledge that Poe was one of the most important leaders in developing both the genres of science fiction and detective fiction. His works in those areas provide abundant examples that he anticipated forecasted future developments in technical areas such as exploration of the Poles, astronomy, physics, space travel, photography, electronic communications, and the forensic sciences. Limon argues that lay writers like Poe and Hawthorne, or those without “letters” who were interested in writing about science, struggled with professional scientists to establish their authority to speak about emerging scientific issues (19). Poe had not received much formal training as a scientist but had considerable exposure to scientific ideas in his education, technical experiences in the military, and in his exposure to science news as a journalist. He believed that an observant and skilled writer did not need professional science training or to be sanctioned by any official science accreditation organizations before he could write about science.

“Sonnet—To Science”

The issues discussed so far are best brought together in one of Poe’s earliest poems, “Sonnet—To Science, “in which he first demonstrates that he is interested in science, i.e., he is fascinated, but also cautious  but the potential dangers of science.  The poem was first included, but not titled, in a limited run volume of poems Poe wrote entitled Tamerlane (1829), which first “appeared in the Saturday Evening Post” on September 11, 1830 (Thomas and Jackson 1). “Sonnet” uses literary themes from ancient Greek literature. Such figures were also later utilized by several of the Romantic poets of the eighteenth century. Drawing an example from these discussions, William Wordsworth’s poem, “The Tables Turned” (1798) cautions that scientists ruin the value of nature when they tried to over-analyze it. The speaker suggests that we should reject traditional science and learn to experience and appreciate nature through our senses:

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–

We murder to dissect.

 Poe, like the Romantics, expressed opposition to seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment Age philosophers and scientists, like Sir Francis Bacon, who held to a strong belief in the rational and empirical methods of science, and denigrated the value of emotion, imagination, and belief (Gewirtz 14).  Literary critic Daniel Hoffman compares “Sonnet” to the Romantic poem, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which notes that all inventions and creations built by men are impermanent. Hoffman views “Poe’s lone sonnet as an outcry against the antipoetic materialism of the modern scientific age…” (47).  However, an alternative reading also considers that there are some verses in “Sonnet” indicating that Poe may have also believed that science could offer new inspiration and writing topics to the writers of the Industrial Age. In the opening quatrain of the sonnet, Poe personifies and addresses his question about Science as follows:

Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!

           Who alterest all things with thy peering heart

Why pryest thou thus upon the poet’s heart?

           Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?   (1-4 )

The poet reminisces that “Science” was, at one time, valued by the ancient thinkers as the “True Daughter of Old Time.” Perhaps, in this case, the “True daughter” represents that science was once able to provide a source of inspiration and wisdom to artists and philosophers. In lines two and three, Poe laments the intrusion of scientific research (“peering heart”) “upon the poet’s heart.” He uses the “Vulture” as a metaphor, in line four, to represent the dark and destructive power of science. He believes that the vulture of Industrial Age science has caused the poet to take flight from his bright dreams and forced him to replace them with the dull realities of mundane existence.

As this inquiry continues, the narrator generates additional questions and insights he has gained by weighing the advantages and disadvantages of science:

How should he love thee? Or deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies?

        Albiet he soared with an undaunted wing(5 – 8).

 “Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering/To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies” could be interpreted in more than one way. Poe asks an important but ambiguously stated rhetorical question in these passages, but leaves it up to the reader to provide the answer. From the negative side, he could be pondering whether science will abandon the wandering and lost poet and relegate him to a life of isolation and extinction. On the positive side, he could be proposing that the artist in the new age of technology could reconcile with science and allow him to soar “with an undaunted wing.” During and before the nineteenth century, astronomers with powerful telescopes were learning important new facts about the solar system which greatly expanded conventional views of the known world. Perhaps Poe was paying respect to the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who significantly improved the power and the accuracy of the telescope in the sixteenth century. These advancements made it possible for him to discover a shining star in the constellation Cassiopeia that briefly appeared in 1574, but was never seen again (Thoren). Consequently, Poe may have been considering that nineteenth-century inventions might offer some new possibilities for discovering truths and “treasure in the jeweled skies,” and give him some new topics to write about. However, if Poe is alluding to Brahe’s fleeting planetary discovery in “Sonnet,” he may also be cautioning his readers, like Percy Bysshe Shelley did, about the uncertainties and impermanent nature of new inventions and discoveries. Poe addresses several significant questions about science:

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven Hamadryad from the wood

To seek shelter in some happier star?   (9-11).

Lines nine and ten ask if the worldly vulture has disturbed the serenity and the creativity of the ancient mythological Greek goddess Diana and the wood nymph Hamadryad. The implied answer, of course is—yes. In verse eleven, he asks if these figures have been driven to seek “shelter in some happier star.” This line could be read as an indication that since their serenity has been disturbed, then they can no longer be creative. However, on the more positive side, these lines might also indicate that Poe believes that science could provide a shelter and some new opportunities for the nineteenth-century writer.

In final tercet, Poe returns to his original question about science: “Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood?” This idea advances a somewhat softer and more positive tone about science than Poe offered in the previous verses.  It could be viewed as positive that science has rescued a water goodness from a flood. However, Poe does not address this question in the poem. By the end verses, Poe personally injects himself into the discussion by lamenting that science has snatched away “the summer dream beneath the tamarind tree” from “me.” Since the tamarind is the large pod of a tropical tree which also contains the juiciest pulp of the tree, Poe may be lamenting that science has deprived him of the inspirational juice needed for his writing.   Poe’s earliest poem about science, “Sonnet” illustrates that he wrestled with some of the same opposing positions as Romantic writers. Shelley and Wordsworth viewed literature as a struggle between those who wrote about the world from an artistic or a scientific point of view. However, rather than staking a one-sided position against science, as many of the Romantic poets, Poe’s early poem shows that his attitudes about science were somewhat ambivalent, and still being formed at the beginning of his writing career.

Works Cited

Faytor, Paul. “Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction.” Victorian Science in Context. Ed. Barnard A. Lightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Gewirtz, Isaac. Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul, Ed. New York: New York Public Library, 2013.

Hoffman, Daniel. Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe. New York: Paragon House, 1972.

Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Science in Context. Ed. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Poe, Edgar Allan.  The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume VII: Poetry. Ed. Harrison, James A. New York: T. Crowell, 1902.

Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Willis, Martin. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006

##############################

Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education at Temple University (1973), a Master’s of Arts in English Literature at VCU (2015), and a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech in 1987. He is married and has three adult employed daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. He is the founder and chief editor of the literary blog, www.LitChatte.com. He is an editor for the “Correctional Education Magazine,” and editing a book of poetry, soon to be published written by Indian mystic, Shambhuvasanda. He also serves as a board member, volunteer tour guide, poetry judge, and all-around helper at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia. He will be teaching literature classes at the Osher Program at the University of Richmond in the beginning of 2017.  You can write to Murray here or at ellisonms2@vcu.edu

 

 

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Madwomen in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature has often used themes of women held back or locked up in rooms and attics while attempting to make valiant stands and statements in support of their rights to artistic and intellectual expression, and social equality. These ideas are thoroughly supported and explored in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s book, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University P, 1979), as well as in many other literary discussions of fictional works written during this period. Mary Shelly’s, Frankenstein, was one of the first examples in literature expressing this theme. In 1818, she published her first book anonymously because she believed that society would not accept the idea that women could be important authors. It was widely assumed that her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelly, wrote the novel. It was first published under the real author’s name in 1823. In the novel, Viktor Frankenstein creates a monster in his laboratory but has no control over the terror it unleashes in the surrounding villages. In one interpretation of Frankenstein, the monster was the author’s representation of how society was threatened by the idea of a successful women writer.

www.horrortalk.com
Madeline Kills Her Brother in “The Fall of the House of Usher: Photo credit by Horrortalk.com

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1829 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” takes Frankenstein to the next level. Roderick Usher keeps his sister Madeline confined to a dark room upstairs where he reports that she is suffering from a strange mental illness. The sister’s name strongly suggests to readers that she is mad about something. The brother paints and plays music to his pleasure but the sister is not permitted to have the same privileges of self-expression. The brother is certain that restraining his sister in her best interest .The brother, who is afraid of sunlight and nature, won’t go outside the house and won’t allow his sister to go out or have any meaningful interaction or dialogue with the unnamed narrator, a friend who visits the house. During his stay as a house guest, the visitor views Madeline roaming through the house as if she is a ghostly spirit. In one way of looking at Madeline, her mental illness could be caused by her forced confinement and by being restricted artistically and socially by her brother. As Madeline’s madness gets more and more out of control, Roderick attempts to bury his sister while she is still alive, believing this is necessary to save her soul. Poe’s unnamed narrator graphically describes her terrifying screams and the rumblings of the House of Usher. As Madeline escapes from her premature burial, she kills her brother in an act of defiant anger and revenge. The narrator flees, saving his life as the ancient house crumbles to the ground. It can be argued that this story supports the view that Poe was sympathetic to the cause of lifting the artistic limitations imposed by society on women.

In Jane Eyre, the narrator as a ten-year-old orphan girl is taken in, but not loved by the Reed family. She is denied the right to read a book by her teenage cousin. When she questions him about this denial, he punishes her by throwing the hard bound book at her and bloodied her head. When Aunt Reed, her caretaker, hears the commotion, she takes her son’s side and admonishes Jane for talking back to her son. When Jane, also questions her Aunt for always siding with her son and for not caring about her, she is locked upstairs in the Red Room. That room was last used as the dying setting for Jane’s uncle and Aunt Reed’s husband. The aunt justifies locking Jane up because she believes she is mad. However, Jane’s uncle’s dying wish, which Aunt Reed had said she would agree to, was that Jane would be adopted and loved in the Reed household. The uncle’s wish is never granted because the Aunt never loves or accepts her niece as part of her family. Instead, she and her children give Jane steady doses of cruelty and neglect. As if the spirit and anger of the dead are being channeled through her uncle, Jane becomes outraged by her confinement and maltreatment. In an uncontrollable fit, she informs her aunt that the spirits of the dead are planning to seek revenge on her for breaking her promise to her dying husband. The Aunt banishes Jane from her home, disowns her, and sends her to an orphan school for girls (see earlier Litchatte.com discussion). After Jane matures to a young woman, she is summoned by Aunt Reed to her deathbed. Although she informs her Aunt that she has forgiven her, Mrs. Reed dies in anger, saying she has never forgiven Jane for her impertinence.

However, the most important question and tension of the Jane Eyre novel is: Who is the woman being confined in the attic in Master Rochester’s House? Jane is first hired by Rochester as a governess to instruct his “charge.” During Jane’s employment at Thornfield, a mysterious woman, living in the attic, roams the house at night to look in on, and frighten Jane, and later to try to set Mr. Rochester’s room on fire and kill him. As the story develops, Rochester is willing to break through socio-economic and caste restrictions and marry Jane. But, before the wedding vows are exchanged, Mr. Mason, the brother of the mysterious women in the attic, reveals that there can’t be a marriage that day because Rochester is already married to that woman— his sister Bertha. Rochester tries to justify his deception by explaining that his wife appeared sane when they were first married in Jamaica, but gradually deteriorated when Rochester brought her back to England. After she had started going mad, he explains that he confined her to an attic room and hired a servant, Grace Poole, to be her caretaker. He then takes the clergymAN, wedding witnesses, and Jane up to the attic to see the madwoman. As soon as Bertha sees her husband, she tries to attack him violently. Her behavior and the descriptions by the narrator seem to support the idea that she is a mad woman. However, there are questions about whether Bertha has always been mad or whether she has become mad because she couldn’t be controlled by her husband. These unresolvable mysteries become even clearer after Rochester explains how Bertha defied his expectations and seemed so different from him after their marriage. However, readers are only told that Bertha is mad by Mr. Rochester and, perhaps, we are not entirely convinced that he is a reliable narrator. We are never able to hear Bertha’s point of view about why she has become so angry and vindictive. Could she have been justified to reacting so strongly against such confinement and for losing her rights as a wife? We may think back to Jane’s anger about her involuntary confinement in the Red Room and for wishing to stand up for her rights of intellectual pursuits and free expression. If we can accept the idea that Jane was falsely accused of being mad, perhaps, we can also consider Bertha’s point of view. Bertha had just as much reason to be angry and vindictive toward her husband as Jane had toward Aunt Reed. Since Rochester could not marry Jane while Bertha was still alive, he proposes that Jane overlook society’s requirement of marriage and become his mistress. She rejects this suggestion because it goes against her moral compass (see first Litchatte, Jane Eyre discussion) and because she is concerned that she might end up as another  victim in Rochester’s attic.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the female narrator, like Bertha Mason and Madeline Usher in Poe’s story, is confined to stay in an upstairs room, because her husband is a medical doctor,  and believes she is suffering from a temporary mental disorder. She, instead, is convinced that she needs to write to relieve her anxieties. However, her husband rejects such thinking. He prescribes a treatment of complete rest for her. As a doctor, he thinks he is prescribing the most proper treatment for her. But she is confused by the conflicting roles he plays between being a medical authority and a caring husband; consequently, she attempts to obey him. The woman, not having any other creative task to occupy her mind, identifies with the crawling woman. She perceives that the women she perceives is trying to escape from the restrictions of being confined in the wallpaper and of not being allowed to express herself. Her confinement causes her to become obsessed with what seems to be a woman living and moving about in patterns of the yellow wallpaper. In her mind, the patterns of the wallpaper and the woman she sees soothe her, and free her from the feeling of confinement. But when her husband returns from work, he observes his wife crawling madly around the room and trying to peel the wallpaper off. No doubt, he considers his wife as incurable at that point. However, she rebels against him, locks the door, and refuses to leave the room. Nineteenth-century readers often interpreted these stories of women going insane as unhealthy representations of their reactions against the expectations of society. However, many modern readers understand them as demonstrating that women, in that era, were just beginning their struggle for the freedom of artistic and intellectual expression.

##############################

Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education at Temple University (1973), a Master’s of Arts in English Literature at VCU (2015), and a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech in 1987. He is married and has three adult employed daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. He is the founder and chief editor of the literary blog, www.LitChatte.com. He is an editor for the “Correctional Education Magazine,” and editing a book of poetry, soon to be published written by Indian mystic, Shambhuvasanda. He also serves as a board member, volunteer tour guide, poetry judge, and all-around helper at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia. He will be teaching literature classes at the Osher Program at the University of Richmond in the beginning of 2017.  You can write to Murray here or at ellisonms2@vcu.edu

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Private Perry is Mr. Poe

Poe in uniform -Google Images

John Limon argues that Poe was one of the first American writers who was important both to the fields of literature and science because he engaged in literary mediation, or “negotiation with science.” Limon notes that Poe’s works provide abundant examples that he anticipated forecasted several future developments in technology, e.g., exploration of the Poles, astronomy, physics, space travel, photography, electronic communications, and the forensic sciences. He wrote about these technical subjects in imaginative ways that captured the public’s interest and concludes that lay writers like Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, or those who wrote “without “letters,” also struggled with the professional class to establish their authority to speak on emerging scientific issues “(19).

Poe had not received any formal training as a scientist. However, he had considerable exposure to scientific ideas in his education, in his training, and in his investigations of science. He believed that an interested, observant, and skilled writer did not need credentials from any official accreditation organization before he was qualified to write about scientific topics. Therefore, in the present column, I will discuss Poe’s early technical preparation, activities, and some of his experiences that likely inspired his interest in writing about science as a poet, journalist, fiction, and non-fiction writer.

Poe’s early schooling and military training inspired and shaped his interest in science. According to Kenneth Silverman, Poe’s secondary education started after his foster parents moved from England to Richmond. In 1821, “Edgar attended the private academy of Joseph H. Clarke,” which served to prepare young gentlemen to obtain “an honorable entrance in any University in the United States.” One of his classmates wrote a testimonial that Poe was one of the top students in the class (23).  Thomas and Jackson list the classes that students typically enrolled in while at that school. They included English, Languages (French, Latin, and Greek), Arithmetic, Geometry, Trigonometry, Navigation (using celestial observations), Gunnery and Projectiles, Optics, Geography, Maps and Charts, and Astronomy (41, 48). Continuing a description of Poe’s education and experiences, Silverman writes that in February 1826, Edgar Allan Poe was among the first group of students enrolled at the University of Virginia. School records there indicate that he was a bright and dedicated student. Despite not being able to afford to pay for his college textbooks, he was one of the top students in several  of his classes. However, hefty financial and gambling debts to the University and to his classmates left him hopelessly in debt. When his foster father refused to continue paying for Poe’s college expenses, he was forced to drop out near the end of his first term (Silverman 29-34).

Major William F. Hecker, the author of Private Perry and Mister Poe, writes that Poe enlisted in the United States Army on May 26, 1827, under the alias of Private Poe. He spent three years as an artilleryman stationed for the longest period at Fort Moultrie, in a coastal area outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Poe spent much of his Army service learning cannon drill and maintenance. This task needed to be performed by a soldier who had extraordinary expertise and skill in the areas of measurement, logistical planning, and design. Army records indicate that Poe “was the most technically competent artillerist in his battery.” He was assigned to “oversee the ammunition supply of the battery.” He was quickly advanced to an artificer, a technical job concerning the “weights and measures of iron and chemicals” (xxxiv).  According to Army records, “Poe was the army’s expert bomb artisan, carefully designing, preparing and constructing inter-connected systems of iron and chemicals with the ultimate goal of explosively destroying his creation” (xxxv-xxix).  It was extraordinary for that time that Poe was promoted to a Sergeant Major in less than two years after he enlisted (xxix), and then enrolled in the United States Army Officer’s School at West Point. At the military academy, he took some classes in French, astronomy, math and navigation, but decided to get himself expelled in 1831 so he could pursue his interests in being a writer. Once again, lacking the necessary financial support from his foster father, Poe wrote: “The army does not suit a poor man—so I left abruptly,” and “threw myself upon literature as a resource” (Poe).

Hecker concludes that Poe’s four years in the Army did not detract in the least from his future career as a writer. On the contrary, it exposed him to many disparate subjects to write about, such as Cryptography, Geography, Oceanography, and Astronomy (xii). Also, he was able to incorporate many of his experiences relating to science into the themes of his poetry, journalism, fiction and non-fiction works. In the next column, I will explore Poe’s earliest published writing on science, a poem entitled, “Sonnet—To Science.”

 

Sources:

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Memorandum in Poe Manuscript, May 29, 1841. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. www.eapoe.org/works/misc/poeautobiogrpahy.

Hecker, William F. Private Perry and Mister Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

##############################

 Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education at Temple University (1973), a Master’s of Arts in English Literature at VCU (2015), and  a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech in 1987. He is married and has three adult employed daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. He is the founder and chief editor of the literary blog, www.LitChatte.com. He is an editor for the “Correctional Education Magazine.”He also serves as a board member, volunteer, tour guide, poetry judge, and all-around helper at the Poe Museum in Richmond. See picture blow:

 

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

H.P. Lovecraft Visits the Poe Museum

HP Lovecraft by Semtner

Last Saturday, August 20, would have been the 126th birthday of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), author of such influential horror, science fiction, and fantasy tales as The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, and At the Mountains of Madness (which was inspired by Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). Lovecraft’s influence on both horror fiction and popular culture has been vast. Several of his works have been adapted to film, music, and even games. In his tales of cosmic horror he created a shared fictional universe known as the Cthulhu Mythos, which continues to live on in the works of legions of later authors.

Lovecraft was also a great admirer of Poe’s works and devoted an entire chapter of his 1935 book Supernatural Horror in Literature to him. In that chapter, Lovecraft writes,

Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or legs of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority’s artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove — good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.

Never a terribly famous writer during his lifetime, Lovecraft would likely not have been recognized by the staff when he visited the Poe Museum in Richmond in May 1929. On May 4, he wrote Elizabeth Toldridge, “In Richmond the chief object of interest for me is the Poe Shrine—an old stone house with two adjoining houses connected as wings & used as a storehouse of Poe reliques. Here I have spent much time examining the objects associated with my supreme literary favourite—to say nothing of the marvelous model of Richmond in 1820, housed in one of the wings.”

The Poe Museum’s Old Stone House, Enchanted Garden, and model of Richmond remain much as they were in 1929, so today’s guests can still feel much of the atmosphere that must have inspired Lovecraft during his visit. The following photographs date to about that time.

The Poe Museum in June 1929. The Enchanted Garden in early spring of 1929. Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building in about 1928

Lovecraft was not the only famous cultural figure to make a trip to the Poe Museum. Vincent Price, Salvador Dali, and Gertrude Stein also visited. Click their names to read about their Poe Museum experiences.

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Poe’s “Oval Portrait: and The Picture of Dorian Gray: the Artist, the Subject, and the Audience*

Poe’s Bride in ” The Oval Portrait” (www.Goodreads.com)

After reading Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), I was struck by how much his theme about the value of art resembled the one found in Poe’s 1842 short fictional work, “The Oval Portrait.” Both stories focus on the relationship between the artist, his subject, and the viewer, or, in the case of literature, the reader.  In Poe’s story, the young artist is driven to paint the ultimate portrait of his beautiful new wife. His goal was to produce a masterpiece that would portray a symbol of youth and vitality that would last an eternity. Poe writes, “As a thing of art, nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself.” The artist writes about the bride (the subject of his art): “She’s  a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover.” However, she wanted to satisfy her husband and sat idly for days, while the artist was engrossed in his creation. He “turned his eyes from the canvas merely, even to regard the countenance of his wife.” After his last brush stroke, “the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought.” Instead of joy, “he grew tremulous, very pallid, and aghast crying with a loud voice, ‘This is Life itself!’ [and] turned suddenly to regard his beloved—She was dead!” Poe’s story shocks readers and forces them to make a judgment on the artist’s values, as well as their own values. Some  might conclude that the story demonstrates that the value of even the most beautiful art is diminished when an artist lives without compassion and positive connection with humanity. Others might conclude that the value of art exceeds the human sacrifice it took to produce it. “The Oval Portrait” also foreshadows the idealistic relationship that modern artists have with their work, as they splash images of their creations across social media and urge people to “Like” them. In many cases, they value their work more than they try to establish and maintain positive human interactions.

Wilde writes, in his Preface of the Picture of Dorian Gray, “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.” Wilde, like Poe, focuses on the relationship between the artist, his subject, and the reader: In the opening pages, he writes, “As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face.” The artist was deeply satisfied and even “riveted” by the profundity and beauty shown in his painting. The viewer of the painting, Lord Henry, who also symbolizes the reader, or the critic of art, remarks, “It is your best work, Basil, you must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor.” The painter remarks that he cannot send it the exhibition, because “I have put too much of myself into it.” Lord Henry, acting as the art critic remarks, “What odd chaps you painters are. You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away.” Although Basil is still interested in having his art recognized, he cannot risk showing Dorian’s portrait because he fears that it will expose the darkness of his soul. The artist believes that he has become too emotionally connected to his subject to allow the purveyors of art to view his creation. Basil was once as scornful of his painting as Poe’s young bride was. However, he becomes enthralled with it after it is finished, and wants to keep it as a symbol of his youth. He makes a Faustian-like request: He wishes to remain eternally young and beautiful, and in his steed, his portrait would age with time. As this a Wilde novel, he is granted his wish. As he ages, he decides that he must hide his painting in the attic for fear that someone might discover that he has found the secret formula to eternal youth. Poe was also consumed with writing about the secret of longevity and eternal life and developed this theme throughout his career in several fictional works, including “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” and “Some Words with a Mummy,” and in his final science treatise, Eureka: A Prose Poem.

Since he is granted long-lasting youth, Basil’s youthful appearance does not change after several decades. However, his life becomes increasingly decadent and even more violent than any character in a Poe story! He heartlessly scorns his lover, Sybil Vane, because she proposes to love Dorian rather than to continue as being a famous Shakespearean actress. In her final stage role, she portrays Juliet, who died an unnecessary death in Shakespeare’s tragedy. When she ceases to be an idealistic object of worship for Dorian Gray, she becomes totally undesirable to him. Dorian’s heartless rejection of her also causes her to commit suicide in real life. Afterward, Dorian and his mentor, Lord Henry, coldly justify that her dramatic death was even more profound than her life would have been as a faded actress and wife of an artist. The scenario with Sybil reminds readers of the wife, in Poe’s story, who was more dedicated to her husband than to his art, and of her the husband, who was more dedicated to his art than to his loving wife. The tragic suicide of Sybil, a word meaning an auspicious omen, foreshadows the tragic downfall of Dorian and, by psychic connection, of Basil, the artist who painted him. Due to Dorian’s decadent human activities, his portrait increasingly begins to mirror his corrupted soul. In the final scenes of the book, he must decide what he is going to do to relieve the guilt he feels when he looks at his hideous portrait. He tries to resolve his tormented soul by killing the artist who painted the work and by destroying the picture. But, does he succeed? Not all that we see in Gray is certain. Readers are as shocked about the conclusion of Wilde’s book as they were about The Oval Portrait. But,  they are not certain if Dorian Gray was conveyed realistically or whether it was entirely imagined in the mind of both the artist and his subject. The creator of the novel, Oscar Wilde, provides little to no clues to help unravel the mysteries of his well-constructed story. Instead, he challenges us to draw our own conclusions. There are several unanswered questions. For example, Did Dorian’s immoral behavior cause the painting to deteriorate? Was there a psychic connection established between the artist and the subject which caused both of them to see the painting in the same way?

Oscar Wilde’s book, Dorian Gray, was also continuing a trend that was pioneered by Poe, which introduced indeterminate endings. In this type of literature, readers had to use their own resources to unravel the loose ends of a story. For example, we do not anything about the relationship between Poe’s artist and his wife before he created his painting. We also don’t know if or how the artist changed after his wife’s death. Readers and literary critics are uncertain whether Gray’s actions caused the portrait to revert back to its former youthful vibrancy, or whether the changes seen in the portrait were only in the minds of Dorian and the artist who created the painting. Wilde wrote that art imitated life and that life imitated art, concluding that readers could understand much about themselves by the ways that they interpreted literature and art. If they thought that the lack of morals caused the tragic destruction of Dorian Gray,then that would be one conclusion about the over-arching theme of the story. However, if they concluded that Dorian lived a full and productive life of hedonistic pursuits, then they might consider that his death could be considered as noble. After all, he did try to reach for eternity. I have stopped a bit short of fully describing the final ending so that readers might explore it and draw their own conclusions about The Portrait of Dorian Gray! However, if you do like that book, I suggest that you also read any of Poe’s stories—many of which had a strong influence on Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece!

*This article was originally posted on Murray Ellison’s, www.Litchatte.com Website.

##############################

 Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education at Temple University (1973), a Master’s of Arts in English Literature at VCU (2015), and  a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech in 1987. He is married and has three adult employed daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. Currently, he serves as a literature teacher, board member, and curriculum advisor for the Lifelong Learning Institute in Chesterfield, Virginia, and is the founder and chief editor of the literary blog, www.LitChatte.com. He is an editor for the “Correctional Education Magazine,” and editing a book of poetry written by an Indian mystic. He also serves as a board member, volunteer tour guide, poetry judge, and all-around helper at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia. You can write to Murray by leaving a Comment or at ellisonms2@vcu.edu

Murray  at the Poe Museum
Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Relic of Virginia Poe is Poe Museum’s Object of the Month

Virginia Clemm Poe

One hundred and eighty years ago Edgar Allan Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm in a small ceremony in Richmond.

For a very awkward moment, try explaining to a group of thirteen-year-old middle school students that they are the same age Edgar Allan Poe’s wife was when he married her—and that her husband was twenty-seven at the time. (To learn more about the wedding ceremony, click here.) Even though Virginia Clemm Poe lived until the age of twenty-four, she is still frequently referred to as Poe’s “child-wife,” as if she were forever thirteen.

The nature of the relationship between Poe and his bride has long been a matter of speculation. To make matters more confusing, in the same August 1835 letter, he called her a sister, a cousin, and a “darling little wifey.” His nickname for her was Sissy (sister), and he called her mother, Maria Poe Clemm, Muddy (mother). Virginia sometimes referred to Edgar as Buddy (brother).

In letters to his mother-in-law, Poe speaks of Virginia in affectionate terms. During an 1844 trip to New York with Virginia, Edgar wrote Maria, “Sis is delighted, and we are both in excellent spirits. She has coughed hardly any and had no night sweat. She is now busy mending my pants which I tore against a nail…You can’t imagine how much we both to miss you. Sissy had a hearty cry last night, because you and Catterina [their cat] weren‘t here.”

Unfortunately, when she was nineteen, Virginia displayed symptoms of tuberculosis, a wasting disease that robbed her of her strength, her energy, and eventually her life. In a January 4, 1848 letter to G. W. Eveleth, Poe describes the agony of seeing her suffer and die from the disease.

Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever laved before, ruptured a blood-vessel in singing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially, and I again hoped. At the end of a year, the vessel broke again. I went through precisely the same scene. . . . Then again — again — and even once again, at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death — and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive — nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank — God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink, rather than the drink to the insanity. I had, indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure, when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can and do endure as becomes a man. It was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope and despair which I could not longer have endured, without total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I receive a new, but — Oh God! — how melancholy an existence.

Aside from his mentions of her in letters like these, scholars have also tried to find traces of Virginia in Poe’s literary productions. While it is tempting to learn about Poe’s feeling for Virginia in his poems like “Eulalie” and “Annabel Lee,” the poem in which he mentions her by name is “To My Mother,” which is addressed not to his mother but to his mother-in-law, Virginia’s mother. Written after Virginia’s death, the poem describes how much she meant to him in the lines,

You who are more than mother unto me,
Filling my heart of hearts, where God installed you,
In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.
My mother — my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the dead I loved so dearly,
Are thus more precious than the one I knew,
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

Of the relationship between Edgar and Virginia, one of their mutual acquaintances Frances Osgood wrote, “Of the charming love and confidence that existed between his wife and himself, always delightfully apparent to me, in spite of the many little poetical episodes, in which the impassioned romance of his temperament impelled him to indulge; of this I cannot speak too earnestly — too warmly. I believe she was the only woman whom he ever truly loved.”

Another of their friends, Lambert A. Wilmer, recalled,

I could mention several striking examples of Poe’s sensibility if my limits would permit. He was unquestionably of an affectionate disposition; of which he gave the best kind of proof when he labored cheerfully for the maintenance of his aunt and cousin, before his marriage with the latter. While he was editor of the Southern Literary Messenger he devoted a large part of his salary to Virginia’s education, and she was instructed in every elegant accomplishment at his expense. He himself became her tutor at another time, when his income was not sufficient to provide for a more regular course of instruction. I remember once finding him engaged, on a certain Sunday, in giving Virginia lessons in Algebra.


One of his severe chroniclers says: “It is believed by some that he really loved his wife; if he did, he had a strange way of showing his affection.” Now it appears to me that he showed his affection in the right way, by endeavoring to make his companion happy. According to the opportunities he possessed, he supplied her with the comforts and luxuries of life. He kept a piano to gratify her taste for music, at a time when his income could scarcely afford such an indulgence. I never knew him to give her an unkind word, and doubt if they ever had any disagreement. That Virginia loved him, I am quite certain, for she was by far too artless to assume the appearance of an affection which she did not feel.

Casting aside nineteenth century propriety, Virginia is said to have run to the sidewalk to embrace her husband when she saw him returning home from work. Other accounts tell of them playing music together or playing games in their yard. Witnesses describe their marriage as a cheerful one. Describing her love for her husband, the twenty-three year old Virginia wrote in 1846,

Ever with thee I wish to roam —
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we’ll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we’ll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee —
Ever peaceful and blissful we’ll be.

In her short life, Virginia grew into a lovely young woman described by one of her houseguests Mary Gove Nichols as looking “very young” with “large black eyes, and a pearly whiteness of complexion, which was a perfect pallor. Her pale face, her brilliant eyes, and her raven hair gave her an unearthly look.” Nichols believed she looked “almost [like] a disrobed spirit, and when she coughed it was made certain that she was rapidly passing away.” By this time, Virginia had been suffering for the past few years from tuberculosis, which would have caused her to be very thin and pale—a look considered very attractive at the time. In the words of Poe’s friend Mayne Reid, “I well knew the rose tint upon her cheek was too bright, too pure to be of the earth. It was consumption’s color—that sadly beautiful light which beckons to an earth tomb.”

While most who knew her described Virginia, as Reid did, as “angelically beautiful in person and not less in spirit,” Susan Archer Talley Weiss, a Poe groupie who never actually met Virginia, thought she was “small for her age, but very plump; pretty, but not especially so…[with a] round, ever smiling face.”

There are no known photographs of Virginia to help us determine whether Reid or Weiss was closer to the truth, and the popular post mortem portrait of Virginia hardly gives us a sense of how this cheerful, loving woman must have looked in life.

Post Mortem Portrait of Virginia Poe

After Virginia succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, her mother saved some of her cherished possessions. Among those items she felt worthy of saving, for their sentimental value or for some other reason, was a simple red trinket box covered in red leatherette with little brass flowers on top. Two years later, Edgar Poe also died, and Maria Clemm became dependent on the support of friends and relatives in New York, Alexandria, and Baltimore. In Baltimore, she found Poe relatives who offered some assistance before she ended up in one of the city’s charity homes.

Virginia Poe’s Trinket Box

One of the friendly relatives was Virginia’s half-sister, Josephine Clemm Poe. To her, Maria Clemm bequeathed some of Virginia’s possessions, including her little red trinket box. Josephine, in turn, left the items to her daughter, who gave some of them to her niece Josephine Poe January.

Virginia’s Half-Sister Josephine Clemm Poe

Josephine Poe January had grown up revering the memory of her great aunt Virginia Poe and, in 1909, wrote the article “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Child Wife’” about her for the October 1909 issue of The Century. In the account, January describes Virginia’s “unchanging love” for Edgar. The article concludes with the lines, “One sees it now, and thinks of the poverty, the sorrow, the renunciation, of those two, and at first it seems so pitifully little that life gave to them. But is it little? To him the gift of song, to her the gift of love.”

Bottom of Virginia Poe’s Trinket Box

At some point, January met the Richmond-born diplomat Alexander W. Weddell whose wife was from Saint Louis, where January was living. Mr. Weddell had been born in St. John’s Church, a short distance from Poe’s mother’s grave in the adjoining cemetery. After passing his Foreign Service exam in 1909, he traveled on diplomatic assignments to Zanzibar, Catania, Sicily, Athens, Beirut, Cairo, Calcutta, Mexico City, and Montreal before returning to Richmond, where he used materials salvaged from an eleventh century English priory to build a grand mansion called Virginia House.

During a meeting with the Weddells, January must have told them about her relation to Edgar Allan Poe, and the Weddells informed her that they were supporters of the newly formed Edgar Allan Poe Shrine (now the Poe Museum) in Richmond. As a result of the conversation, January wrote Pultizer Prize-winning editor, historian, and Poe Shrine president Douglas Southall Freeman on September 5, 1927,

My Dear Dr. Freeman,
My friend and yours Alexander W. Weddell told me he thought you would be interested to have for the Poe Shrine in Richmond a little possession that was once Virginia Clemm Poe’s. My grandmother Josephine Clemm Poe was her sister and this little red box came with the other little relics of Virginia’s bitter-sweet life.

It is in the form of a little chest of red wood or hard card board perhaps with a brass ring on the lid and may well have held some of her own little trinkets in the Fordham days. At least it is completely authentic and has never been in any other than her family’s hands. We were brought up as children to share my grandmother’s sense of loyalty and to know the inside truth of their wishing to have Virginia go to school and live with them a little longer before marrying Edgar. So we loved everything about her and my aunt who became custodian after her parents’ death loved everything about E.A.P.

I hope very much to come to Richmond when the dear Weddells are in “Virginia House” and to see the Shrine. Meanwhile I feel that it is the place Virginia’s little box should go to as nobody after me would value it as much as I have. If you care to have it and will let me know here where I shall be until October I will post it to you when I return to St. Louis.

Very Sincerely,
Josephine Poe January

Josephine Poe January’s Letter to the Poe Museum

The Poe Shrine jumped at the chance to accept the donation of this priceless relic of Poe’s wife. The chairman of the executive committee, museum co-founder Annie Boyd Jones wrote her, “As the children say, we just can’t wait to see the little red box.”

Decoration on Top of Trinket Box

Since 1927, Virginia Poe’s trinket box, one of her very few surviving possessions, has been on display at the museum for the public to study and appreciate, imagining how Virginia must have kept her few, modest trinkets in it and how she, Edgar, and Maria survived in genteel poverty while Edgar wrote for a succession of magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. One wonders what miniature treasures Virginia kept in the box and what became of them. Maybe the box held the portrait of her husband she supposedly kissed and gave to her nurse Marie Louise Shew shortly before dying. Maybe it held a ring or a letter from Edgar. We may never know. Another question we may never answer is precisely why, out of all Virginia’s possessions, Maria Clemm chose to save this box. Maybe it had been a favorite of Virginia’s, a gift from a good friend, or just a reminder of happier times. Like most great artifacts, it makes us ask far more questions than it answers.

The Trinket Box Getting Scanned

Earlier this year, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Virtual Curation Laboratory visited the Poe Museum to make a 3D scan of the trinket box so that a three dimensional replica could be printed. Such a replica would allow museum visitors to see the actual trinket box locked safely in its case while handling the nearly identical replica. This new printing technology will offer new ways for the public to experience the museum’s collection, bringing us just a little closer to understanding what this box meant to the most important woman in Poe’s life.

Digital Image of the Trinket Box During Scanning

Now displayed alongside Virginia’s mirror in the Poe Museum’s Model Building, the box is a favorite among the museum’s many guests. Museum visitors this summer also have the rare opportunity to see two fragments of Virginia Poe’s trousseau (on loan from Dr. Richard Kopley) in the same exhibit case.

In honor of Poe’s 180th wedding anniversary, Virginia Poe’s trinket box is the Poe Museum Object of the Month. Click here to find out more about some of the other Objects of the Month.

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Rufus Griswold Archive Arrives at the Poe Museum

How would you like to have your worst enemy’s portrait hanging in your living room? Although a few people half-jokingly advised us that Edgar Allan Poe would not approve of having a portrait of Rufus Griswold in the Poe Museum, we decided there was no better place for such an artifact than here in the center of the Poe-verse. Griswold, after all, is the one responsible for defaming Poe and creating the dark myth which far too many people have mistaken for fact. If it hadn’t been for Griswold, people wouldn’t still believe Poe was a drug addicted madman whose horror stories were merely based on his disturbed life.

Photograph of the Rufus Griswold portrait printed in the 1943 book Rufus Wilmot Griswold by Joy Bayless

Here is just a sample from Griswold’s obituary of Poe:

He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned), but for their happiness who at the moment were objects of his idolatry — or, with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms wildly beating the winds and rains, he would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjugated him — close by that Aidenn where were those he loved — the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of death.

If that description sounds about right to you, it’s because of Griswold. This is the caricature of Poe he created, and, although it has long since been reputed, it is still the myth some of us learn in English class and from popular culture. It’s also the hopelessly drunk and depressed Poe portrayed by John Cusack in the 2012 film The Raven. When reading such a description it’s easy to see why most people think Poe only wrote horror stories when he actually wrote more comedies and science fiction tales.

This distorted view of Poe is so popular that a few people think we are either mistaken or lying when we at the Poe Museum tell them the true story of Poe’s life. That is when we have to inform them about Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the rival editor, anthologist, and failed poet who, to avenge some wrong Poe had done him, wrote such a libelous obituary of the author that, at first, he chose to sign it with a pseudonym. Published two days after Poe’s death, it begins, “EDGAR ALLAN POE is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.”

As if that were not enough, Griswold continued his smear campaign with a biography of Poe that portrayed the dead man as a vile, despicable human being, a liar, a blackmailer, a madman and a womanizer. Griswold even implied Poe had made a pass at his foster father’s mother and forged some of Poe’s letters to quote in the memoir. While some of Poe’s friends came forward with articles defending Poe’s good name, many were afraid to speak out until after the influential anthologist Griswold was dead. Three years after Griswold’s death, Poe’s former fiancée Sarah Helen Whitman published her own biography of Poe, and several others followed. With a few notable exceptions, most of them portrayed Poe in a much better light. Now any objective biographer can safely dismiss the popular view of Poe as an insane opium addict.

When the Poe Museum tries to provide its visitors a fair and objective view of Poe’s life and work it is helpful to distinguish the facts from the fictions associated with his biography. A big part of this involves examining the man who started these myths and the reasons he did it. That’s why most Poe Museum tours end with at least some mention of Rufus Griswold’s infamous biography of Poe.

Rufus Griswold’s Wife Caroline

A few months ago, an antique dealer contacted the Poe Museum with an offer to sell a collection of Rufus Griswold artifacts including oil paintings of Rufus Griswold and his wife Caroline as well as about forty-five letters to and from Griswold, members of his family, and the poet (and enemy of both Poe and Griswold) Elizabeth Ellet. As soon as the collections committee heard about the opportunity, it voted to acquire the items. To raise the money, the museum launched a Gofundme campaign which quickly raised the money thanks to generous gifts from Susan Jaffe Tane, Stephan Loewentheil, Abbe Ancell, Michael Brazda, Teresa Carter, Christine Clements, Christopher Davalos, Escape Room Live DC, Katrina Fontenla, Mary Lee Haase, Sarah Huffman, Magdalena Karol, L. L. Leland, Aimée Mahathy, Lizzie O., Neca Rocco, Robert Rosen, Jennifer and Joe Rougeau, Justin and Elizabeth Schauer, Ernst Schnell, John Spitzer, Wayne and Pat Stith, Kurt Strom, Amy H. Sturgis, Sara Tantlinger, Patrick Tsao, Ashleigh Williams, and Seven Anonymous Donors.

Now, after years in the possession of descendants of Rufus Griswold’s daughter Emily, this collection is finally in a public collection where anyone can see and study it. Although the portraits were printed once in a 1943 biography of Rufus Griswold, the small black-and-white reproductions in that book only provided the slightest hint of the face of Griswold we will see when we have finished conserving the original paintings. For the first time ever, the public will be able to see Rufus and Caroline Griswold as they appeared when Griswold himself owned the paintings.

Portrait of Griswold printed in 1943 book by Joy Bayless

While seeing the portraits will be like traveling back in time to meet the man, reading his private letters in this collection will be like having a conversation with him. This will be our chance to learn about Griswold’s private struggles, his aspirations, and his motivations.

Griswold descendant Benjamin Wakeman Hartley with the portrait in background ca. 1960

The paintings’ trip to the Poe Museum is just one step on their decades-long journey. Painted in 1840, they went from Griswold (1815-1857) to his daughter Emily Griswold Hartley (1838-1906, a missionary) to her son Randolph Hartley (1870-1931, a librettist and theatrical agent) to Wakeman Hartley to a Massachusetts antique dealer. The next step is a visit to the conservator to repair the damage caused by decades of neglect. Now obscured by dark varnish, dust, smoke, and grime and covered with cracks, holes, and restorers’ over-painting, these 176 year old artifacts need to be cleaned and repaired in order for us to finally see them as they would have appeared in Griswold’s time. You will learn more about that in next week’s installment.

If you would like to help take care of the Poe Museum’s artifacts, please make a contribution here.

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Poe, Lynch, and the Literary Salon Scene

Many who have visited the museum may have recognized the striking portrait of a mysterious woman in the Memorial Building, just above Maria Clemm’s socks and cornered to Samuel Osgood’s Poe portrait. Her eyes follow no matter where you step in the room, her inquisitive gaze and smirk presenting an air of grace, affluence, intelligence, and perhaps suspicion. She was not unknowing when it came to her guests; Poe, a short-time regular guest, was no exception. This stark woman was Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta, hostess of one of New York’s prominent literary salons, and dictator of who was “in” and who was “out” of the literary scene.

According to Maggie MacLean, author of the Women History Blog, Lynch was a poet, sculptor, and teacher, who made her bearings in Philadelphia in the early 1840s. She was introduced to popular actress Fanny Kemble, who then opened Lynch to a world of artists and writers. In 1845, she moved to New York City, where she taught English composition at the Brooklyn Academy for Young Ladies. She also published poems, stories, and contributed to periodicals such as The Gift and the Democratic Review. (Source.)

It was this year, in 1845, when Edgar Allan Poe swept the nation with his popular poem, “The Raven.” In fact, most likely because of this he was given the privilege to attend Lynch’s events. According to Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a prominent literary figure, rights activist and Poe contemporary,

To be invited to the reception of Miss Lynch was an evidence of distinction, and one in itself, for she was strict in drawing the moral as well as the intellectual line. Perhaps no one received any more marked attention than Edgar A. Poe. His slender form, pale, intellectual face and weird expression of eye never failed to arrest the attention of even the least observant…women fell under his fascination and listened in silence (Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Wyman, 88).

Elizabeth Oakes Smith.

It is said that these women, including Frances Osgood, would sit at his feet to hear him speak his eloquent, poetical topics of various discussion. In this same memoir, Oakes Smith recalled,

At that time, at the houses of Rev. Orville Dewey, Miss Anna C. Lynch (now Mrs. Botta)…Edgar Poe was an accepted and honored guest. His manners were refined, and the scope of his conversation that of the gentleman and the scholar. His wife, being an invalid, dared not encounter the night air, but he spoke of her tenderly, and often (121).

Lynch seemed to be an intelligent, respected hostess, and Edgar was now up to celebrity standards amongst his peers. However, this would not last for long. Amidst the Frances Osgood scandal, in which he swapped numerous flirtatious poems with Frances Sargent Osgood, he found himself surrounded by other vindictive women, including Ann Stephens, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Ellet. According to Frederick Frank and Anthony Magistrale, authors of The Poe Encyclopedia, Poe was “‘soon off her [Lynch’s] guest list because of her disapproval of Poe’s contemptuous treatment of Elizabeth Fries Ellet'” (214).

Thus came Poe’s rise and fall with the prestigious literary scene led by the eminent Anne Lynch. As one views the portraits next to one another, they cannot help but wonder if Lynch is keeping an eye on Edgar’s antics indefinitely. What we do know is that her portrait deserves the prominence it has received hanging in the Poe Museum. To close, we will leave our readers with Poe’s own words regarding Lynch in his “Literati of New York City,”

In character Miss Lynch is enthusiastic, chivalric, self-sacrificing, “equal to any fate,” capable of even martyrdom in whatever should seem to her a holy cause-a most exemplary daughter…In person she is rather above the usual height, somewhat slender, with dark hair and eyes-the whole countenance at times full of intelligent expression. Her demeanor is dignified, graceful, and noticeable for repose.

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Cholera Pandemic Terrified and Inspired Edgar Allan Poe

The population of New York City was 515,547 at the beginning of 1849. When a cholera epidemic broke out that spring, about 100,000 people fled the city. Of those who remained, 5,071 succumbed to the disease. The July 8 issue of The Christian Intelligencer reported that 358 New Yorkers died of cholera in the week of June 30 through July 7. Also on July 7, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his mother-in-law, “I have been so ill — have had the cholera, or spasms quiet as bad, and can now hardly hold the pen…The very instant you get this, come to me. The joy of seeing you will almost compensate for our sorrows. We can but die together. It is no use to reason with me now; I must die…For your sake it would be sweet to live, but we must die together.” Poe wrote “New York” at the top of the page, but he probably wrote it in nearby Philadelphia, which was also suffering from a cholera epidemic. Twelve days later, he wrote his friend E.H.N. Patterson that he had “barely escaped with my life” from the cholera epidemic.

On August 7, Poe wrote Patterson that he had “suffered worse than death — not so much from the Cholera as from its long-continued consequences in debility and congestion of the brain — the latter, possibly, attributable to the calomel taken.” Calomel was a medicine derived from toxic mercury. One of many potentially dangerous “remedies” doctors of the time often prescribed to those suffering from a variety of maladies.
At a time before the acceptance of germ theory, doctors had little understanding of the causes of diseases and virtually no comprehension of how to cure them. Various quack remedies for cholera included prescribing opium, mercury pills, and oil of turpentine. If these failed to produce results, the doctor might perform tobacco smoke enemas or administer beeswax plugs to stop the diarrhea associated with the disease. The following article from the New York lists a few other proposed “cures.”

Unknown to North America before 1832, cholera tore a path of destruction across the continent that year as part of a worldwide pandemic that had begun in India and swept westward through Europe before crossing the Atlantic. In an April 9, 1832 letter, the German poet Henirich Heine described the arrival of cholera in Paris.

On March 29th, the night of mi-careme, a masked ball was in progress, the chabut in full swing. Suddenly, the gayest of the harlequins collapsed, cold in the limbs, and, underneath his mask, “violet-blue” in the face. Laughter died out, dancing ceased, and in a short while carriage-loads of people were hurried from the redoute to the Hotel Dieu to die, and to prevent a panic among the patients, were thrust into rude graves in their dominoes. Soon the public halls were filled with dead bodies, sewed in sacks for want of coffins. Long lines of hearses stood en queue outside Pere Lachaise. Everybody wore flannel bandages. The rich gathered up their belongings and fled the town. Over 120,000 passports were issued at the Hotel de Ville.

Out of a population of 650,000 Paris lost 20,000 of its citizens to cholera during the 1832 epidemic. In London, another 6,536 died. Cholera claimed 100,000 in France; 55,000 in the United Kingdom; 130,000 in Egypt; 100,000 in Hungary; and even more elsewhere during that pandemic. In New York City, which had a population of about 250,000 at the time, 3,000 people died, and an estimated 100,000 fled the city.
Poe was in Baltimore in 1832 and would have seen the panic brought about by the arrival of the disease. He also lost one of his closest friends Ebenezer Burling, who succumbed to cholera in Richmond. The best doctors of the time were unable to arrest the progress of the disease. It would be years before they would realize it was carried in the water. Unsuspecting victims contracted the germs from drinking water. Once they displayed symptoms, sufferers could expect about a fifty percent mortality rate.
Without a proper understanding of the causes of cholera, residents could do little to prepare for it. Writing twenty years later, Dr. George B. Wood seemed dumbfounded about how to stop it when he wrote, “No barriers are sufficient to obstruct its progress. It crosses mountains, deserts, and oceans. Opposing winds do not check it. All classes of persons, male and female, young and old, the robust and the feeble, are exposed to its assault; and even those whom it has once visited are not always subsequently exempt.”
Former New York mayor Phillip Horne was among many who thought they knew the real cause of the disease—the Irish. These immigrants, “filthy, intemperate, unused to the comforts of life and regardless of its proprieties…flock to the populous towns of the great West, with disease contracted on shipboard, and increased by bad habits on shore,” he wrote in his diary.
By the end of the 1849 epidemic, cholera had claimed 150,000 American lives. While this disease struck terror wherever it visited, cholera was not unique among the deadly pandemics that threatened Poe’s world. Yellow fever epidemics broke out multiple times in the early nineteenth century, forcing Poe’s mother to flee from an outbreak in New York and overtaking his grandmother in Charleston. His cousin George William Poe succumbed to yellow fever in Baltimore. Virginia experienced thirteen yellow fever epidemics in the 1800s. The worst of these took place in Norfolk in 1855, six years after Poe’s death. Of the city’s population of 16,000, about 6,000 fled the area, and 2,000 died.

Tuberculosis also claimed thousands of lives each year. Among those he knew, Poe’s mother, foster mother, brother, wife, and literary executor died from the extremely widespread and very contagious killer. He likely carried a latent form of the disease.

His first published short story “Metzengerstein” reflects the age’s tendency to romanticize the wasting disease, then called “consumption.” In the tale, the narrator says, “The beautiful Lady Mary! — how could she die? — and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! to depart in the hey-day of the young blood — the heart of all passion — the imagination all fire — amid the remembrances of happier days — in the fall of the year, and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous, autumnal leaves.”
Fifteen years later, Poe would watch his wife waste away from tuberculosis over the course of five agonizing years.

“King Pest” illustration by Harry Clarke

In the face of all these real-life terrors, Poe turned to his writing. The cholera pandemic of 1832 inspired his short stories “King Pest” and “The Masque of the Red Death” and provided a setting for his tale “The Sphinx.” The beautiful young women who succumb to wasting deaths in so many of his stories might be suffering from the same consumption that had claimed many of his loved ones.
Poe’s brother William Henry Leonard Poe, also wrote about yellow fever, setting his story “The Pirate” during an outbreak. Virginia Poe, Edgar’s wife, also wrote, in her only surviving poem, about the consumption that ravaged her lungs and how she wanted to move to a cottage in the country to “heal my weakened lungs.”
It was not until well after Poe’s death that doctors were finally able to effectively combat these illnesses. With greater understanding of the causes and cures of these diseases, the public gradually became less prone to live in fear of the next plague or to panic at the first sight of disease. That is why it is sometimes difficult to understand just how terrifying a story like “The Masque of the Red Death” might have been to the author’s contemporaries or to comprehend how deeply offensive Robert Louis Stevenson found Poe’s plague comedy “King Pest,” written just three years after the 1832 cholera pandemic. (Stevenson went so far as to write that the author of that story had “ceased to be a human being.”) This is why from June 23 through August 21, the Poe Museum will host the special exhibit Pandemics and Poe exploring the ways deadly diseases like yellow fever, cholera, and tuberculosis touched Edgar Allan Poe’s life and inspired some of his greatest work. The exhibit features rare first printings and original documents, including a Poe family bible, that trace the impact of disease and death on Poe’s world.

“The Masque of the Red Death” illustrated by Harry Clarke British Broadsheet warning about Cholera
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Broadsheet warning about Indian cholera symptons and recommending remedies, issued in Clerkenwell, London, by Thos. Key and Geo. Tindall: Church wardens. London, 1831.
1831 Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Conducting a Comprehensive Study of Poe’s, Eureka: A Prose Poem

 

Nineteenth-Century Science

 

First, I am going to propose what a researcher might have to do to conduct a comprehensive study of Poe’s 1848 book, Eureka: A Prose Poem. Then, I am going to explain why I decided not to fall into the trap of attempting to evaluate Poe’s final work. As I noted in my previous Poe and Science Blogs, in 2012 and 2013 , I attempted to design a Prospectus on Eureka for my M.A. Thesis in English Literature at the Virginia Commonwealth University. To that end, I worked with Chris Semtner at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond and several professors at VCU putting together a few draft versions on a proposal to evaluate Eureka. I spent hours in libraries reviewing articles and even books that scholars had written about Eureka. I transcribed Moon-Notes, a scientific manuscript that Poe had written to assist him with several works he was writing. And finally, I took a trip to New York, to the noted collector, Susan Jaffe Tane’s home, to examine Poe’s personal copy of Eureka. This book is now the most valuable first-edition since it contains hand-edited notes by Poe indicating that he had intended to revise and expand his work in a later edition. It is hard to determine conclusively why Poe decided to attempt to write and publish this comprehensive poetic, historical, scientific, and metaphysical treatise after having established a highly recognizable career as a poet and fiction writer, but there are some clues.

In 1847, after recovering from a serious illness, the death of his wife, and facing the prospects of his own mortality, Poe decided to conduct research on astronomy and cosmology. Perhaps he hoped he might be able to unify the differing theories about the universe that were being advanced by competing disciplines and to publish his conclusions in a single book. By that period, astronomers had developed more powerful telescopes than had been available at any previous time. These instruments could discern details of celestial bodies which were at the far edges of the Solar System and beyond. Undoubtedly, Poe was attempting to gain a greater understanding of the most credible theories about the origins and operational details of the Universe. He was seeking answers to the mysteries surrounding the greater meaning of life and existence. As if those questions weren’t comprehensive and mysterious enough, he also decided to address what happens to humans after they died, a topic which he had often explored in great detail in his previous poetry and science fiction writing.

After he finally published Eureka: A Prose Poem in 1848, he suggested that his book should not be evaluated until after he died (Preface of Eureka). Prior to its publication, he informed his publisher, George P. Putnam, that Eureka would one day found to be “of greater importance than Newton’s discovery of gravitation.”  He considered it the culmination of his life’s work” (Broussard 52). Once Eureka was published, Poe resumed a lecture tour and promoted his book until his death in 1849.  In the Preface, he suggested that though his book is “True,” it should only be read for the “Beauty that abounds in Truth.”

Eureka remains for us as Poe’s most enigmatic work. Even the most ardent Poe experts are baffled when trying to read or understand the book. To this date, no one has been able to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of Poe’s most enigmatic work. Literary critic, Charles Baxter, in Burning Down The House, writes about a literary device that has often been employed by fiction writers, called defamiliarization. In this technique, everyday scenes take place in unexpected settings; or unfamiliar scenes takes place in everyday settings (21). Avid readers of Poe are very familiar with his writing style and literary themes but are often unfamiliar with the subject matter of Poe’s culminating poetic-science treatise. Some critics have noted that Eureka is too scientific for literature and too literary for science. Scientists who have considered Poe’s book have generally not considered him sufficiently qualified to write on complex scientific subjects and literary scholars are often too baffled to attempt to apply the tools of literary criticism on Poe’s science book. Prominent nineteenth-century scientist, Alexander von Humboldt (to whom Poe dedicated Eureka) wrote that “he enjoyed Poe’s latest satire on science” (Levine 118).  Henry Lee (Hal) Poe a descendant of E.A. Poe’s cousin (William Poe) and a prominent E.A. Poe researcher stated that until the last quarter century many researchers were quick to dismiss Eureka as being too difficult to understand. As evidence to that assumption, they concluded that, in Eureka, Poe had “gone around the bend.”  Hal Poe contends that the easiest course, both for Poe enthusiasts and detractors, has been to dismiss the work in its entirety. However, during the modern era, there has also been another growing group of literary, historical, and science researchers who have been willing to take a fresh look at the work (H.L. Poe, ix).

After more than a year of Eureka research, I concluded that to gain a fuller understanding of Poe’s culminating book, I would first need to determine whether Poe’s interest in science in Eureka was an anomaly or a continuation of his previous interest in that topic. Therefore, I shifted my research priority to trace the development of Poe’s science-based themes throughout his pre-Eureka, poetic, non-fiction, and fictional writing. I wondered if an understanding of Poe’s previous works might help me to better understand Eureka. Although I was still enthusiastic about conducting research on Poe and Science, I did not believe that I was ready or able to accept Poe’s challenge of evaluating Eureka almost 170 years after Poe published his book. Several previous researchers had attempted to use traditional methods of critiquing literary or scientific research with Eureka but had produced inconclusive results. Using the pitfalls of these previous research studies as cautionary guidelines, I decided, instead, to construct some questions that other scholars might need to consider before attempting to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of Eureka. I delineated these questions in 2013 both at the William & Mary Literature and History Conference and the Positively Poe Conference at the University of Virginia.

Research Questions about Eureka

  1. What are the major scientific themes embedded in Poe’s poetry, non-fiction, and fictional writing?
  2. Were Poe’s previous science themes continued in Eureka or was his book an anomalous work?
  3. Would an understanding the historical, cultural, and scientific contexts of the nineteenth-century to help modern researchers to better understand Eureka?
  4. How does Eureka help modern scholars to understand how the nineteenth-century public received and interpreted news about science and technology?
  5. What are the major scientific theories that informed Poe as he was writing Eureka?
  6. How did critics respond to Eureka in and after Poe’s lifetime, and what is the validity of their responses?
  7. What are the literary techniques Poe used in writing Eureka and does he follow his own standards?
  8.  What are the theories and conclusions that Poe reached in his treatise?
  9.  What is the significance of Eureka in Poe’s Canon, in English Literature, and in science history?

Re-Assessment of Eureka Needed?

The conclusion I reached after considering these research questions is that for me to complete a comprehensive evaluation of Eureka, I would need to conduct a multi-perspective study, requiring a combination of literary analysis, historical, and scientific research. I concluded that I would not be able to complete such a study within the time that I had  left in my M.A. program. Anyone conducting such a study would need to employ the ingenious inductive, deductive, and ratiocinative methods of Poe’s Detective C. Auguste Dupin to unravel the many seemingly unsolvable puzzles of Eureka. Poe defines ratiocination as the process of reasoning or forming accurate conclusions from known and observed premises as a method of solving complex and seemingly irresolvable mysteries. Ratiocination combines the use of considerable intellect, intuition, and creative imagination. Poe’s previous detective writing and columns on cryptography demonstrate that he was interested in posing and resolving complex problems. He created Dupin as a literary figure to solve the most complex enigmas and conundrums by using the highest form of human discovery available to the human mind. It is possible, then, that Poe wrote Eureka as a puzzle, and left obscure clues for his readers to solve like he done in his earlier cryptography newspaper columns. However, solutions to the puzzles and mysteries Poe posed in Eureka have evaded researchers and readers for almost one hundred and seventy years. In my next Poe and Science column, I will explain why I decided not to focus my M.A. Thesis research on evaluating Eureka but, instead, on the general topic of Poe and Science.

Selected Resources

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2008.

Broussard, Louis. The Measure of Poe. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.

Daniels, George.  American Science in the Age of Jackson.  NY: Columbia UP, 1968.

Levine, Stuart and Susan F. Levine.  Eureka. Eds. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Ostram, John, Ed.  The Notes of Edgar Allan Poe.  New York: Guardian Press, 1966.

Poe, Edgar Allan.  Eureka A Prose Poem. New York: George P. Putnam, 1848.

____ “Moon Notes,” Scanned copy of eight un-numbered and unordered pages handwritten by Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Richmond, VA:  MS (Museum Catalogue # 2012.2.44). Manuscript

Poe, Henry Lee. Evermore: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the Universe. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2012.

Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: A Biography. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson. Eds. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.            

##############################

 

 Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education at Temple University (1973), a Master’s of Arts in English Literature at VCU (2015), and  a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech in 1987. He is married and has three adult employed daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. Currently, he serves as a literature teacher, board member, and curriculum advisor for the Lifelong Learning Institute in Chesterfield, Virginia, and is the founder and chief editor of the literary blog, www.LitChatte.com. He is an editor for the “Correctional Education Magazine,” and editing a book of poetry written by an Indian mystic. He also serves as a board member, volunteer tour guide, poetry judge, and all-around helper at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia. You can write to Murray by leaving a Comment or at ellisonms2@vcu.edu

Murray  at the Richmond Poe Museum

                                                                               

 

 

Categories
The Poe Museum Blog

Salvador Dali Meets the Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe

May 11 marks the 112th birthday of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists, Salvador Dalí. What does the great Spanish Surrealist painter Dalí have to do with Edgar Allan Poe? More than you might think.

Dalí mentions Poe at the beginning and the end of his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. In the first anecdote, Dalí describes the cultural climate in Paris in the 1930s and how everyone was reading Poe and Marie Bonaparte’s new psychoanalytical take of Poe’s work. Bonaparte’s search for hidden Freudian meanings in Poe’s work appealed to Dalí and the Surrealists, who were trying to tap into the powers of the subconscious.

Dali painting in Virginia

At the end of Dalí’s autobiography, he describes the process of writing the book. By that time he has fled the war in Europe and is living with friends in Virginia, about an hour north of Richmond. While there, he began Daddy Long Legs of Evening—Hope! (1940), his first picture painted entirely in America, and Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940).

During his stay, newspaper accounts say Dalí visited Richmond movie theaters and museums. One of his housemates, the author Henry Miller, signed the Poe Museum’s guest book. Dalí likely also visited the Poe Museum at that time, but his signature has not been located in the guest book. After either hearing Miller’s description of the Poe Museum’s Enchanted Garden or after seeing it for himself, Dalí decorated the garden at the house at which he was staying and entitled his work “The Enchanted Garden.”

Dali’s Enchanted Garden in Bowling Green, Virginia

Whether or not Poe influenced Dalí’s landscaping, he apparently inspired the painter’s writing. In fact, Dalí claimed Poe helped him write his autobiography. According to Dalí, “on certain nights the spectre of Edgar Allan Poe would come from Richmond to see me, in a very pretty convertible car all spattered with ink. One night he made me a present of a black telephone truffled with black pieces of black noses of black dogs, inside which he had fastened with black strings a dead black rat and a black sock, the whole soaked in India ink.”

After leaving Virginia, Dalí took America by storm, producing some of his best paintings, painting celebrity portraits, and collaborating with Hollywood directors Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney. Click here to read more about Dalí’s stay in Virginia.

Dali’s painting Soft Construction in Boiled Beans (1936)