Sarah Helen Whitman

I have put on reserve three boxes of mss. by Sarah Helen Whitman, Poe's one-time fiancee, though all you need to look at is the first box.  Interesting docs, especially in the first folder in that box, I have marked with green flags.  I would like each of you to pick two letters that you are able to talk about on Tuesday. Some pics of letters (by Maria Clemm, Poe's mother-in-law; by Sarah herself; by George Eveleth; and by Sarah Robins) will be available on the website.

 

The correspondence has several interesting strands:

1) an ongoing correspondence between Whitman, Poe's one-time fiancee, and now the main defender of his reputation, and Poe's mother-in-law, who is concerned about her "dear Eddie's" legacy.  We can deduce the content of Helen's letters from Maria's often plaintive messages.  I have flagged several examples in the first folder of the first box with green flags and two letters are on the site.

2) a long correspondence, often on the verge of hysteria, between George Eveleth, a physician from Maine who is heavily into spiritualism and has visions, and Sarah Helen Whitman.  Again, we have mostly Eveleth's side of the correspondence:  Eveleth refuses to believe that Poe is really dead (he speaks about his "disappearance") and is hoping to get Sarah involved in his spiritualist pursuits, with varying success. (I have flagged two letters in the first folder).  The correspondence gets interrupted when Sarah incautiously points out certain similarities between Poe's and Eveleth's handwriting and Eveleth (though he doesn't make this explicit) apparently briefly considers the possibility that he might be Poe.  They reconcile and the correspondence picks up again, including, among other things, a long description of a little girl's death and attendant visions, which Eveleth shares with Whitman (8 November 1865).  In this letter, too, noting the news that Whitman's health is beginning to fail, Eveleth, who is concerned that she might die and then not appear post-mortem in his visions since he's never met her, also  urges a visit (I flagged the letter, in the sixth folder from the top).  One of the Eveleth letters is damaged.

3) Letters from a Poe admirer John Wood Davidson, who also takes pride in the similarity between his and Poe's handwriting (his letters get longer and longer;  Sarah for him is the medium through which he can get closer to his idol Poe).  These letters are spread out over the collection in its entirety.

4) There are also some interesting letters by a young poet from Ohio, Sarah Elizabeth Robins, who was one of the Poe's fans and went insane over her infatuation.  She read Whitman's book on Poe (Edgar Allan Poe and His Critics, 1861) and invited Maria Clemm--who was always hitting everybody up for money--to become her houseguest in Putnam, Ohio, because she, too, wanted to write a book about Poe.  Maria accepted, but Robins went insane soon after she came and had to be confined  to an asylum.   She later joined a convent and died in Putnam in 1868, aged thirty-two.  See the letter fragment Jan. 28, 1861.  I have marked the letter (it's in the 5th folder from the top of the first box).

I hope I've given you enough of a taste of this enormously rich collection to entice you to take a closer look.  Deciphering the letters shouldn't be too hard, since an archivist added typewritten transcriptions for each of them (though these are not always reliable). Again, I would like to ask each of you to pick two letters from any of these strands mentioned above or others you might discover (there are also some letters by Rufus Griswold, the chief destroyer of Poe's reputation, whom Sarah takes to task, though she then also accepts his invitation to submit one of her portraits for a poetry anthology Griswold is editing) and construct a little narrative around them:  i.e. two letters by Eveleth that show his increasing madness;  two letters by Clemm that reveal her (mis-)understanding of Poe; and so forth.   You should be able to talk about your two letters on Tuesday.  

The collection as a whole is just an incredible resource in the genealogy of literary celebrity.  The dead or not-quite-dead Poe hovers over all these letters; his spectral presence shapes, elevates, and ruins the lives of his admires decades later.