Poe’s 1845 Boston Lyceum Appearance Reconsidered

Until as recently as the 2009 bicentennial celebrations of his birth, Edgar Allan Poe was best known to most students, general readers, and aficionados as a son of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, New York, and even Sullivan’s Island, but usually not of Boston. Even now, when Poe is associated with the city of his birth, it is usually because of the “bad reputation” that he earned as a result of his one-sided war of words with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his subsequent October 16, 1845, appearance before the Boston Lyceum, an event that drew mixed reviews but whose aftermath tainted Poe’s professional and personal reputation. According to Major Mordecai Manuel Noah of The Sunday Times and Messenger,

This event, which took place at the pinnacle of “The Raven’s” annus mirabilis, was a well-documented “disaster” for Poe,^[2] but not entirely, as I will suggest, for the reasons usually cited. While I would not go so far as to say, as Sidney Moss asserts in Poe’s Literary Battles, that this incident, combined with some others, “cause[d] Poe’s downfall as a critic,”^[3] I would argue that it brought to the surface Poe’s conflicting feelings about the city of his birth. Rather than confirming Poe’s animosity toward the city of Boston, its authors, and its institutions, the event instead reveals Poe’s desire not only to appear before a Boston audience but also to be accepted by that audience as a Bostonian. When Poe’s motivations and anxieties are taken into consideration, the Boston Lyceum appearance reveals Poe’s desire to reclaim his birthright.

If Major Noah’s account had been the final word on the incident, Poe’s Boston Lyceum lecture would have attracted little attention thereafter. However, according to Poe’s post facto account in the Broadway Journal, his poem, “Al Aaraaf,” renamed “The Messenger Star” for the occasion, was intended as a “hoax,” or “quiz,” on the Bostonians. According to Cornelia Wells Walter of the Boston Evening Transcript, Poe’s performance was an absolute “failure”; according to later biographers, the event revealed Poe’s “sad inability to cope any longer with the affairs of this world,”^[4] and it served as yet another example of the “Imp of the Perverse,” in which Poe was seeking simultaneously to please and to irritate his audience.^[5] By other accounts, it constituted a “public relations fiasco” that “damaged his already eroding reputation” by trying “to launch another literary war of words, like the Longfellow episode.”^[6] While these critical assessments attest to Poe’s professional failure on this occasion, I would like to consider his personal failure: that is, Poe’s failure to attain what he most desired that evening—acceptance in the city of his birth by an audience of Bostonians.

Poe’s Boston Lyceum appearance was not itself disastrous, despite the assertions of reviewers, including Walter, who zealously “poh”ed Poe’s performance, and others, such as Thomas Dunn English, who berated him for accepting the Boston Lyceum’s money and insulting his distinguished audience by delivering a “mass of ridiculous stuff” when his “want of ability” prevented him from delivering a new poem as expected.^[7] What was disastrous for Poe was his reaction to his critics in the first issue in his new capacity of editor and proprietor of The Broadway Journal, in which he admits to having prefaced his reading with “an apology for not ‘delivering,’ as is usual in such cases, a didactic poem: a didactic poem, in our opinion, being precisely no poem at all. After some farther words—still of apology—for the ‘indefinitiveness’ and ‘general imbecility’ of what we had to offer—all so unworthy of a Bostonian audience,”^[8] remarks aimed both at the poetry of Longfellow and the followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Poe noted furthermore that his poem was well received, more so than the lengthy discourse of Mr. Caleb Cushing, but that, before the evening concluded, he was prevailed upon to accept the invitation to deliver “The Raven,” which he did to more applause. As if it were not already enough, Poe launched into a diatribe on Boston and the “soul-less” Bostonians:

Poe would subsequently take the disingenuous position that he substituted “Al Aaraaf” as a “hoax” upon an audience that could not appreciate one who had magnanimously “enlightened” them on the poetry of Longfellow and whose aims were Beauty, not Truth.

Poe’s published account is a mixture of fact and fiction, more especially of hyperbole intended to draw more attention to the incident and to bait his readers to respond. Poe confesses to a “hoax,” which undermines his own credibility, and he fabricates details about his poem, such as its date of composition, claiming that it was written when he was scarcely ten years old, when in fact it was written while he was serving as an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army. Poe writes that he does not consider the poem “a remarkably good one,” but he clarifies this statement to suggest that Transcendentalists would not consider it to be a “good” poem.^[10] Though uneven, Poe’s poem is a serious composition written in an epic style that includes lyrical passages, such as the song “Ligeia,” which impressed several members of his audience that evening, most notably the young Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then an undergraduate at Harvard College. Higginson recorded his memories in more than one publication, later recalling the poem in a testimonial he sent to the organizers of the 1876 Baltimore monument committee, and including the selection below in his chapter on Poe in his Short Studies in American Authors:

Higginson gives a full account of that evening and notes that “it was not then generally known, nor was it established for a long time thereafter—even when he had himself asserted it,—that the poet himself was born in Boston; and no one can now tell, perhaps, what was the real feeling behind the apparently sycophantic attitude” that Poe expressed in his introductory remarks, in which he anticipated “criticism of the Boston public.”^[12] However, concerning Poe’s recitation of the lines above, Higginson wrote that “[Poe’s] voice seemed attenuated to the finest golden thread; the audience became hushed, and, as it were breathless; there seemed no life in the hall but his; and every syllable was accentuated with such delicacy, and sustained with such sweetness, as I never heard equalled by other lips.”^[13] He concludes his account with the admission that on the way back to Cambridge from Boston, Higginson and his classmates felt they had been “under the spell of some wizard.”^[14]

Poe’s professed “shame” over having been born in the city and his dismissive estimation of his “juvenile” poem and its inappropriateness for this audience do more to raise questions than to produce answers. Ottavio Casale convincingly notes that just as Poe’s enemies effectively had “trivialized” Poe’s Lyceum appearance, more importantly, Poe himself trivialized his selection of “Al Aaraaf”: indeed, “Instead of being a perverse choice, the reading of ‘Al Aaraaf’ was probably a deliberate attempt to impress” his audience.^[15] Furthermore, Daniel Hoffman argues, “‘Al Aaraaf’ is very ambitious. It is Poe’s most ambitious failure.”^[16] Although it contains epic qualities that Poe would attack in “The Philosophy of Composition,” it is what Hoffman calls “the best he ever did in the line of Jumbo Productions.”^[17] It is a poem, moreover, that draws seriously upon the poetry of both Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Milton in an effort to create a mythological place “out of space, out of time,” a realm beyond this world of suffering, that only the vates, or poet-prophet, can imagine and relate to his audience. The epic scope of Poe’s youthful vision in “Al Aaraaf” would not be seen again until the publication in 1848 of his prose-poem Eureka. Nevertheless, Poe was prepared for the worst: if the poem should go unappreciated, as it apparently did, then Poe could, and would, call attention to its having been a “juvenile” poem, even going so far as to claim that he had written it earlier than he had in order to save face by having been a child prodigy and to ridicule a “cultured” audience for not having been able to recognize the poem as that of a child.

What has probably not been misread is Poe’s self-destructive, even “perverse,” reaction to the event, which did little to enhance his reputation even as it sold magazines (though not enough to save The Broadway Journal from folding in less than a year). Any unconscious desire Poe may have had to win the approbation of the Bostonians was irrevocably dashed as a result of this episode. But why would Poe sabotage himself in such a colossal way on this occasion? What could have contributed to his strange behavior that evening and his “perverse” reaction to his critics in the wake of his performance?

Already having delivered a lecture earlier that year on “The Poets and Poetry of America” before the New York Historical Society in which he criticized the didacticism of such revered New England writers as Longfellow and Charles Sprague, Poe knew to anticipate a chilly reception in Boston. That he was unable also to compose a new poem for the occasion, as expected by the Boston Lyceum planning committee, surely added to Poe’s anxiety. Nevertheless, Poe wanted to come to Boston. Although he does not mention the fact in his own account of the lecture, Poe, in 1844, had actively sought the influence of his then friend James Russell Lowell to secure an invitation from the Boston Lyceum to appear on one of that year’s programs. The chairman was unable to grant Lowell’s request at the time, but he assured Lowell that an invitation could be extended to Poe during the following year. Poe went out of his way to mention publicly that he had been “invited” to “deliver” a poem, and he was very likely honored finally to have received the invitation from this respectable institution. However, Poe was featured second on the program, following the Honorable Caleb Cushing, former four-term representative from Massachusetts and late ambassador to China. While both speakers were expected to draw sizable crowds, Cushing was better known to the general public and therefore given top billing that evening, with his name appearing above Poe’s in the local papers. As was increasingly commonplace in Lyceum series by the 1840s, one speaker would provide the primary “substance” while the other would provide the “entertainment.” One can only speculate as to how Poe would have regarded his status that evening.

Cushing’s lecture, which began at 7:30 p.m., lasted for more than two hours without intermission, and so Poe’s “delivery” was delayed until at least 9:30 or 10:00 p.m. It is therefore understandable that some people began to leave the auditorium midway through Poe’s delivery, especially considering that Poe began with a “preface” in which he rehashed old complaints about didacticism in American literature and “apologized” that his poem was not sufficiently didactic for the tastes of Bostonians, before commencing his reading of “Al Aaraaf.” Even if Poe believed “Al Aaraaf” to be a worthy poem (based on his own estimation and that of Lowell and John Neal, critics for whom Poe had considerable respect), as it seems clear that he did, it is remarkable given the late hour and Poe’s “preface” that the majority of the audience remained in their seats to the bitter end. Had Poe not taken the bait of his critics and had he not attempted to bait them in return, had he let his “delivery” stand on its own merits, the Boston Lyceum incident would probably take up no more than a paragraph in Poe biography, at the most, and a footnote, at the least. That they had been edified by Cushing’s political observations and exotic anecdotes and entertained by “The Raven” himself, who was prevailed upon eventually to recite his signature poem, would have been enough to convince most of the audience that the evening had been well worth the cost of admission. The problem, though, was that Poe did not like to be regarded as “second fiddle” or, worse, as the “sideshow.”

Why would this consideration matter to Poe, who was used to the cutthroat world of early nineteenth-century American print culture? Why would it matter to one who believed that almost any publicity is good publicity, even when one’s own character is damaged? Perhaps his pride was wounded when he was selected as second to Cushing, when perhaps Ralph Waldo Emerson, a favorite of the Boston Lyceum planning committee, would not have been. But Poe had managed to obviate any perceived advantage that Cushing had over him (at least in his own mind) by stating publicly that his performance had received more applause than the former ambassador’s. Perhaps Poe was hoping to make a name for himself in the city that prided itself on its considerable literary and intellectual talent of such writers as Longfellow, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, or perhaps he was hoping, finally, to break in to the center of American literary culture and to expose the cliques that seemed to have a monopoly on the production and promotion of American literature. Perhaps Boston was home to the Muses and to their favorite sons and daughters, but Boston was his home, too; it was Edgar Poe’s birthplace. This consideration, that Poe was a Bostonian and even saw himself as such on some level, I believe to be the most significant and the least appreciated piece of the puzzle.

Boston was the city where Poe’s parents, David and Elizabeth Poe, had performed on stage. It was, more importantly, the city that his mother, Eliza, had commended to Poe, as recorded by Marie Louis Shrew Houghton in her journal, on the back of a watercolor she left to him upon her death: “For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best, and most sympathetic friends.”^[18] Indeed, Poe cherished this watercolor, titled “Boston Harbour, morning, 1808,” along with the few other items left to him by his mother, until his death. Poe also valued the miniature that she left to him and a copy of the novel Charlotte Temple, despite its sentimentality, because it had once belonged to her.^[19] Given Eliza Poe’s feeling about the city of Boston, it is especially significant that the Odeon, where Poe delivered his poem to the Boston Lyceum, was originally the Boston Theatre, where his parents had performed when they lived in Boston from 1806 to 1809 and where his mother continued to perform until the time of Poe’s birth.

According to the Boston Athenaeum Theater History Database, the building—which was located on the corner of Federal and Franklin Streets and designed by the noted architect Charles Bulfinch—opened its doors on February 3, 1794. Although the original Federal Street Theatre burned down four years later, it was quickly rebuilt, served as a theater until 1835, and was converted to a public hall, which was renamed the Odeon. Figure 4.1 shows the Boston Theatre—also known as the Federal Street Theatre—as it looked in the early nineteenth century. It was at this theater that Poe’s parents performed at the time of Poe’s birth in 1809. Figure 4.2 shows the same building, renamed the Odeon, as it looked between 1834 and 1852, when Poe delivered his Boston Lyceum lecture there in 1845. The hall had been remodeled and leased for a period of years by the Boston Academy of Music,^[20] and it later served as a popular venue for such events as the Boston Lyceum lecture series until it was reopened as a playhouse under its old name in 1846. The building was demolished in 1852.^[21] Thus, Poe delivered his poem on the very stage on which his mother had performed to great acclaim.^[22] Of all of Poe’s biographers, only Mary E. Phillips notes that “the Odeon was one of several later names given Old Federal Street Theatre, upon which stage Poe’s parents played so often and the last time during the spring of 1809,” but neither she nor later biographers have pursued the potential implications of this fascinating connection.^[23]

Geddeth Smith writes that the Federal Street Theatre was the first stage upon which the young Eliza Poe performed as a girl when she came to America with her mother (Poe’s grandmother),^[24] the English actress Elizabeth Arnold, and it was the stage where Eliza and David Poe would perform together until David’s disappearance from Eliza’s life and the lives of their children. It was also the last stage upon which Eliza performed in Boston prior to Edgar Poe’s birth, which means that Edgar was on that stage in utero even before he was born. Because of the watercolor left to him and the knowledge that his mother (indeed, his parents and his grandmother) had performed regularly there, Poe would have associated Boston with his mother, her successes, her struggles, and her love for the city. Poe expresses his love for his mother in the following tribute, included in one of his theater reviews:

When Poe left the household of John and Frances Allan for the final time in 1827, it makes sense that he would have traveled to Boston to become a published poet, not only because Boston was a major publishing center but also because it was where his parents’ theatrical career had flourished (or floundered, as the case may be), and in spite of John Allan’s outspoken dismissal of Poe’s poetic aspirations and the unrespectable career of his “real” parents. One can only speculate, as Arthur Hobson Quinn does in his authoritative critical biography, that it is likely that Poe would have sought out opportunities to join an acting troupe in the city.^[26] As enticing, though unsubstantiated, as that prospect may be, it seems very likely that the young Poe at least would have sought out some of the venues, or former venues, associated with his parents when he was in Boston. Poe was employed as a clerk in Boston’s wharf district, and his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, By a Bostonian, was published by Calvin F. S. Thomas on 70 Washington Street, which was within easy walking distance of the theatre district. While Poe’s failure to achieve fame and financial security eluded him, leading him to enlist in the U.S. Army under the name of Edgar A. Perry at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor, his self-identification as “a Bostonian” is significant in my view, not only for what it would have meant to him in 1827 but also for what it would have meant to him in 1845 when he was invited to deliver a poem to the Boston Lyceum. Though he may not have known beforehand that the particular venue would be the auditorium formerly known as the Federal Street Theatre, when the venue was announced or when he actually arrived in Boston he surely would have realized that this was, indeed, the very stage upon which his mother had performed before an adoring crowd. That he could not expect the same degree of affection or adoration from his Bostonian audience would have been a profound source of anxiety for one who openly despised but inwardly desired Boston’s approval. That anxiety would likely have grown more acute the longer he waited for Caleb Cushing’s oration to conclude and for his own turn on stage to arrive.

Poe has been charged with having contempt for the city of Boston, largely based upon his overblown rhetoric in the aftermath of his 1845 Lyceum lecture, thus contributing to his “bad reputation.” It is true that Poe identified Boston with writers who embodied the literary establishment, but his notion of the literary establishment extended beyond Boston more broadly to New England as well. His so-called hatred of Boston has taken on undue proportions, I think, based upon the documentation associated with the Boston Lyceum incident. However, Poe had enough vitriol to go around; Boston was simply the most conspicuous target for his critical tomahawk. By taking Poe’s hyperbolic statements about Boston at face value (a dangerous thing to do, as anyone familiar with Poe’s exaggerations and prevarications can attest), we run the risk of undervaluing Boston’s significance to Poe, both professionally and personally. Poe takes such an extreme position toward the city of his birth in his journalistic writing because it does matter to him: it was his mother’s city, the city that he should love, the city that was the “Athens of America,” and in an ideal sense, the place that should recognize and promote real literary merit. However, it is “Frogpondia” according to Poe’s public persona, a place where critics are too loudly croaking to hear themselves croak and croaking to praise the works of their friends. But Boston was not alone: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and even Richmond were all guilty of this, and the kind of “puffery” that Poe denounced in others (and was, at times, himself guilty of producing), was the practice that was preventing American literature from rising to the heights of which it was capable. Poe denounced Longfellow more because he viewed his work as derivative than because he thought his literary borrowing, or downright plagiarism, to be the mark of Cain. Poe saw the possibility of originality in American letters in a way that his contemporaries could not, and he “clear[ed] the GROUND” for it, as William Carlos Williams would later write,^[27] in his own creative and critical work. A century later, Williams convincingly observed, “Poe gives the sense, for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.”^[28] At the same time, though, Poe undermined his own project by placing himself above others, by picking unworthy and unnecessary battles in New England and elsewhere around the country, and in the case of Boston, by failing to realize that the “home” that he sought, the final end that was his beginning, the Boston that his mother Eliza had loved so well, never was and never would be the Boston of his imagination. Poe’s Boston remained as elusive as the dark beauty of his elegiac verse, as dim and distant as “Al Aaraaf.”

Notes

The Sunday Times and Messenger, October 26, 1845.

For the most recent critical perspectives on Poe’s Boston Lyceum appearance, see Katherine Hemple Brown, “The Cavalier and the Syren: Edgar Allan Poe, Cornelia Wells Walter, and the Boston Lyceum Incident,” New England Quarterly 66, no. 1 (March 1993): 110–23; Kent P. Ljungquist, “Poe’s ‘Al Aaraaf’ and the Boston Lyceum Contributions to Primary and Secondary Bibliography,” Victorian Periodicals Review 28, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 199–216; Kent P. Ljungquist, “‘Valdemar’ and the ‘Frogpondians’: The Aftermath of Poe’s Boston Lyceum Appearance,” Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 181–206; and Eric Carlson, “Poe’s Ten-Year Frogpondian War,” Edgar Allan Poe Review 3, no. 2 (2002): 37–51.

Sidney P. Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of his Literary Milieu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963), 190.

Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1926), 2:662.

Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 267.

James M. Hutchisson, Poe (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 184–85.

From The Evening Mirror (1846); qtd. in Allen, Israfel, 664.

The Broadway Journal, November 1, 1845, 2:261R–262R, in The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 3, ed. Burton R. Pollin (New York: Gordian Press, 1986), 297–99.

Ibid.

10.

Interestingly, Poe resisted Transcendentalism while simultaneously sharing some of its central concerns. In “Naysayers: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville” (in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson et al. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 597–613), Richard Kopley identifies Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville as “naysayers” who set themselves in opposition to the “prelapsarian vision” of Emersonian Transcendentalism by offering a “postlapsarian corrective” that more fully acknowledges the “darker side of humanity” (597). According to Kopley, Poe criticized Transcendentalism for its “verbal obscurity, its naïve reformism, and its inadequacy”; although Poe was interested in the Transcendent, “‘Frogpondian’ (or Bostonian) Transcendence could be, in his view, problematic” (597). Kopley concludes that Poe “evidently believed in a balance regarding the condition of humanity, a view that shaped his judgment of the Transcendentalists’ faith in utopian achievement” (599).

11.

From Edgar Allan Poe, “Al Aaraaf,” qtd. by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Short Studies of American Authors (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1880), 14.

12.

Ibid., 13.

13.

Ibid., 14.

14.

Ibid., 15. Apparently, Poe cast a lasting spell on Higginson, who nearly thirty-five years later adds, “Indeed, I feel much the same in retrospect, to this day” (15).

15.

Ottavio M. Casale, “The Battle of Boston: A Revaluation of Poe’s Lyceum Appearance,” American Literature 45, no. 3 (November 1973): 423.

16.

Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 36.

17.

Ibid., 37.

18.

Qtd. in John Carl Miller, Building Poe Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 121.

19.

Kevin J. Hayes, “More Books from Poe’s Library,” Notes and Queries 55 (December 2008): 457.

20.

See Abel Bowen, Bowen’s Picture of Boston, or the Citizen’s and Stranger’s Guide to the Metropolis of Massachusetts, and Its Environs, 3rd ed. (Boston: Otis, Broaders and Company, 1838), 71–73 and 187–93. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Catharina Slautterback, Curator of Prints and Photographs, Boston Athenaeum, for her expert assistance in locating images of the various façades of the Boston Theatre, later the Odeon, located on Federal Street. The representation of the “Odeon” printed in Bowen’s Picture of Boston (opposite p. 188) is the only image of which she is aware that shows the building’s façade as it looked between 1834 and 1852, when it was razed.

21.

For the best short history of the Boston, or Federal Street, Theatre, see the Boston Athenaeum Theater History Database, created by Rebecka Persson, Rare Material Cataloger, Boston Athenaeum, at http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/node/224.

22.

On the cultural implications of the fact that Poe’s Lyceum lecture took place on the stage where his parents had performed, see Paul Lewis and Dan Currie, “The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and the City of Boston,” an exhibition at the Boston Public Library, December 17–March 31, 2010. While I consider how an awareness of the connection could have affected Poe’s anxiety level at the time, Lewis and Currie emphasize the connection between anti-theater Puritan laws and highbrow Frogpondian aesthetic views in their exhibition.

23.

Mary E. Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man (Chicago: John C. Winston Co., 1926), 2:1054.

24.

Geddeth Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 85.

25.

The Broadway Journal, July 19, 1845, 2:29L, in The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin (New York: Gordian Press, 1986), 3:176; qtd. in Smith, 133.

26.

Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1941; Rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 118.

27.

William Carlos Williams, “Edgar Allan Poe,” from In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956), 216.

28.

Ibid.