“His jealousy of other writers amounted to a mania.”
—Frederick Saunders, Poe’s publisher
Edgar Allan Poe had many unwilling sparring partners. His early favorite was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow had done nothing in particular to piss off Poe other than outselling him, being an esteemed professor, and having a rich wife.
Initially Poe had called Longfellow a genius and begged him for an endorsement of his work so “my fortune will be made.” When Longfellow declined, Poe dismissed him as “the GREAT MOGUL [his caps] of the Imitators” and a plagiarist.1
Henry played rope-a-dope with Edgar, stoically taking his most devastating shots and saying only, “Life is too precious to be wasted in street brawls.”
Beside himself, Poe threw haymakers at his rival’s Poems on Slavery, saying they were written “for the especial use of those negrophilic old ladies of the north, who form so large a part of Mr. LONGFELLOW’s friends.”
Returning to his corner at the bell, the father of Horror cooled down. He then counted himself one of his opponent’s “warmest and most steadfast admirers” and regarded him as “the principle American poet.” Ignoring the olive branch, Henry still stubbornly refused to endorse Edgar’s work.
Poe soon traveled to Boston to deliver his lecture “On Reason.” Receiving a chilly reception from Bostonians, he called everyone in the audience a plagiarist. He then took a carriage across town to the Lyceum to read “The Raven,” only to realize, en route, that he’d forgotten to pack his popular poem. So he recited it by heart with some stammering and hyperventilation. As audience members walked out, he hectored the stage, cackling that he had “demolished” the Walden “Frogpondians.”
Back in New York, Poe courted patronesses while his wife/cousin, Sissy, was in the last stages of TB at home. He boasted that one, Mrs. Ellet, was sending him love letters. She charged him with libel and enlisted gentlemen to protect her honor. Poe hurried to his colleague, T.D. English, asking to borrow his pistol.
T.D. had recently published a parody of “The Raven.” Poe felt that the least he could do, by way of making amends, was to lend him a piece to protect himself against Mrs. Ellet’s champions. But English insulted him again, suggesting that he apologize to the widow. Poe had recently finished “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which his hero, Montresor, making good on his motto—“Nemo me impune lacessit” (No one insults me with impunity)—buried his rival, Fortunato, alive.
Instead of walling up T.D. in a wine cellar, Edgar boasted that he “gave English a flogging which he will remember to the day of his death… [and] had to be dragged from his prostrate, rascally carcass.”
English had a different take on the bout. He said he flattened the poet’s nose with a signet ring punch, sending him “to bed from the effect of fright and the blows he received from me.”
Poe wrote “Literati,” a caricature of the work and physical peculiarities of English and his allies. After its publication, the author announced his plans for a sequel, “American Parnassus,” which would discredit the entire American literary population. According to biographer Kenneth Silverman, he vowed that the title would be “a culmination of his work as a critic, aesthetician, and tastemaker.”
Rebutting “Literati” in The New York Evening Mirror, magazine publisher Charles Briggs described his former editor and book critic as a self-confessed forger and a loan cheat. Adding insult to injury, Briggs described Poe as: “5 feet 1. … His tongue too large for his mouth … his head … of balloonish appearance.”
The poet sued the Mirror for libel, insisting that his character was unimpeachable. Furthermore, he described himself as 5 feet 8, English a dwarf by comparison, and the Mirror’s owner, Hiram Fuller, “a fat sheep in reverie.”
Two years later, Poe was in a Baltimore ER watching, according to his physician, Dr. Moran, “spectral and imaginary objects on the walls.” In a brief moment of coherence, he told Moran “the best thing my best friend could do would be to blow out my brains with a pistol.”
The next day he muttered, “Lord help my poor soul” and expired.
On a raw, cloudy Baltimore morning, the poet was buried beside the father who had abandoned him as an infant. Only a few attended the brief service. His aunt, whom he called Mother, was not present, nor his supposed fiancée, Elmira, nor English.
“This death was almost a suicide,” said his admirer and translator, Baudelaire. “A suicide prepared for a long time.”
1 Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).