`CHAPTER 4`

New York (1844–1848)

My dear Muddy,

We have just this minute done breakfast, and I now sit down to write you about everything.

So began Poe’s first letter from New York City, written on April 7, 1844: a buoyant, detailed update to Maria Clemm, who would soon join him and Virginia there. He rhapsodized over the bounteous feasts presented to them at their boarding house: “Last night, for supper, we had the nicest tea you ever drank, strong & hot—wheat bread & rye bread—cheese—tea-cakes (elegant) a great dish (2 dishes) of elegant ham, and 2 of cold veal, piled up like a mountain and large slices—3 dishes of the cakes, and every thing in the greatest profusion. No fear of starving here.” Unless he ran out of money, of course. There are eight references to prices, buying, and borrowing in this relatively brief letter, suggesting that there may have been fear of starving in Philadelphia, a likely motivation for moving to New York. Clearly, Poe was seeking a fresh start, and the decision to relocate was a calculated gamble that he believed would pay off if he could remain frugal and sober: “We have now got 4 $ and half left. Tomorrow I am going to try & borrow 3 $—so that I may have a fortnight to go upon. I feel in excellent spirits & have’nt drank a drop—so that I hope so[on] to get out of trouble” (L 1:437–38). He would get out of trouble in New York, and then get into more trouble, following his lifelong pattern of self-sabotage. Poe would be most productive and stable when he was able to live in a rural setting outside the city, and most self-destructive when living in densely populated lower Manhattan. But lower Manhattan—specifically, the district just south of city hall, radiating from the intersection of Nassau and Fulton Streets—was the world he had come to conquer, and much of his writing over the next few years would comment directly or indirectly on his experience there.

New York’s rise as the nation’s economic and cultural capital is one of the most dramatic developments of the antebellum period. Having established itself as the national financial center in the wake of the American Revolution, the city saw unparalleled economic growth after 1825, when the opening of the Erie Canal made it the hub of commercial traffic.¹ Meanwhile, largely as a result of German and Irish immigration, the city’s population—at a time when “the city” referred only to Manhattan—soared from 123,706 in 1820 to 312,710 in 1840 to 813,669 in 1860.² Consequently, Lower Manhattan became increasingly crowded while the urban frontier moved rapidly northward, despite the temporary slowdown caused by the Panic of 1837. Less than 10 percent of the population resided above Fourteenth Street in the early 1830s, but by the end of the 1850s more than 50 percent would. Developers snatched up available land, building on what had previously been green space and creating no new parks (until Central Park was established in 1857) as the grid expanded.³ Fire and water—specifically the Great Fire of December 1835 and the construction of the Croton Waterworks, which began in 1837—changed the physical and social landscape as well. The fire and subsequent rebuilding frenzy “touched off a pell-mell flight of the wealthy” northward, according to historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace.⁴ The new mansions were the first to be outfitted for running water, provided by the system of aqueducts, tunnels, and pipes from the Croton River.⁵ The introduction of north-south rail transportation in 1831, combined with ever-increasing omnibus traffic, sped up the pace of city life and made simply crossing the street an adventure.⁶

Both foreign and domestic observers of antebellum New York were amazed at the chaotic energy and acceleration of change. Fanny Kemble described the city in her journal (published in 1835) as “an irregular collection of temporary buildings, erected for some casual purpose, full of life, animation, and variety, but not meant to endure for any length of time.”⁷ As for the buildings that did endure, their use was likely to change with the city’s demographics. “He who erects his magnificent palace on Fifth Avenue to-day,” predicted the philosopher Henry Philip Tappan, “has only fitted out a future boarding-house, and probably occupied the site of a future warehouse.”⁸ Writing in 1845, former mayor Philip Hone concurred: “Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York.… The very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century, and one generation of men seem studious to remove all relics of those who precede them.”⁹ May 1, the annual “moving day,” when leases turned over and tenants flooded the streets with all their belongings, seemed to epitomize Gotham; the very fact that such a large percentage of the city’s inhabitants lived in boardinghouses signified a population conditioned to transience.¹⁰ In the words of Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley in 1849, “Nothing and nobody seem to stand still for half a moment in New York.”¹¹ A renter like most New Yorkers, Poe had at least five different residences in Manhattan between his arrival in April 1844 and his removal to Fordham in mid-1846. Having spent most of his time in Philadelphia living on the outskirts or in nascent suburbs, he probably found the bustling, crowded streets and ever-changing landscape of lower Manhattan unnerving.

`Figure 4.1` Unknown artist, *Moving Day in Little Old New York*, ca. 1827. Poe experienced the pandemonium associated with Moving Day (May 1) and wrote about it in his journalistic series *Doings of Gotham*. (Bequest of Mrs. Screven Lorillard [Alice Whitney] from the collection of Mrs. J. Insley Blair, 2016. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.)

But Poe must have felt that New York was where he needed to be at this point in his career. Despite his success as an editor and a fiction writer in Philadelphia, after parting with George Graham and discovering Virginia’s tuberculosis, his life there had become increasingly unstable, professionally and personally. His plan to establish his own magazine had been deferred too many times to be viable in Philadelphia, where he no longer had the promise of Graham’s financial backing. The letter that opens this chapter suggests that he believed that the change of cities would help him turn a corner toward prosperity and sobriety. He already had one steady, if not exactly high-profile, assignment lined up as the “New York Correspondent” for a Pennsylvania paper, and he was sufficiently well known as a “magazinist” that he could expect to find editorial or freelance work. Most of all, it was probably the city’s gravitational pull as a publishing mecca that drew Poe in.

Almost immediately, he tested the waters of New York’s sea of print with what became known as the “Balloon Hoax.” A week after Poe wrote his effusive letter to Muddy describing boardinghouse delicacies, he published an account in the daily New York Sun of a transatlantic balloon voyage, under the headline “Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days, Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying Machine! Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, S. C.—After a Passage of Seventy-Five Hours, etc.” Of course, this voyage had not taken place; no one would even attempt a transatlantic balloon voyage for another fifteen years, and no one would succeed until 1978. However, Monck Mason (a real person) had successfully piloted a balloon from London to Weilburg, Germany, and published an account of it seven years earlier. Drawing heavily from Mason’s account, Poe made his hoax as plausible as possible, incorporating technical details from that voyage and presenting part of the story as a journal kept by the aeronauts.12 Judging from the responses of other papers, few people were taken in—in this regard, it didn’t help that the Sun had published a moon-voyage hoax several years earlier—but Poe later insisted that he had created a sensation, writing that “I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of the newspaper” (D 33).

Poe also tried his hand at a popular form of journalism with “Doings of Gotham,” written for a small-town Pennsylvania weekly, the Columbia Spy. By 1844, serialized informal reports or “letters” from the metropolis had become a thriving subgenre, as New York’s transformation fascinated both its own inhabitants and readers throughout the United States. By the early 1840s, a variety of periodicals—from the Charleston Mercury to the Cincinnati Gazette to the New England Weekly Review—featured first-person dispatches from New York (though the writers were frequently anonymous) that described personal encounters with the hustle and flow of big city life.¹³ In February 1844, the New York Herald griped about the trendiness of the form: “It seems that the various leading papers, in many of the States and large cities throughout the Union, do not think their newspaper arrangements complete, unless they have a ‘New York correspondent,’ who furnishes them with the fiddle-faddle, chit-chat-, and other small balderdash, which can be picked up on Broadway, at the bar-rooms, lobbies of the theatres, and other places of public resort in this Babylon.”¹⁴

`Figure 4.2` Soon after his arrival in New York City in 1844, Poe created a hoax describing a transatlantic balloon voyage for the *Sun* newspaper. (Harry Ransom Center, Digital Collections, the University of Texas at Austin.)

In using the phrase “chit-chat,” the Herald invoked one of the most popular magazinists of the time: Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose series “Chit-Chat of New York” was running in the National Intelligencer of Washington, DC, as well as the local New Mirror (which he edited) in 1844. Willis wrote additional series entitled “Sketches of the Metropolis” and “Daguerreotype Sketches of New York,” the latter aiming to provide with words the visual clarity and precision of the newly popular photographic process. Willis’s style was gossipy, playful, and—true to his daguerreotype metaphor—highly descriptive.15 Venturing into the “New York Letters” genre, Poe seems to have modeled his persona initially on Willis, who would soon be his employer at the Mirror.¹⁶ Though the resemblance fades over the course of “Doings of Gotham,” in the first letter Poe is clearly imitating Willis’s breezy style of journalism:

It will give me much pleasure, gentlemen, to comply with your suggestions and, by dint of a weekly epistle, keep you au fait to a certain portion of the doings of Gotham. And here if, in the beginning, for “certain,” you read “uncertain,” you will the more readily arrive at my design. For, in fact, I must deal chiefly in gossip—in gossip, whose empire is unlimited, whose influence is universal, whose devotees are legion;—in gossip, which is the true safety-valve of society—engrossing at least seven-eighths of the whole waking existence of mankind. (D 23)

The emphasis on gossip, the elevated language (“epistle”; “au fait”), and the rhetorical apology for his own lack of serious purpose all evoke Willis’s trademark persona: a loquacious, cosmopolitan dandy.

Poe was either unable or unwilling to sustain the effervescent tone, but over seven installments he mixed random notes on the literary and publishing scene with other “doings” around town. When not commenting on literary New York, he discussed miscellaneous topics including footraces, peep shows, architecture, political campaigns, blue laws (he was against them), the latest telescope, the presidential election, and an expedition to the South Pole. Having just moved from Philadelphia, Poe made occasional references to his recent home, but he neither declared nor implied any moral judgment about New York through these comparisons, other than to point out that Gotham was generally dirtier than its rival to the south. Poe joined the chorus of commentators on the rapid pace, and particularly the pace of change, in New York:

A day or two [ago] I procured a light skiff, and with the aid of a pair of sculls, (as they here term short oars, or paddles) made my way around Blackwell’s [now Roosevelt] Island, on a voyage of discovery and exploration. The chief interest of the adventure lay in the scenery of the Manhattan shore, which is here particularly picturesque. The houses are, without exception, frame, and antique. Nothing very modern has been attempted—a necessary result of the subdivision of the whole island into streets and town-lots. I could not look on the magnificent cliffs, and stately trees, which at every moment met my view, without a sigh for their inevitable doom—inevitable and swift. In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see here nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves. (D 40–41)

When twenty-first-century readers imagine Poe, he’s usually not paddling on the East River contemplating the transformation of his physical environment. And yet he probably did make this trip, and, in any case, he was comfortable adopting the persona of someone who did. Poe seems to have known that this sort of excursion, these sentimental observations—on the changing cityscape, the destruction of anything old—were generic conventions of the “New York Correspondence.”

“The city is thronged with strangers,” Poe wrote in his second letter, “and everything wears an aspect of intense life” (D 31). Poe likely moved house on May 1, experiencing firsthand the day’s notorious chaos, to which he alluded in his first letter: “We are not yet over the bustle of the first of May. ‘Keep Moving’ have been the watchwords for the last fortnight. The man who, in New York, would be so bold as not to peregrinate on the first, would, beyond doubt, attain immortality as ‘The Great Unmoved’—a title applied by Horne, the author of ‘Orion,’ to one of his heroes, Akinetos, the type of the spirit of Apathy” (D 24). Not surprisingly, Poe sympathized with the mythical “Great Unmoved” amid the constant motion of New York. He also praised the “unspoiled” parts of the city—foreshadowing Whitman, he referred to it by the indigenous American name “Manahatta”—and disapproved of “improvement.” He described the “shanties of the Irish squatters” as “picturesque” and lamented the impending doom of old wooden mansions: “The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath,” he wrote. “Streets are already ‘mapped’ through them, and they are no longer suburban residences, but ‘town-lots.’ ” Elsewhere he complained that “in some thirty years every noble cliff will be a pier, and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brown-stone, or brown-stonn, as the Gothamites have it” (D 26).

Poe was particularly distressed by new architectural developments in Brooklyn (not yet incorporated into New York City), which he described in his fifth letter. “I know few towns which inspire me with so great disgust and contempt,” he wrote, mainly because of the new style of houses being built there: “What can be more silly and pitiably absurd than palaces of painted white pine, fifteen feet by twenty?” (D 59) In his earlier story “The Business Man,” one of Peter Proffitt’s scams was to build shanties next to fashionable new palaces, enticing his neighbor to pay him to move his “eyesore”; the Poe of “Doings of Gotham” clearly preferred the “eyesore,” as he condemned the architects of “Brooklynite ‘villa’s” to hell: “I really can see little difference between putting up such a house as this, and blowing up a House of Parliament, or cutting the throat of one’s grandfather” (D 60).¹⁷ He was not terribly enamored of Brooklyn’s street vendors, either. They made life noisy, as did inferior stone pavement—although for that problem, Poe had a solution:

Of the stereatomic wooden pavement, we hear nothing, now, at all. The people seem to have given it up altogether—but nothing better could be invented. We inserted the blocks, without preparation, and they failed. Therefore, we abandoned the experiment. Had they been Kyanized [that is, chemically treated], the result would have been very different, and the wooden causeways would have been in extensive use throughout the country.… In point of cheapness, freedom from noise, ease of cleaning, pleasantness to the hoof, and, finally, in point of durability, there is no equal to that of the Kyanized wood. But it will take us, as usual, fully ten years to make this discovery. In the meantime, the present experiments with unprepared wood will answer very well for the profit of the street-menders, and for the amusement of common-councils—who will, perhaps, in the next instance, experiment with soft-soap, or sauer-kraut. (D 61–63)

Like the gossipy introduction and the paddling adventure quoted earlier, this excerpt might stump some readers who think they know Poe’s writing when they see it. Did Poe really care this much about street paving? About “pleasantness to the hoof”? Perhaps he did—he spent a lot of time walking the city streets, so it is not surprising that, almost a year later, in the Broadway Journal, he would again hold forth on the subject, not merely reprinting the long paragraph quoted above but expanding his claims on behalf of chemically treated wooden pavement. As Poe’s most extensive writing about his experience in the city, “Doings of Gotham” defies our expectations of a “Poe-esque” style, at least partly because he was experimenting in a form that was new to him. Not surprisingly, the Willis-inspired tone of the first letter quickly gave way to the voice of a stodgy and somewhat cranky Knickerbocker, exasperated by Brooklyn architecture and bad pavement.

Sometime in May or early June, as Poe was writing the “Doings of Gotham” letters, he moved with Virginia and Maria to a farm owned by Patrick and Mary Brennan, a 216-acre parcel off Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) near present-day Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street. This relocation made sense to the Poe-Clemm trio: it would be healthier for Virginia to live away from the city, and the Brennans almost certainly offered more space at a lower cost than Poe could have secured in Lower Manhattan.¹⁸ Though they stayed at the Brennan farm less than a year (probably seven or eight months), it was Poe’s longest residence in Manhattan. We know relatively little about Poe’s life with the Brennans, but the available evidence presents an intriguing scenario: during a pivotal period in his career, Poe chose to live about five miles north of what constituted the city and about six miles from the hub of periodical publishing. Poe was in New York and yet outside of New York, remote and secluded at a time when he was clearly not trying to remove himself from the publishing world. Throughout his residence with the Brennans, he wrote steadily—prodigiously, in fact—while planning the next step in his career.

`Figure 4.3` Archival photograph, from about 1890, of the house at Brennan Farm, blended with a photograph of the approximate location at West Eighty-Fourth Street and Broadway. (Archival photograph of Brennan Farm House, Eighty-Fourth and Broadway, 1879, #84696d, courtesy of the New York Historical Society.)

`Figure 4.4` Approximate location of “Brennan Farm,” where Poe completed “The Raven” in 1844.

According to Mrs. Brennan, Poe loved life in the country; as she told the early Poe biographer William F. Gill, “When not at his favorite seat by the river’s brink, he would place himself at one of the front windows, and with Virginia by his side, watch for hours the fading glories of the summer evening skies.” From his writing table, “[Poe] could look down upon the rolling waters of the Hudson and over at the Palisades beyond. It was a fitting dwelling for a poet, and though not far from the city’s busy hum, the atmosphere of solitude and remoteness was as actual, as if the spot had been in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.”19 The Brennans’ son-in-law, who never met Poe but recalled his mother-in-law’s somewhat romanticized stories about him, added details for a newspaper story published in 1900: “It was Poe’s custom to wander away from the house in pleasant weather to ‘Mount Tom,’ an immense rock, which may still be seen in Riverside Park, where he would sit alone for hours, gazing out upon the Hudson. Other days he would roam through the surrounding woods and, returning in the afternoon, sit in the ‘big room,’ as it used to be called, by a window and work unceasingly with pen and paper, until the evening shadows.”²⁰

Poe had moved to New York to advance his publishing career, and yet here he was living on a farm, physically detached from the swarm of magazine and newspaper offices in the city. He could have traveled downtown by omnibus, essentially a horse-drawn streetcar; in fact, he wrote a satiric article about omnibus travel for a Philadelphia newspaper that summer (“A wet umbrella and a dirty dog are useful in a full omnibus. When you enter and leave, tread upon the company’s toes” [T 2:1091]).²¹ But he probably walked more often than he rode, since walking was free and omnibus transport, only a little faster, required a fare.²² Around October, Poe began working for N. P. Willis and George Pope Morris’s Evening Mirror at 105 Nassau Street, which likely increased the frequency of these treks. Google Maps estimates what would have been Poe’s walk at an hour and fifty-four minutes today; it probably took less time before the advent of automobiles and traffic lights, but, still, it is hard to imagine Poe covering that much ground in less than eighty or ninety minutes. By contrast, the Spring Garden home where the Poe family had lived in Philadelphia for the year prior to their removal to New York was semirural but still only about a twenty-minute walk to that city’s center of publishing.

By the 1840s, American men with careers based in northeastern cities were beginning to embrace suburban living—“country life within city reach,” as Willis himself represented it.²³ But the genteel lifestyle epitomized by Washington Irving’s celebrated “Sunnyside” estate and Willis’s “Idlewild” presumed an income that could sustain home ownership and the cost of commuting by steamboat, rail, or carriage. Poe may have aspired to this suburban ideal, but in 1844 he lived a poor man’s version of it. Moreover, Poe’s letters from Brennan Farm strongly suggest that he saw himself as isolated, not within comfortable reach of the city. On July 10 he told his correspondent Thomas Holly Chivers, “You will find me here—at New-York—where I live, [at] present, in strict seclusion, busied with books and [ambiti]ous thoughts” (L 1:453). Writing to his friend Frederick W. Thomas in September, he explained: “I have left Philadelphia, and am living, at present, about five miles out of New York. For the last seven or eight months I have been playing hermit in earnest—nor have I seen a living soul out of my family” (L 1:457). Finally, toward the end of his time with the Brennans, in early January 1845, he explained again to Thomas: “I do not live in town—very seldom visit it—and, of course, am not in the way of matters and things as I used to be.… In about three weeks, I shall move into the City, and recommence a life of activity under better auspices, I hope, than ever before. Then I may be able to do something” (L 1:475).²⁴ The slight inconsistencies in these references to his location are intriguing. To Chivers he is at New York but in strict intellectual seclusion, as if it is the mode of life he has chosen for himself. To Thomas he is outside New York. In the September letter he exaggerates the length of his hermitage, while in January he probably exaggerates in saying that he “seldom” visits the city. In fact, since he was now writing editorial filler for the Evening Mirror, he must have made frequent treks downtown. Furthermore, what seems like a deliberate choice in July comes across as an obstacle or as frustration in January. The limited available evidence suggests that Poe enjoyed and benefited from “playing hermit” even though he was increasingly frustrated by his physical separation from the hub of his profession.

`Figure 4.5` An 1844 map of New York City, with developed areas shaded. Brennan Farm, where Poe, Maria, and Virginia lived throughout the second half of 1844, is literally off the map, well beyond the developed portion of the grid. The locations of Poe’s three known residences in 1845 to early 1846 are marked. (“Plan von New-York, 1844,” Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library Library Digital Collections.)

When Poe referred to “better auspices,” he was probably thinking of his delayed magazine project, the other consistent theme of his letters from Brennan Farm. In his letter to Chivers, he described himself as “busied with books and ambitious thoughts, until the hour shall arrive when I may come forth with a certainty of success. A Magazine like Graham’s will never do. We must do something far better” (L 1:453). When he asked his friend Charles Anthon to help convince Harper & Brothers to publish a collection of his tales, he explained book publication was merely a means to that end; it would place him in “a far more advantageous position … in regard to the establishment of a Magazine” (L 1:471).

While still dreaming of his own magazine, Poe kept busy writing. In addition to “Doings of Gotham”—which he discontinued at the end of June—and his work for the Evening Mirror, he wrote, for various periodicals, satirical essays (one on urban transportation, another on cats), an article to accompany an engraved illustration of Byron and his niece Mary Ann Chaworth, and the first installments of a series for the Democratic Review called “Marginalia.” This last was both column-filler and another experiment in journalistic personae, as Poe adopted the pose of a distinguished man of letters whose marginal annotations, presumably gleaned from a vast personal library, are rich with wit and insight—an idealized version of the rural literary “hermit” role he was playing in real life.

He also continued to publish a variety of fiction throughout 1844 and early 1845. In the second half of 1844, he published seven stories, written either just before or just after moving to New York: the spooky half-essay/half-tale “The Premature Burial”; the gothic love story “The Oblong Box”; “Mesmeric Revelation,” a hoax that gave serious consideration to postmortem consciousness; a comic detective story, “Thou Art the Man!”; two broad comic spoofs, “The Angel of the Odd” and “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.”; and his intricate third and final story featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin, “The Purloined Letter.”25 Another tale from this period, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” revolves around inmates taking control of an asylum. It might have been inspired partly by his previous residence near Eastern State Penitentiary, though, at Brennan Farm, between the supposed completion of the manuscript and its publication, Poe was only a short walk from the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, located near present-day Columbia University. Two more satirical stories, “Some Words with a Mummy” and “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade,” were written at Brennan Farm and published in early 1845. This flurry of activity, both writing and seeing his work into print, solidifies the impression that Poe was in fact very busy—and, according to the Brennans, sober—throughout his semiseclusion, and that he was building a resume in New York with an eye to starting his own magazine. Dupin’s characterization of his rival, the Minister D______, in “The Purloined Letter” might apply to Poe himself at Brennan Farm: “Perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive—but that is only when nobody sees him” (T 2:990).

And yet two items written by Poe around this time reveal his cynicism toward the enterprise through which he hoped to achieve lasting renown. His bitter editorial on the need for international copyright, “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” offers a simple explanation for the popularity of the medium and the poor pay for authors: American firms would not publish American books when they could pirate popular British titles. Even so,

it would not do (perhaps this is the idea) to let our poor devil authors absolutely starve, while we grow fat, in a literary sense, on the good things of which we unblushingly pick the pocket of all Europe: it would not be exactly the thing comme il faut, to permit a positive atrocity of this kind: and hence we have Magazines, and hence we have a portion of the public who subscribe to these Magazines (through sheer pity), and hence we have Magazine publishers (who sometimes take upon themselves the duplicate title of “editor and proprietor,”)—publishers, we say, who, under certain conditions of good conduct, occasional puffs, and decent subserviency at all times, make it a point of conscience to encourage the poor devil author with a dollar or two, more or less as he behaves himself properly and abstains from the indecent habit of turning up his nose. (T 2:1207)

Poe then proceeds to tell the story of one “poor devil author” who starves to death while waiting for payment from a magazine owner, who buys a meal of canvasback duck and champagne with the money saved. In the more jocular “Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” the fictional memoirist is a no-talent hack whose signature poem is a two-line ode to hair tonic. Thingum Bob claims to have risen to the top of the magazine world through “diligence,” though his narrative reveals that his ability to navigate the shifting politics of literary coteries is his only marketable skill—and yet it is all he needs. Clearly, Poe still identified with the poor devil authors who struggled to survive while the Thingum Bobs of the world became rich and famous. And yet Poe may have believed that he was about to join the ranks of the editor-proprietors and one-trick poets he liked to ridicule.

Probably sometime during his last months in Philadelphia, Poe had written a draft of a narrative poem about a grief-stricken man visited by an ominous black bird. According to one former Graham’s employee, he tried to sell the poem to his former boss, who rejected it but took up a small charitable collection for him.²⁶ After moving to New York, Poe revised and may have expanded the poem at Brennan Farm, then sold it to the American Review, a recently launched New York magazine. Part of the considerable lore surrounding the poem concerns the trifling payment Poe received from the Review: probably between nine and fifteen dollars.²⁷ However, there is no record of Poe complaining that he was inadequately compensated in this case; clearly more interested in the poem’s circulation than in direct remuneration, he arranged with his boss N. P. Willis to publish it in the Evening Mirror days in advance of its appearance in the Review. Willis not only printed the poem but introduced it as being “unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift and ‘pokerishness’ [that is, spookiness].… It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it” (P 361). He was right: “The Raven” was an instant sensation, and Poe would be closely identified with the poem not only for the rest of his career, but for all time.

Mrs. Brennan and her son-in-law promoted the idea that, while working on “The Raven,” Poe gained inspiration from the farmhouse’s upstairs chamber, where he worked. According to General O’Beirne, a bust of Pallas sat on a shelf above the door, and the Brennans’ daughter Martha, O’Beirne’s future wife, arranged the manuscript pages that Poe tossed to the floor as he revised.²⁸ I want to avoid both the convenient conclusion that country air and hospitality gave Poe the peace of mind to transform the early version that Graham rejected into his masterpiece, and a simple identification of Poe, writing “The Raven” in the Brennans’ upstairs room, as the poem’s speaker in his chamber surrounded by forgotten lore. And yet … Poe clearly felt isolated from the everyday life of his profession, even as he was writing and publishing at a brisk pace. “The Raven” features an excess of “inner” activity—the speaker’s grief-inspired fantasies about the meaning of the bird’s appearance and repeated utterance—within the virtual absence of “outer” or physical action, especially remarkable for a popular narrative poem. It is not only about loss but also about seclusion, setting up an invasion of privacy that is simultaneously dreaded and welcome.

While it dramatizes a private episode, “The Raven” was designed for public consumption: to be read aloud, on a stage, as Poe himself did many times. Indeed, there is little doubt that Poe knew he had written a blockbuster. Before its publication, he shared the poem with his friend and fellow poet William Ross Wallace, declaring it “the greatest poem that was ever written.”²⁹ Poe later told his friend F. W. Thomas that he “wrote it for the express purpose of running,” that is, being widely circulated (L 1:505). The poem “ran” quickly through New York and throughout the country, with parodies appearing almost immediately. The poet Elizabeth Oakes Smith recalled that in early 1845 “the Raven became known everywhere, and everyone was saying ‘Nevermore.’ ”³⁰ Like the volume of tales he hoped Anthon would convince the Harpers to publish, “The Raven” was likely, in Poe’s calculation, a means to his ultimate end: the high-quality magazine that he would control, and that would make him financially independent. In this sense “The Raven” does mirror Poe’s working life at Brennan Farm in its productive tension between the psychic comfort of privacy and the need to go public; the poem is a showy tour de force about interior experience.

About a week before the publication of “The Raven,” Poe enjoyed a publicity bump in the form of a biographical article by James Russell Lowell, prominently placed in Graham’s Magazine. Lowell, who was friendly with Poe at the time, told him that he wrote the article “to please you rather than the public,” and Poe certainly must have been pleased. Lowell described Poe’s “genius” as a combination of “vigorous yet minute analysis” and “a wonderful fecundity of imagination.” He acknowledged Poe’s critical severity—a trait Poe actually prided himself on—and suggested that the remedy for the overly caustic reviews would be for Poe to control his own magazine. The one-two punch of Lowell’s article and “The Raven” seem coordinated, especially considering that Poe’s friend and employer Willis advertised both, conspicuously republishing the biography in the Evening Mirror and adding, “We wonder, by the way, that, with so fine a critic at command for an editor, some New York publisher does not establish a Monthly Review, devoted exclusively to high critical purposes.”³¹

In short, Poe was making his move toward fulfilling his magazine dream in early 1845, which required making another kind of move, leaving the Brennan Farm for a residence in Lower Manhattan—specifically, 154 Greenwich Street, on the eastern edge of what is now the World Trade Center complex. Like all of New York in the 1840s, this neighborhood between Broadway and the Hudson River was in transition; as the area became increasingly commercial, the residences that remained were cheaper and less desirable than those to the north, near and above Washington Square.³² But it was a convenient location: Poe now lived within ten minutes’ walking distance of virtually every publishing office in the city. He was also living close to New York’s more affluent literati, and, after the publication of “The Raven,” they were eager to make his acquaintance. The writer Henry Tuckerman described Poe’s visit in early 1845 to a gathering at the home of physician and socialite John W. Francis, where he was known only by reputation:

The expression on [Francis’s] face, as he left the room betokened the visit of a celebrity; in a few moments he ushered into the room a pale, thin, and most grave-looking man, whose dark dress and solemn air, with the Doctor’s own look of ceremonious gravity, produced an ominous silence, where a moment before, all was hilarity; slowly conducting his guest around the table, and turning to his wife, he waved his hand, and, with elaborate courtesy, made this unique announcement: “The Raven!” and certainly no human physiognomy more resembled that bird than the stranger’s, who, without a smile or a word, bowed slightly and slowly.³³

Similarly, at the Greenwich Village home of the popular author and editor Caroline Kirkland, “there was great curiosity to see the writer of that wonderful poem,” according to another witness.³⁴ Poe began attending literary salons hosted by the poet and socialite Anne Charlotte Lynch, where established New York writers of both sexes mingled and recited poetry. These genteel, nonalcoholic events encouraged Poe’s best behavior and, for a while, enhanced his reputation.

He was also courted by “Young America,” a New York–based movement promoting literary and cultural nationalism, spearheaded by the Democratic Review and its editor, John O’ Sullivan (best known for coining the phrase “manifest destiny”). It was an unlikely alliance: although he never committed himself to partisan politics, Poe was particularly no Democrat, as he distrusted what he would call “mobocracy” associated with the party of Andrew Jackson. While in Philadelphia, he had sought a government job through connections with the son of president John Tyler, a Whig. As for literary nationalism, Poe had consistently opposed promoting novels and poems on the basis of their American content or patriotic themes, and yet he did share common ground with Young America on the need for international copyright, which would supposedly encourage the publication of more American-authored works.³⁵ During his brief association with the group, Poe editorialized on behalf of the copyright cause; in return, their pundits promoted him. Not coincidentally, Poe’s first book publications in five years—Tales and The Raven and Other Poems—were included in Wiley and Putnam’s patriotically titled Library of American Books series, edited by another leader of the Young America movement, Evert Duyckinck.

As another sign of Poe’s new renown, on February 28, 1845, an audience of about three hundred turned out to hear him lecture on “The Poets and Poetry of America” at the Society Library, Leonard Street and Broadway. Duyckinck, among others, promoted the event: “What mode of discussion Mr. Poe will adopt, we cannot pretend to say; but the lecture will differ from anything he has ever done before, if it do[es] not prove novel, ingenious, and a capital antidote to dullness.”³⁶ The lecture was a turning point for Poe’s fortunes in New York, yet it exemplified his career-long tendency to sow calamity from the ground of success. At this moment Poe was as well known and well regarded as he would ever be in his lifetime, lecturing at a prestigious venue with a hit poem ringing in everyone’s ear. The lecture was covered by numerous local magazines and newspapers, with mostly favorable assessments, particularly from writers already in his corner. And yet, building on his reputation as an exacting critic, Poe, somewhat predictably, dispensed more censure than praise, singling out a number of celebrated poets for criticism and suggesting that one of them, the beloved Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, borrowed excessively from other poets. Poe had made a similar claim against Longfellow in Burton’s in 1840, but now he seemed intent on a full-scale campaign. In a recent review in the Mirror he had insinuated, with no real evidence, that Longfellow was a plagiarist, and he doubled down on the claim at the Society Library. Whether Poe was just following his own instincts and literary principles, or he truly believed that there was no such thing as bad publicity, he was overstepping: a potentially libelous campaign against Longfellow was not the way to endear himself to the very people who could help sustain his current popularity and realize his long-delayed monthly magazine. Even though Poe had made his pre-“Raven” reputation as a “Tomahawk Man,” and even though he could play the scrappy Gothamite to Longfellow’s privileged Brahmin Harvard professor, he should have known that his one-sided “Longfellow War” would damage only his, not Longfellow’s, reputation.

The day after Poe’s lecture, the Evening Mirror published a long letter—signed “Outis” (Greek for “nobody”)—refuting Poe’s charge against Longfellow and insinuating that Poe himself was a plagiarist. Scholars disagree over whether Poe wrote the “Outis” letter himself, but even if he didn’t create his own sparring partner, he enjoyed having one. He responded to Outis with a lengthy article in the Broadway Journal, a new weekly paper, and continued his disquisition on Longfellow and the nature of plagiarism over the next four issues, with an addendum in Thomas Dunn English’s magazine the Aristidean. Poe’s relentless war with Longfellow created yet another sensation, but his charges were virtually groundless; Longfellow, taking the high road, never responded in print.³⁷ Mutual friends of the two authors were puzzled: George Rex Graham wrote to Longfellow, asking, “What has ‘broke loose’ in Poe?” and James Russell Lowell similarly distanced himself from the writer he had recently lauded.³⁸ Meanwhile, Boston papers began publicly mocking the famous author of “The Raven.”³⁹

Around the same time that Graham was wondering what had broken loose in Poe, his former employee sent him an article—half essay, half fiction—that might have offered a clue. “The Imp of the Perverse” develops an idea Poe had hinted at in “The Black Cat” a few years earlier: that human beings commonly experience a “perverse” or irrational desire to do what we know we should not. As Poe describes it, the “Imp of the Perverse” is not so much an urge to violate the law or a moral code as an urge to subvert our own designs, a self-destructive tendency. After several pages of discursive, quasi-philosophical commentary on his theory, the article shifts to a condensed narrative similar to “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.” The erudite philosopher we have been listening to (and assuming to be the author) has himself committed the perfect crime, having killed his victim with a poisoned candle. Days later, while inwardly congratulating himself, he encounters his own “imp”: he thinks to himself, “I am safe—I am safe,” but then adds, “Yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!” (T 1225) With that thought, his fate is sealed, as he cannot control his own impulse to confess and ensure his own execution. By analogy, at the moment Poe achieved the kind of success that should have given him control of his own magazine and his own career, he began undermining that very success, as if listening to his own imp.

As Poe carried out his Longfellow campaign, he was also becoming more involved with a new weekly paper, the Broadway Journal. Launched in January 1845 by the popular fiction writer C. F. Briggs and publisher John Bisco, the sixteen-page Journal covered literature and other arts, primarily (though not exclusively) focused on New York. Briggs chose the name, he said, “because it is indigenous, and furthermore is indicative of the spirit which we intend shall characterize our paper. Broadway is confessedly the finest street in the first city of the New World. It is the great artery through which flows the best blood of our system.”⁴⁰ The Broadway Journal was housed near City Hall, a block north of the Mirror’s offices and about half a mile from Poe’s Greenwich Street residence. Briggs was greatly impressed with Poe, who began contributing reviews with the first issue; in March he made Poe a coeditor, along with Briggs himself and art critic Henry C. Watson. But by the summer Briggs, Poe, and Bisco were already embroiled in a power struggle. Poe had not worn well on Briggs, who complained of his drinking and general selfishness. But it was Briggs who was either pushed out or left, and in October Poe suddenly became sole editor and co-owner with Bisco, then bought out Bisco with borrowed money. Somewhat unexpectedly, Poe had finally gained control of his own periodical, but the weekly paper, though respectable, fell short, and was now falling even shorter, of the high-quality literary monthly he had been planning for years. More urgently, it was losing money, which is probably why Poe’s partners were willing to leave it in his hands. As sole “editor and proprietor,” Poe was unable to save the Journal; after a brief partnership with another investor and desperate efforts to sustain the operation—twelve- to fourteen-hour workdays, borrowing money from anyone who would lend—Poe folded the paper one year after its inception, three months after taking it over.

Though Poe had worked hard in the final months to keep it afloat, the Journal’s demise had been hastened by his inability to stay sober after moving back downtown. As had been the case in Philadelphia, drinking damaged his reputation: in April, the Town, another New York weekly, included in a satirical list of forthcoming books “A treatise on ‘Aqua Pura,’ its uses and abuses, by Edgar A. Poe … to be issued at the Broadway Journal office.”⁴¹ Briggs complained repeatedly about Poe’s drinking, and Lowell, meeting Poe in person for the first time in May 1845, found him “a little tipsy, as if he were recovering from a fit of drunkenness, & with that over-solemnity with which men in such cases try to convince you of their sobriety.”⁴² Visiting from Georgia, the poet Thomas Holley Chivers met Poe for the first time that summer and found him by turns either drunk or recovering from a bout of drunkenness.⁴³ By the time of Chivers’s visit, the family had moved again, this time about a mile and a half west to 195 East Broadway on the Lower East Side—less central than lower Greenwich Street, but probably cheaper and also quieter. Within a few months, though, Poe would move yet again, settling in Greenwich Village at 85 Amity (now West Third) Street, just south of Washington Square—a building that remained standing until 2002, when it was razed by New York University. Poe might have left the East Broadway house because of a dispute over rent, or inability to pay; he later wrote that “I did not leave it on very good terms with the landlady” (L 1:591). The family’s new lodgings were small and modest, but they were in a more respectable neighborhood. In fact, Anne C. Lynch, who hosted the literary salons Poe attended throughout 1845, lived just a few blocks away on Waverly Place.⁴⁴

The frequent moves underscore Poe’s general instability following the sudden success of “The Raven,” and he was never more unstable than when he was away from home altogether. In October, having been invited—through Lowell’s efforts—to present a new poem at the Boston Lyceum, Poe ignited another war of words. Finding himself unable to compose a new work, Poe read his long poetic fantasy “Al Aaraaf,” first published in 1829 and temporarily renamed “The Messenger Star.” Accounts of his performance that evening vary, but he seems to have acquitted himself reasonably well and could have gone back to New York relieved either that no one noticed he was recycling an old poem or that no one cared. Instead, upon his return, Poe began boasting in the Journal of having “quizzed” (conned) the Bostonians by delivering an incomprehensible “juvenile poem,” and claiming that the undiscriminating Lyceum audience loved it. As he had done during the Longfellow War, he used the Broadway Journal as a platform to spar with the Boston literary establishment, this time represented by Cornelia Wells Walter, editor of the Evening Transcript. At one point Poe made the self-contradictory jab, “We like Boston. We were born there—-and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact” (E 1086). For her part, Walter dished out disparaging puns on Poe’s last name and took at least one dig at his reputation for drunkenness. When he solicited “support” for the Journal from its “friends,” she quipped sarcastically, “What a question to ask! Edgar A. Poe to be in a condition to require support! It is indeed remarkable.”⁴⁵

Meanwhile, Poe was no longer endearing himself to the New York literary circle that had embraced him upon the success of “The Raven.” Chivers recalled Poe staying home, pretending to be sick, to avoid having to deliver a poem to “one of the Literary Societies of the City.”⁴⁶ More seriously, in early 1846 Poe found himself at the center of scandal involving his relationships with women writers he had encountered through the literary salons. In March 1845, he met Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, a popular poet married to a society portrait painter. Attracted to each other, Poe and Osgood wrote—and published—flirtatious poems, whose intended recipients would have been obvious to any discerning reader as well their own circle. For instance, the Broadway Journal, with Poe’s name on the masthead, published a poem by Osgood that alludes to Poe’s poems “Israfel” and “The Raven,” describing a secret love:

I know a noble heart that beats

For one it loves how “wildly well!”

I only know for whom it beats;

But I must never tell!

Never tell!

Hush! Hark! How Echo soft repeats,—

Ah! Never tell!⁴⁷

In early 1846, another salon habitué, Elizabeth Ellet, visited Poe’s house in Greenwich Village and saw what she considered a compromising letter from Osgood to Poe. Osgood later claimed that she had nothing to hide; moreover, she was friendly with Virginia Poe, and was known to visit the Poes at their home on Amity Street.⁴⁸ Yet, at Ellet’s urging, Osgood sent a pair of emissaries, journalist Margaret Fuller and poet Anne C. Lynch, to retrieve her letters. Poe was taken aback by this visit and retorted that Ellet should be more concerned about retrieving her own letters to him, a remark that escalated the squabble. By the time this soap opera had run its course, Poe had gotten into a fistfight with his sometime friend Thomas Dunn English, after English refused to lend him a pistol to defend himself from Ellet’s outraged brother. Poe managed to escape the scandal without further violence, but he and English, whose relationship was already on shaky ground, became bitter enemies.

Poe had hoped that the publicity from Lowell’s biographical profile and, even more, the success of “The Raven” would lead, finally, to his establishing a high-quality monthly magazine, and the literary stature that came with it. Whether he moved downtown specifically to be near the Broadway Journal office or just to be in close contact with the publishing world, he was there in pursuit of that goal. Sadly, Poe’s plan fell just short: the Journal was not the Stylus, his literary battles with New England did not make him a champion of the New York literati, and personal networking opportunities eventually fell prey to bouts of drinking and scandal. After a highly productive 1844, Poe wrote little fiction or poetry in 1845, occupied as he was with book and theater reviews, the Longfellow War, and other editorial work for the Journal. In this year in which he had achieved his greatest fame, he earned only about seven hundred dollars (roughly equivalent to twenty thousand dollars today).⁴⁹ With the Journal’s collapse, an exhausted Poe must have seen that it was time for another removal from the city.

For Valentine’s Day, 1846, Virginia wrote a poem for Edgar, an acrostic spelling out his name with the first letter of each line, expressing not only her love but also her wish for the future:

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.⁵⁰

As they had done two years earlier, the family moved north of the developed portion of Manhattan, this time to Turtle Bay, near the East River. Poe, Virginia, and Maria might have lived briefly with the Brennans again before boarding with the Miller family, whose riverfront property was located on what is now part of the United Nations headquarters, near Forty-Seventh Street. The Millers’ son and daughter—nine and twelve years old at the time, respectively—both provided fond reminiscences many years later, the only record of Poe’s having lived there. The daughter described them as near neighbors who would “frequently call on us,” Poe sometimes borrowing a boat so that he could row out to the islands south of Blackwell’s to swim. The son claimed that Poe actually lived with the Miller family, having “prevailed upon my parents to accommodate him until he could find a place where they could keep house for themselves.”⁵¹

The place the Poe family eventually found, in May or thereabout, was much farther north, in Fordham: part of the new township of West Farms, in what would become known later in the nineteenth century as the Bronx. For less than nine dollars a month, Poe rented a small cottage on a triangular acre of land, about ten minutes’ walk from a recently established stop on the New York and Harlem railroad line. The area was lightly populated, but thanks to the railroad it was beginning to attract development, including the houses of some wealthy families.⁵² It was, by all accounts, bucolic: the property on which the cottage sat was bounded on one side by an apple orchard, there were other fruit trees in the yard, and the nearest neighbor was the recently founded St. John’s College (which became Fordham University in the twentieth century). One visitor, J. H. Hopkins, later recalled Poe complimenting the Jesuit priests of St. John’s as “highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars” who “smoked, drank, and played cards like gentlemen, and never said a word about religion.”⁵³ The cottage, which was about thirty years old, was small and sparsely furnished, but tidy, thanks to Muddy Clemm’s diligence. Trains arrived at and departed from Fordham six times daily, with service to city hall, near the center of publishing. Poe could have commuted regularly, but at this point he had no place of employment, little money for train fare, and apparently little inclination to make frequent trips to the city, preferring to send Muddy to solicit or deliver manuscripts, or to collect payment. He claimed to be, and probably was, ill much of the time, and he was also preoccupied with Virginia’s worsening condition.

But, even from Fordham, Poe continued to stir controversy, most conspicuously with a new series for Godey’s Lady’s Book called “The Literati of New York City.” Published in Philadelphia, Godey’s was the highest-circulation monthly magazine in the United States, so Poe had a big national stage for his pronouncements on local literary personalities. “The Literati” was an immediate sensation—not for the admiring sketches Poe offered of authors such as the Reverend George Bush or Caroline Kirkland, but for his score-settling takedowns, particularly of his former Broadway Journal partner C. F. Briggs in the first installment and former friend Thomas Dunn English in the second. After accusing English of plagiarizing poetry, Poe dismissed his ability as a magazine editor: “No spectacle can be more pitiable than that of a man without the commonest school education busying himself in attempts to instruct mankind on topics of polite literature” (E 1166–67). As a final, gratuitous taunt, Poe pretended not to know English personally, despite their long history. The first installment sparked a run on the May 1846 Godey’s; New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley told a friend that “every copy is bought up in the City. I have applied twice without success.”⁵⁴ Advertising the June issue, publisher Louis A. Godey promised to reprint the first “Literati” along with the second because “we have had orders for hundreds from Boston and New York which we could not supply.”⁵⁵ In June, English struck back hard in the pages of the Evening/Weekly Mirror, which was no longer under N. P. Willis’s Poe-friendly editorial control. In addition to resurrecting the Osgood-Ellet affair and Poe’s embarrassing attempt to borrow a gun for self-defense, English characterized his antagonist as a drunkard, “unprincipled, base, and depraved,” and accused him of having committed forgery and having obtained money (from English himself) under false pretenses. After another published exchange, Poe filed suit against the Mirror’s owners for libel.

`Figure 4.6` Poe’s cottage in Poe Park, the Bronx. In 1913, the house was moved a short distance from its original location in order to preserve it.

`Figure 4.7` The interior of the Bronx Poe Cottage as it appears today.

With the October issue of Godey’s, the “Literati” series had run its course, but the controversy hadn’t. Throughout 1846 rumors had already been spreading, in print, that Poe was mentally ill. English depicted him as crazed as well as drunk through a thinly veiled caricature—a character named Marmaduke Hammerhead, known for his poem “Black Crow”—in his novel 1844, or the Power of the S. F., serialized in the Mirror. Word got out regarding the Poe family’s current state of poverty, which led to some sympathetic, but also sanctimonious, editorial comments in the New York papers.

In the same issue of Godey’s that concluded the “Literati” series, Poe published his most enduring story from this period, “The Cask of Amontillado.” Appropriately, it is a fantasy of revenge, in which a fallen member of an aristocratic social circle entombs his more prosperous rival—the not-so-subtly named Fortunato—by outsmarting him, using reverse psychology and manipulating his victim’s pride in his own expertise in wine. Feigning concern for Fortunato’s health, the less fortunate Montresor tells him, “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as I once was. You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter” (T 2:1259). While this brilliant tale can’t be reduced to a fictionalized rendering of Poe’s relationship with English or any other member of the New York literati, Montresor’s thirst for revenge, his proclaimed motivation of honor barely concealing his jealousy, resonate with Poe’s literary battles. Yet some part of Poe may be glimpsed not only in the ingenious killer but also in the victim, whose undoing is a drunken quest for another bottle of wine.

The demise of the Broadway Journal, the Longfellow War, the Osgood-Ellet scandal, the infamy of the “Literati” series: Poe was careening from one controversy to the next while trying to maintain a peaceful home life in Fordham. But, despite its pastoral setting, the Fordham cottage was hardly an escape, as Virginia lay dying throughout Poe’s professional misadventures. Finally, on January 30, 1847, five years after her symptoms first became apparent, Virginia’s suffering ended. Edgar, distraught, remained in near-seclusion in Fordham for the rest of the year, except for a midsummer trip to Washington and Philadelphia. He received expressions of sympathy and assistance from friends and admirers, but in his grief he became even more estranged from the city’s literary scene. Enlisted that fall by an elocution instructor to write “something suitable for recitation embodying thoughts that would admit of vocal variety and expression” (P 410), Poe delivered “Ulalume,” a poem as sonically hypnotic as “The Raven,” treading the same thematic territory. But the two poems make for very different reading experiences: while “The Raven,” immediately accessible, nearly gallops as its speaker’s anguish builds to a near frenzy, the repetition and alliteration in “Ulalume” create a slow, viscous movement:

The skies they were ashen and sober;

The leaves they were crispéd and sere—

The leaves they were withering and sere:

It was night, in the lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year:

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

In the misty mid region of Weir:—

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. (P 415–16)

The speaker, joined by “Psyche, my soul,” is guided by “Astarte’s bediamonded crescent”—either the planet Venus or some star of love. In this dreamscape, the speaker repeatedly suggests that there is something portentous about this “night of the year,” and Psyche warns him not to follow Astarte’s light, but, by the poem’s end, he finds himself at the grave of his lost love Ulalume on the anniversary of her burial. Of course, the speaker should have known where he was going, but his journey ends in anguish, the verbal repetition now fraught with sorrowful meaning:

Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber—

This misty mid region of Weir:—

Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber—

This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. (P 418)

Making the most of its elocutionary-lesson sound effects, the murky, dreamlike confusion of this poem of sorrow, written in the months after Virginia’s death, viscerally conveys the sensation of grief, the inevitability of returning to that place of sorrow and loss.

Not long after Virginia’s death, Poe was awarded $225 in his libel suit against the Mirror. He needed the money, but the ruling was hardly vindication in the eyes of the literary community, since Poe had, in a sense, trolled Thomas Dunn English, resorting to a lawsuit in the midst of a verbal battle he had instigated. Poe had all but given up writing fiction (“Cask” being the notable exception) and poetry (nothing significant since “The Raven” in early 1845), devoting most of his energy to the “Literati” series and reviews for Godey’s Lady’s Book. That trend away from fiction continued after Virginia’s death, as he turned his attention to something completely different: his theory of the universe, a lecture and treatise that he would title Eureka. Poe posited that the universe originated in an event much like a big bang, and argued that, having expanded to its limit, gravity would pull everything back, and then the process would repeat: “A novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine” (EU 103). Published in mid-1848 by G. P. Putnam, the 143-page cosmology did not sell well, but Poe still regarded it as his crowning achievement; a year after its publication, he would tell Maria, “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more” (L 2:820).

Indeed, Eureka temporarily reenergized Poe: in a February 1848 letter to his friend George Eveleth in which he outlined the essay’s argument, he also declared himself sober and in good health, acknowledging that his reputation might suggest otherwise:

My habits are rigorously abstemious and I omit nothing of the natural regimen requisite for health:—i.e.—I rise early, eat moderately, drink nothing but water, and take abundant and regular exercise in the open air. But this is my private life—my studious and literary life—and of course escapes the eye of the world. The desire for society comes upon me only when I have become excited by drink. Then only I go—that is, at these times only I have been in the practice of going among my friends: who seldom, or in fact never, having seen me unless excited, take it for granted that I am always so. Those who really know me, know better.… But enough of this: the causes which maddened me to the drinking point are no more, and I am done drinking, forever. (L 2:648)

Poe might have overstated the division between his wholesome private life and his behavior while “among friends,” but visitors to Fordham supported his claims of sobriety there. For air and exercise, he frequently walked along the High Bridge, which spanned the Harlem River as part of the Croton Aqueduct system that brought water to Manhattan.56

Four years after his optimistic letter describing the bountiful boardinghouse fare, Poe had come to see the city, correctly, as hazardous to his health, perhaps as much as it had been for Virginia’s. The primary “cause” that he referred to in his letter to Eveleth was almost certainly Virginia’s long, ultimately fatal illness; a year after her death, he could reasonably believe that he was making a healthy new start, but it’s telling that he expressed no desire to return to Manhattan. Meanwhile, he renewed his efforts to establish the Stylus and began lecturing again, with a Eureka-based talk on “The Universe” at Society Library in February 1848. For the moment, Poe seemed stable and content in his retreat across the Harlem River. His past four years in New York had been among the most tumultuous of his life, as he moved in and out of the city while creating one sensation after another, trying to conquer the literary capital of the nation. As was so often the case, he had come tantalizingly close before his goal fell out of reach.