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Edgar Poe and His Critics - Scholar's Choice Edition
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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Sarah Helen Power Whitman was a poet, essayist, transcendentalist, Spiritualist and a romantic interest of Edgar Allan Poe.
Background
Sarah Helen Whitman was born on January 19, 1803 in Providence, R. I, second of three children of Nicholas and Anna (Marsh) Power. Her father became a sea-faring man and was absent once for a period of nineteen years, so that the influence of her mother dominated her in practical matters most of her life.
Education
She attended private school in Providence and for a time, when she was residing with an aunt, Mrs. Cornelius Bogert, in Jamaica, L. I. In her mature years she read widely in French, German, Spanish, and Italian.
Career
Her first poem, "Retrospection, " was published in Mrs. Sarah J. Hale's Ladies' Magazine in 1829, with the signature "Helen. " For the remainder of her life she contributed to various magazines verses and articles on religious and literary topics. She was interested especially in mystical discussions and in 1851 published in the New York Tribune articles on spiritualism, which were widely reprinted and served to extend her growing correspondence, especially with other writers. Though her first book of verse, Hours of Life and Other Poems, did not appear until 1853, she had already been generously represented in R. W. Griswold's The Female Poets of America and other anthologies, and had frequently been mentioned with praise by critics, especially by Edgar A. Poe. Helen Whitman (as she preferred to be named) is remembered chiefly as the woman to whom Poe became engaged after the death of his wife, Virginia, and to whom he wrote the second of his poems entitled "To Helen. " He first met Mrs. Whitman in September 1848. The engagement, which followed visits to Providence and a correspondence in a style of heightened romantic passion, was finally broken in December 1848, partly through the poet's instability and partly through the influence of Mrs. Whitman's mother. For Helen Whitman, Poe supplied the chief romantic experience of her life. She always held that "Annabel Lee" was his message to her, and she cherished his memory faithfully. In 1860 she published her book, Edgar Poe and His Critics, in his defense. Of her Poems, which she had collected for printing, and which were published by her literary executor, William F. Channing, in 1879, sixteen are associated with Poe and many others echo his cadences and even his words. She generously supplied to a succession of writers biographical material relating to Poe, and in the case of John H. Ingram, the English biographer, she may fairly be considered a collaborator, so copiously did she supply him with aid. After her mother's death in 1860, the care of her younger sister, Anna, who was eccentric, devolved upon her and conditioned all of her later life. Her verses "In Memoriam, " dated April 1878, show that within three months of her own death she wrote with clearness and grace. She thought of herself as frail and her use of ether was supposed to be associated with a weak heart. She died at the home of her friend, Mrs. Albert Dailey, where she lived during the short interval between her sister's death and her own, and was buried in the North Burial Ground in Providence. In 1909, The Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman was published. Two portraits of Mrs. Whitman hang in Providence. The one by Giovanni Thompson in the Athenaeum was painted when she was a widow of thirty-five; the other, in the Hay Library, by John N. Arnold was painted in 1869.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
Views
Quotations:
"I can never forget the impressions I felt in reading a story of his for the first time. .. I experienced a sensation of such intense horror that I dared neither look at anything he had written nor even utter his name. .. By degrees this terror took the character of fascination - I devoured with a half-reluctant and fearful avidity every line that fell from his pen".
Personality
She was slight and graceful in figure, quick and vivacious in movement. Her brown hair framed a pale delicately featured face with deep-set eyes. Intellectually she combined with her romantic love of the poetic and the unusual a very sane and realistic sense of the practical. Her letters reveal an honest, generous nature, tolerant and manysided but cautious and fearful of giving offense.
Connections
After her marriage to John Winslow Whitman, attorney and inventor, at Jamaica, on July 10, 1828, she lived in Boston, but after his death in 1833, she returned to Providence to live with her mother and sister. The house on the corner of Benefit and Church Streets was her home for more than forty years.