I

Edgar Allan Poe proves an interesting study from the point of view of psychoanalysis. He has been analysed by pathologists and psychologists, but there remains much to be said about the work of this baffling genius. I can take up only a few phases of the pathetic life and great work of Poe.

One question that has interested critics is, what was the source of those mysterious ladies in his stories, the Ligeias, the Morellas, the Eleonoras? What made him so preoccupied with the subject of the death of beautiful women long before his own wife died? All this brings us to a little emphasised chapter in Poe's life, the history of one of his love affairs before he married Virginia Clemm. Its influence on his work has hardly ever been noted by critics, and yet the effect was of great importance.

Poe lost his parents when he was an infant, and he was adopted by Mr. Allan. He loved the mother of a friend of his, Mrs. Stannard, and when she died (he was 15 at the time), he was inconsolable. But the history of this boyish love is not fully known to us. As a boy of sixteen he loved Sarah Elmira Royster, whom he again met later in life and to whom he became engaged shortly before his death. At about the age of twenty or thereafter he loved his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Herring, and wrote several poems to her.

The real clue to Poe's life and work is furnished in an article, "Poe's Mary," that appeared in Harper's Magazine for March, 1889, by Augustus Van Cleef. It reports a conversation with a woman who was Poe's sweetheart and who rejected him. Her name is now known to us as Mary Devereaux. The main facts of the article have not been questioned by his biographers. The substance of the interview is this: Mary Devereaux met Poe through a flirtation. Her memory did not serve her as to the date, which she put in 1835. But since Poe was betrothed to Virginia that year, and had been betrothed to her for some time, the date was probably 1832, as the author of the article surmises, though Killis Campbell believes the year was 1831. Mary returned the poet's love, and he called on her almost every evening for a year. She jilted him, and Poe horsewhipped a relation of hers as being responsible for his loss. He wrote for a Baltimore paper a poem of six or eight verses expressing his indignant sentiments. This passion continued with Poe, buried in his unconscious, even after he married Virginia Clemm. The day before Virginia died, in 1847, Mary was at the Poe household, and Virginia said to her: "Be a friend to Eddie, and don't forsake him; he always loved you—didn't you, Eddie?"

There is an account in the article of a scene that occurred in the spring of 1842. Poe tried at the time to see Mary, who was then a married woman, at her home in Jersey City. He reproached her and shouted that she did not love her husband, and he tried to force her to corroborate his words. He had been inquiring for her, and made up his mind he would see her even "if he had to go to hell" to do it. When he saw her, he was somewhat soothed, and she sang to him his favourite song, "Come Rest in This Bosom." She had sung this for him in the early days, and also at a visit she paid him in Philadelphia not long before his Jersey City visit. After this episode at her home the poet was found in the woods wandering about like one crazy.

Mary Devereaux scoffed at the idea that the poet's child wife was the great passion of his life. It was always known, in spite of Poe's tenderness for Virginia, that he never found intellectual companionship in her. Poe married Virginia in May, 1836, when he was 27 and she 14 years old. He was living in 1833 with the Clemms in Baltimore, and had taken out a marriage license on September 22, 1835, but Virginia was then too young for marriage.

The relation of Mary to his work will soon appear. I wish to show first that the splendid love poem, To One in Paradise, appearing in the tale The Assignation, was, with the story, inspired by Mary. Visionary, the original title of The Assignation, appeared with the poem in January, 1834, in Godey's Lady's Book, and hence was written in 1833, or before. It was among the tales submitted in the prize contest that year in which Poe was successful with one of his stories. When Poe later obtained employment on The Southern Literary Messenger, he reprinted here some of his tales; this tale was reprinted in July, 1835. The clue comes now. In the same number of the Messenger there is a poem entitled To Mary, by Poe, beginning, "Mary amid the cares—the woes," which in sentiments and ideas is but another version of To One in Paradise in the Visionary. This poem To Mary appears in Poe's poetical works under the title To F——. He reprinted this poem, which was originally written to his love Mary, in Graham's Magazine for March, 1842, and changed the first line and called the poem no longer To Mary, but To One Departed, very suggestive of the To One in Paradise. Poe, who would make a poem written to one lady serve, by a few changes in its text, for another later woman friend, gave this poem its present title, To F——, when he reprinted it in the 1845 Broadway Journal in honour of the poet Frances S. Osgood, whom he met that year.[H]

If we compare To One in Paradise with To F—— there will be no doubt that they were inspired by the same person and written at the same time, 1833, when the affair with Mary was over. In both poems references are made to his sweetheart being an isle in the sea and covered with flowers over which the sun smiles. In each poem mention is made of the desolate condition of the poet who derives happiness from living in dreams connected with her. To F—— is not as perfect as the other, but the idea underlying each poem is the same. The sonnet To Zante also has the same imagery, and was written, no doubt, at the same time to Mary.

To One in Paradise is supposed to be written by the lover in the story Assignation, in which it appears. It will be recalled that the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite in that tale had written the poem in a volume of Politian's tragedy, a page of which was blotted with tears. Poe is that lover and Marchesa Aphrodite is Mary. But we know also that Poe is the author of the poem Scenes from Politian, which was written about the time he loved Mary. It was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in December, 1835. In these scenes Poe identified himself with Politian, who loves Lalage and asks her to fly to America. "Wilt thou fly to that Paradise?" he asks her. The reference to Politian in Assignation is then significant, and the tears on the leaf of the play shed by the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite, the dreamer, were Poe's own for his lost Mary. The poet looked upon her as dead to him, and hence in a later version of the poem to her, To F——, he changes the title to To One Departed; when he wrote To One in Paradise he looked upon her as dead. Mary was, by the way, a name that haunted him, and in his Marginalia he advances his belief in the correct theory that Byron's only real love affair was with Mary Chaworth.

I am not so dogmatic as to maintain that in writing the Assignation and the three poems I mentioned, and the Politian scenes, his other earlier loves did not unconsciously make themselves felt. Killis Campbell thinks To One in Paradise and the sonnet To Zante were written to Miss Royster. Poe may also have been thinking of the mother of his friend who died, in the poem To One in Paradise. But it is most likely that his love for Mary chiefly inspired these poems. They were certainly not written to Virginia, for in 1833 she was only 11 years old.

The poem to Mary Devereaux, supposed to have been written for a Baltimore paper, may, as Woodberry surmises, be the To F—— poem, although it is not so severe as Mary said the poem he wrote against her was. Either her memory failed her as to the alleged severity of the poem, or the poem has not been discovered. A poem by Poe was only recently unearthed by Prof. J. C. French, of Johns Hopkins University, and printed in the Dial for January 31, 1918. It was called Serenade, and was published in the Baltimore Visiter, April 20, 1833. The girl addressed is given a fictitious name, Adeline. Whether she is Mary or not I cannot venture to say with certainty, but most likely she is. It was published when the affair was probably over, and may have been written at the height of his love a year previously. Here are some lines from it:

"And earth, and stars, and sea, and sky

Are redolent of sleep as I

Am redolent of thee and thine

Enthralling love, my Adeline,

But list, O list,—so soft and low

Thy lover's voice to-night shall flow

That scarce awake thy soul shall deem

My words the music of a dream."

The lover in Assignation, in which To One in Paradise appeared then is Poe, and his dreamy character is in accordance with all the other self portrayals we have of the poet. The description of the Marchesa, no doubt, was inspired by Mary.

I think that the tale of Ligeia, which Poe considered his best story, was unconsciously inspired by Mary, and it hence calls for a new interpretation. It was published in September, 1838, two years after he married Virginia; but the poet's memories still hearken back to Mary. She is the dead Ligeia, and his wife, Virginia, is the Lady Rowena, whom the narrator married after Ligeia died. The story of Ligeia was suggested by a dream. The poem The Conqueror Worm did not originally appear in the body of the tale. The narrator's memory, we will recall, flew back to the dead Ligeia; he called her name in dreams; ever after Rowena was dead he had a thousand memories of Ligeia. The emphasis throughout the tale on the love for the departed Ligeia which will not die shows the real love the poet felt for Mary, about whom he was thinking. The narrator imagines that the dead Ligeia put a poison into the cup of his second wife, Lady Rowena, and that thus the latter dies. He then sinks into visions of Ligeia. He imagines that the corpse of his wife becomes alive, and as he looks at it, it is transformed into "my lost love" Ligeia. In other words, the dead love still lives and will not die; it is not forgotten, and haunts the poet, just as love for Mary haunted him. The quotation from Glanvil that man does not yield to death, applies as well to dead love.

In this tale we see then the unconscious influence which an earlier love held on Poe. It is a tale of dead love as much as of death.

Mary enters into another famous tale where her presence was never suspected, in Eleonora. It has been thought that Eleonora was the poet's wife, Virginia, but the tale of the "Valley of Many Colored Grass" refers to the happy days when he courted Mary, and the sad change when Eleonora died, that took place in the Valley, describes the poet's grief when Mary jilted him. The story appeared in 1841 in The Gift for 1842. Whether it was written before Virginia burst a blood vessel, in 1841, as is likely, or afterwards, matters not. For in the tale, which was certainly written six years before Virginia died, the narrator thinks of a second marriage after the death of Eleonora, and Poe was surely not thinking of a second marriage in 1841. We recall in the tale that the narrator had vowed never to love or marry again after he lost Eleonora, but he does—he marries Ermengrade, who is really Virginia, since Eleonora is Mary. The narrator believes he hears the voice of Eleonora forgiving him for his marriage. The poet tells us then in this tale that in spite of his great love for Mary he was able after her rejecting him, still to care for and marry some one else.

The strongest passion of his youth was Mary and not Miss Royster. When he became engaged later in life to Miss Royster it was due to worldly reasons, and he once broke the engagement. I believe that the fact that Poe and his wife were cousins and that she burst a blood-vessel gave rise to the theory that Eleonora, who is a cousin of the narrator, was Virginia.

Another earlier tale of the period of Assignation and submitted in the prize contest at Baltimore, and hence written by 1833, is Morella. In Morella, Mary is still present in the person of the first Morella, whom the narrator marries and who dies; again we have a symbol of Mary's dead love. Morella leaves him a daughter also called Morella, and this may be a description of the paternal feeling Poe entertained at the time for Virginia, who was then 11 years old. In the tale the second Morella also dies.

The sadistic story, Berenice, of the same period, also has memories of Mary.

These stories with fanciful names like Ligeia, Eleonora, Morella, Berenice and the tale Assignation were given us by the poet from the depths of his unconscious; love repressions starting from the death of his own mother in infancy, the loss of his foster mother, Mr. Allan's first wife, the grief at the death of his friend's mother, the quarrel with Mr. Allan's second wife, the love affairs with Miss Royster, and Miss Herring, but especially the rejection by Mary entered into the influences, which made up not only the poems and tales previously mentioned, but much of his later work. He was neurotic because he lost his mother in infancy and had many love disappointments. The only tale where he gives an account of the love emotions is in The Spectacles, written before or about 1844, and here he drew on his experiences, probably chiefly from memories of Mary.

Now comes a question that has always puzzled his critics: Why was the poet so occupied with the subject of death of fair ladies or of depicting a man bereaved by the death of his love. Many replies have been made, but not altogether satisfactorily. The most common answer is that he was so occupied with the subject because he lost his own wife, Virginia. Some uninformed critics are of the belief that poems like The Raven and The Sleeper, tales like Eleonora and Ligeia, were written after his wife died. As a matter of fact these, with the exception of The Raven and possibly Eleonora, were written even before Virginia burst a blood-vessel. There is evidence to make us believe that Ulaume, which is taken to refer to the death of his wife, was at least commenced before Mrs. Poe's death, in January, 1847; Annabel Lee was, however, written after that date. Nearly all of Poe's short stories, too, had been published by that time. He was occupied with the subject of death long before he married; he mourns the death of women in Lenore, Tamerlane, and The Sleeper, all written before he was twenty-two years old. His first tales, Assignation, Ligeia, Morella, deal with the subject of women's deaths. So those who believe that he may have imagined Virginia dead after she burst a blood-vessel, and hence wrote as if she had died, are not right. For all the stories of this nature with the doubtful exception of Eleonora were written before she burst a blood-vessel. The Raven and The Conqueror Worm, two poems occupied with death, were written before her death but after her hemorrhage.

Poe tells us in his Philosophy of Composition,—an unconvincing account of the origin of The Raven,—that he regards the death of a beautiful maiden the most poetical and melancholy topic. But there were factors that made him think so, and these were the deaths of women he loved and the rejections by girls with whom he was infatuated. He lost his mother when he was three years old. Mrs. Lannard, who is said to have inspired To Helen, and who was "the first pure ideal love of my soul" (Poe) died when he was fifteen. (She is also said to have inspired The Sleeper.) He lost Mrs. Allan, his foster mother, to whom he was greatly attached, when he was twenty. He had also lost three sweethearts by the time he was twenty-three. These he looked upon as departed or gone from him. In the Bridal Ballad, written probably on the occasion of the marriage of Miss Royster, he refers to himself as a dead lover. The poems To F——, To One in Paradise, and To Zante, as I showed, were most likely written to Mary, though he may have had the others in mind, who either died or were gone from him. All this shows the strong infantile influences on Poe in damming up of his libido. He was, therefore, occupied with the subject of death not because of Virginia's illness or death, but because he lost, before he was twenty-three, six girls or women. His interest in the subject made him hope death could be conquered or stayed, and hence we have Ligeia and The Facts in the Case of Valdemar. There is a philosophic treatment of death in The Colloquy of Monos and Una.