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LAST FLOWERS: THE ROMANCE AND POETRY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE AND SARAH HELEN WHITMAN.

With an essay by Brett Rutherford. Second edition, expanded and revised, 2003/2005, first paperback edition 2008. Fourth Edition, Expanded and Revised, December 2011, with additional annotations and illustrations.
This is the definitive book on Edgar Allan Poe's doomed romance with Providence poet Sarah Helen Whitman, and the first time her poetry has been available in print since 1916. This book contains the poems both poets wrote about one another, and the best work they might have read to one another during their courtship. The essay traces Poe's 28 days in Providence in detail, as well as the genealogy and family history of Mrs. Whitman. Additionally, an appreciation of Sarah Helen Whitman's highly romantic poetry helps to place her in the pantheon of American women poets where she belongs.

EXCERPTS FROM THE INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

During these years, Sarah Helen maintained her place in a literary America that was exploding with new philosophical ideas. Despite the pious underpinnings of New England society, the 1840s were a decade of intellectual turmoil: end-ofthe- world prophecies, new native religions, Brook Farm, the antislavery movement, spiritualism, and the restless intellectual odyssey of Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Science was advancing in leaps and bounds, and poets and essayists all felt that they had to take it all in and make sense of it.

Their problem was that they carried all the baggage of Platonic thought in a world that was becoming mechanistic and Aristotelian. It may seem strange to us that the same persons who read natural science and astronomy tomes also troubled themselves about souls, ghosts and Divinity. This is the complex world in which they lived. We can laugh at Transcendental abolitionists talking at seances to ghosts of dead Indians, but we do not have to look far to see equally bizarre belief-complexes among the intellectual class today.

The 1840s also represented a watershed for literacy and the appreciation of culture in America. Boston really was the Athens of the United States, and the roster of American writers active in mid-century was staggering. The Lyceum movement brought thousands of young people to hear writers and artists lecture, and lending libraries insured that working class people could have access to books. The prices of books were also falling dramatically during that period because of the introduction of the rotary printing press. Americans were proving to the world that high culture was for everyone. For an overview of literary America during this period, one of the best sources is still the classic book, The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865, by Van Wyck Brooks (E.P . Dutton, 1936).

In the early 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe had made his mark with stories, criticism, literary hoaxes and poems. His career was followed with interest, if not always approval, by his fellow critics. He had pretty much thrown the gauntlet against the New England literati in favor of the writers of New York.

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In 1845, Edgar Poe’s personal, financial and romantic calamities piled one upon another in New York. Poe gained control of The Broadway Journal and secured financing for it. By late July his backer was referring to Poe as “a drunken sot.” Poe’s book of Tales Grotesque and Arabesque, meantime, was being reviewed everywhere, and the fame of his poem, “The Raven,” flew throughout the states. In August, a visitor to the offices of The Broadway Journal found Poe “irascible, surly, and in his cups.” In the August issue of the Journal, Poe reviewed a poem by Lowell and accused him of plagiarizing Wordsworth, and inaccurately quoted Wordsworth to prove it. Lowell wrote to Poe’s partner that his editor lacked character, and got a commiserating letter back saying, “[Poe’s] presumption is beyond the liveliest imagination.” By the end of August, Poe was begging a $50 loan from Chivers to sustain the magazine.

On October 1, despite all these troubles, Poe sent the manuscript of The Raven and Other Poems off to the printer.

Poe managed to irritate the Boston literary world on October 16, when he was paid $50 to read a new poem as part of a Lyceum program. Unable to write anything new for the entire preceding month, Poe trekked to Boston and substituted “Al Aaraaf,” a juvenile work, re-titling it “The Messenger Star.” He did an encore reading of “The Raven.” Then he went home and boasted in The Broadway Journal of having given Boston old goods. Reviews in Boston suggested that most of the audience fled before the poem was over, and numerous letters to journal editors pilloried Poe over his behavior.

Poe’s tale, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” was circulated at this time under several titles in newspapers and magazines, and caused a stir in New England, where it was taken by many to be a factual account. It describes a man whose soul was retained after death through the power of hypnotism. The final sequence, in which Valdemar’s body dissolves into a putrescent mass when the hypnotic spell is broken, should have made it clear that this was a horror story. Sarah Helen Whitman, a student of mesmerism, wrote to friends in New York, begging to know whether Poe’s story was true.

Sarah Helen would later write: “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.”

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Sarah Helen Whitman lived for three more decades [after the broken engagement with Poe.] In 1853, she published the poems she had written to and about Poe. In 1860, two years after the death of her mother, she published Edgar Poe and His Critics, a small but well-reasoned defense of Poe’s writing and reputation. Although she seldom left Providence, she published her poems in major magazines and newspapers, and maintained correspondence with writers around the world. Her loyalty to Poe and her unselfish help to Poe biographers over the decades helped turn the tide of popular opinion against those who had slandered him. Helen’s achievement is one of the great vindications in literary history.

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I arranged the poems in this book to recreate the courtship, parting and remembrance of Helen and Poe. In the first section of the book, Poe’s masterpiece “The Raven” is answered by Helen’s valentine of the same title. Then each poet introduces characteristic poems, emphasizing their respective solitude.

Then, they demonstrate some of their best work to one another — both in love poems and in their verses on more far-ranging subjects. I chose poems they might have read to one another, pieces that would serve to deepen their mutual admiration.

Next come the poems associated with their parting, and the two poems that might have led to reconciliation — Helen’s “Our Island of Dreams” and Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” The remaining poems are Helen’s posthumous tributes to Poe, and several additional Poe poems chosen for counterpoint. I believe this “dialogue” of poems shows both writers to their best advantage.

Among the fine later poems, Sarah Helen Whitman’s “Proserpine, To Pluto, In Hades” deserves special attention for its personification of the characters in our drama. The poet uses the familiar mythical story of Ceres’ daughter, Proserpine (Persephone in Greek), who must spend six months of the year with her brooding husband, Pluto, lord of the dead, and six months of the year above ground. This ancient fable explaining and symbolizing the seasons is turned topsy-turvy by Whitman; she got the idea from her reading of Virgil. Her Proserpine loves Pluto and prefers to sit by his throne in the dark underworld. Her angry mother Ceres comes in a chariot drawn by two dragons to reclaim her. Here we have, a trio of archetypes: Helen, Poe and Helen’s ever-angry mother. The Proserpine symbolism even carried to Whitman’s funeral in 1878: her coffin was decorated with a green wreath, and a stalk of wheat.

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Paperback published December 2011. ISBN 978-0922558605. 164 pp. 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $13.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.

Hardcover edition published December 2021. ISBN 979-8780820543. 164 pp. 6 x 9 inches. $18.95. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.

CLICK HERE to order the PDF e-book from Payhip.

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Version 24 Updated February 24, 2024