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For years he lived in "complex sentimental incestuousness" with his aunt Maria Clemm, that "tireless minister to genius," and her "sylphlike" daughter Virginia. One day 13-year-old Virginia was playing on the swings at school; the next, after some fakery with the Richmond register, she was Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe. He wore a wedding ring of entwined hoops—one for Virginia and one for Aunt Maria. Until she suitably expired at 24 of consumption in Poe's cottage at Fordham, Virginia adored her "Buddy," but as to whether his "darling little wifey" was ever truly his wife, Biographer Winwar has her doubts. Nor does she believe in accusations of "criminal relations" between Poe and the faithful Mrs. Clemm, whose cry, "Eddie, my dear boy! Let me put you to bed," was often the last word in Poe's addled ears.
Whip of Scorpions. None of Poe's admirers like to dwell on the time when, at 39, he took up with Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman. This Massachusetts lawyer's widow was a small, shapely poetess who wore flowing draperies, lived in a perpetual jag from an ether-soaked handkerchief but pledged Poe to teetotalism. She called him "A God-Peer" (an anagram of Edgar Poe), wore a little carved wooden coffin round her neck on a black velvet ribbon, and Poe proposed to her in a graveyard. Poe's own reason seemed to tell him that his demon had betrayed him; he wrote desperate love letters to another woman, tried suicide. Finally he went home to Baltimore for his last bat.
"Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge." said James Russell Lowell. Said Poe's friend George R. Graham of Graham's Magazine: "Literature with [Poe] was a religion; and he, its high priest, with a whip of scorpions scourged the money-changers from the temple . . . Could he have stepped down and . . . made himself the shifting toady of the hour ... he would have been feted alive, and perhaps, been praised when dead."
It is all sad and true, except that if Edgar Allan Poe had been a better poet —less steeped in the idiom of a sentimental age—he might well have had an even worse time of it.
*Poe's The Raven and Other Poems contained 31 poems and sold at 31¢, the best buy in verse until the appearance of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach.