The Portable Edgar Allan Poe Read Online Free PDF

weekly, and among his numerous reviews he celebrated the poet Mrs. Francis Sargent Osgood, with whom he was carrying on an ostensibly platonic, semi-public “amour” sanctioned by his ailing wife. Wishing to give the journal a “fresh start,” Briggs planned to relieve Poe of his editorial role and find a new publisher, but when his partner disagreed, Briggs withdrew, and Bisco named Poe editor, offering him half of the meager profits. The crisis came in October: that month Poe made his infamous appearance at the Boston Lyceum, reading not a promised new poem but rather the early, esoteric “Al Aaraaf.” The outcry from that fiasco had not subsided when Bisco capitulated and sold out to Poe, who through loans from friends became sole proprietor of a failing literary journal. Despite the attraction of his revised, reprinted works and his biting editorial commentaries— in which for weeks he taunted his Boston critics—the Broadway Journal was in a death spiral. Beset by debts, Poe ceased publication on January 3, 1846, the final issue ironically reprinting his early tale “Loss of Breath.”
    Illness, poverty, and scandal dogged Poe through 1846. For Graham’s he composed “The Philosophy of Composition,” an exaggerated account of how he wrote “The Raven.” A jealous Elizabeth F. Ellet stirred a controversy involving Mrs. Osgood’s love letters to Poe that ostracized him from the popular salon of Anne C. Lynch. The episode also provoked a bizarre scuffle with Thomas Dunn English, who had moved to New York and become an unlikely ally in the Longfellow wars but defied Poe at a volatile moment. Rumors of Poe’s insanity and Virginia’s worsening condition prompted their move to healthier surroundings in Fordham, where they rented a country cottage. Still unwell, Poe prepared for Godey’s a series on the “New York Literati,” flattering friends and abusing enemies in pithy sketches. He also continued his “Marginalia” series but composed only one notable new tale—perhaps inspired by his feud with English—titled “The Cask of Amontillado.” The “Literati” sketch portraying English as an ignorant charlatan elicited a slanderous reply for which Poe eventually received a legal settlement. But in 1846 he increasingly became an object of private gossip and public derision by “little birds of prey”; alluding to his latest renunciation of drink, he called Virginia his “ only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory, and ungrateful life.” In letters to Philip Pendleton Cooke and George W. Evelith, he nevertheless revealed his determination to publish The Stylus, the “one great purpose” of his literary life. But at year’s end that goal seemed remote; both Poe and Virginia were bedridden in Fordham, attended by Mrs. Clemm and Marie Louise Shew, a friend with nursing experience.
    For Virginia, the end came on January 30, 1847. On her deathbed she asked her husband to read Mrs. Shew a poignant letter from the second Mrs. John Allan, confessing that she had turned Poe’s foster father against him. Virginia’s death and burial prostrated Poe, and although he composed a poem (“The Beloved Physician”) for Mrs. Shew when she nursed him back to health, he wrote little else in 1847. His lawsuit against English briefly provided distraction from grief and, after a favorable ruling, relief from penury. That summer Poe visited Thomas in Washington and called at the office of Graham’s in Philadelphia, perhaps to deliver a new review of Hawthorne that appeared in the November issue. His only significant literary composition since Virginia’s death, however, was “Ulalume,” a mystical poem transparently inspired by her loss. He received attentions from several literary women and composed for Sarah Anna Lewis the anagrammatic poem, “An Enigma.” Across the Atlantic his work had attracted the attention of Charles Baudelaire, the poet whose translations would enshrine Poe as a