Thursday, October 22, 2020 - Five authors of Greenwich Village - as told by Kate Alsbury - Edgar Allan Poe
EDGAR ALLAN POE IN GREENWICH: THE UNCERTAINTY OF SUCCESS
Known for his eerie writing style and untimely death, Edgar Allan Poe spent several years of his short career in and around New York City, including the leafy streets of Greenwich Village.
He made brief trips to the city from Philadelphia and Baltimore during the 1830s. In 1837, he, his wife, and her mother moved to Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) and Waverly place. They shared the building with William Gowans, a well-known bookseller at the time, for around eight months. According to the journal The Bookman in “Old Booksellers of New York,” Gowans described Poe as “one of the most courteous, gentlemanly, and intelligent companions he had ever met with.”
The Poe family would move on to 113 1/2 Carmine Street, then head back to Philadelphia for several years. When Poe finally relocated to New York in the spring of 1844, he rented a room at 130 Greenwich (near where the World Trade Center now stands).
Though the actual building he stayed in is long gone, you can capture a feeling for the way things were at the time by walking a few blocks south and brushing aside the old brickwork of Trinity Church (it was the tallest building in the city when Poe was living there) and narrow side streets that run along other historic buildings in the area.
He became sub-editor for the Evening Mirror in the autumn of 1844, where one of his best loved poems, The Raven, was published in 1845.
It was around this time (1846) that he wrote critiques on the “Literati of New York” for The Lady’s Book. They were profitable for Lady’s Book, however, as you can imagine, the targets of those essays were often displeased.
“A Campaign Song” was likely written during his stay in Greenwich. A complete manuscript may not exist, but the following was recounted by one of Poe’s artist friends, Gabriel Harrison, and published in the New York Times Saturday Review in 1899:
See the White Eagle soaring aloft to the sky,
Wakening the broad welkin with his loud battle cry;
Then here’s the White Eagle, full daring is he,
As he sails on his pinions o’er valley and sea.
Poe and Harrison first met in a tea and tobacco store Harrison owned at 568 Broadway, on the corner of Prince Street. He recalls the first time Poe came into the store: “a small man with a large head looking rather wistfully at some beautiful plugs of tobacco . . . he entered and asked the price, made no move to buy, and started to leave . . . I was struck by . . . his manner, by his voice and by his fine articulation . . . so I offered the man a piece of tobacco. He accepted, thanked me and departed. Two or three weeks afterwards he came in again. At the time I happened to be in the throes of composing a campaign song for the White Eagle Club, a political organization of which I was President . . . I began to explain the matter to him . . . ‘Let me have your pencil,’ he said . . . In about fifteen minutes . . . I saw written a song of five stanzas with chorus . . ."
After a brief trip to the Upper West Side (or the countryside as it was then) they were back on Greenwich Street at 154. Later, they would move on to 85 Amity Street (which would become 85 West 3rd Street) just south of Washington Square. He believed the park’s fresh air and quiet demeanor might help restore the failing health of his wife. Arguably the most famous of his houses, the building was partly destroyed in 2001 when New York University decided to expand their law school. Due to the efforts of preservationists, the facade still remains.
No doubt his lengthy stays in the Financial District inspired “Epigram For Wall street” which appeared in the Evening Mirror:
I’ll tell you a plan for gaining wealth,
Better than banking, trade or leases —
Take a bank note and fold it up,
And then you will find your money in creases!
This wonderful plan, without danger or loss,
Keeps your cash in your hands, where nothing can trouble it;
And every time that you fold it across,
’Tis as plain as the light of the day that you double it!
This is decidedly one of the best jeux d’esprit we have met in a year. Who did it? — who?
Lectures at the New York Historical Society were a hit. One was on the subject of “Poets and Poetry of America.” His remarks and criticisms hurled at popular members of New York’s literary world drew quite a bit of attention.
He wrote about the experience a few days later: "In the late lecture on the 'Poets and Poetry of America,' delivered before an audience made up chiefly of editors and their connections, I took occasion to speak what I know to be the truth, and I endeavored so to speak it that there should be no chance of misunderstanding what it was I intended to say.”
The success of these lectures led him further afield, invited to speak in Boston. After leaving the Evening Mirror he became one of three joint-editors (and later sole editor) at the Broadway Journal.
His time in New York had a defining impact on his career, publishing some of his most celebrated works during this time, like “The Raven and Other Poems,” along with “Tales,” which included “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Despite their success and the good company of New York’s high-society, he remained relatively poor. Even when his popularity in Europe soared, he was constantly plagued by his wife’s ill health.
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Kate Alsbury is a writer and marketing consultant. Her creative work has appeared in journals like Frogpond and Modern Haiku, along with several anthologies.
