Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 188, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 August 1917 — REMINISCENCE OF POE. [ARTICLE]

REMINISCENCE OF POE.

The painter, William Sartain, contributed some recollection of Edgar Allan Poe to the Art World: “His biographer, Griswold, has slandered him as Intemperate. My father said this was not true, and he was most temperate in .drinking. It is a of this that Poe was a model of punctuality in his reviewing and other work for the magazines during all the ensuing 15 years of his life, which comprises his literary career. In 1837 he moved to New York and after a year to Philadelphia, where he wrbte some of his finest stories. For much of his literary career he was half starving. His labor over his writings is shown, no doubt with some exaggeration, however, in his article ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ written shortly after the publication of ‘The Raven.’ In this essay he enumerates some of his articles of faith, such as: Beauty is the legitimate province of the poem; it is a pure and intense elevation of the soul, not of the intellect nor the heart. “But except for these intermittent indulgences, his addiction to stimulants must have been grossly exaggerated by his biographer Griswold, whom my father has said he had personally seen on quite bad terms with Poe. My father’s acquaintance with him was the more close in the latter years of his life and, as his statements were most positive, these derogatory stories must be taken with a grain of salt. The account I have given of’ Poe’s death after having been robbed of his clothes seems to me to be so reasonable —and, moreover, based on my father’s contemporary information —that I cannot accept the story of his having been lured into the hands of an electioneering gang and drugged, so as to be utilized for depositing ballots in numerous polling places."