Edgar Allan Poe to George W. Eveleth — 1846-12-15

Edgar Allan Poe to George W. Eveleth — 1846-12-15 Historical printed letter from University of Virginia edition, 1924. Catalog identity RCL-660. The final scan page also begins the next letter; the searchable excerpt stops before that next letter. The local PDF preserves the selected source pages unchanged. Searchable text is unreviewed repository OCR and retains recognition errors and historical editorial notes. This is a historical printed witness, not an autograph manuscript or a modern critical text. [Source scan page 15] (' Copies of Letters from Edgar Allan Poe to H. B. W.) New-York, Dec. 15/46. My Dear Hn: By way of beginning this letter, let me say a word or two of apology for not having sooner replied to your letters of June 9th 1 and Octo. 13th. For more than six months, I have been ill — for the greater part of that time, dan¬ gerously so, and quite unable to write even an ordinary letter. My magazine papers appearing in this interval were all in the publishers’ hands before I was taken sick. Since getting bet¬ ter, I have been, as a matter of course, overwhelmed with the business accumulating during my illness. It always gives me true pleasure to hear from you, and I wish you could spare time to write me more frequently. I am gratified by your good opinion of my writings, because what you say evinces the keenest discrimination. Ten times the praise you bestow on me would not please me half so much, were it not for the intermingled scraps of censure, or of ob¬ jection, which show me that you well know what you are talk¬ ing about. Let me now advert to the points of your two last letters : What you say about the blundering criticism of “the Hart- at 304 Broadway. Poe formally withdrew after printing a “Valedictory” on December 26, 1845. 1. Better IV in the series of Eveleth letters edited by Mabbott is dated Oct. 13, 1846. No letter from Eveleth to Poe of June 9 is printed; apparently it is lost. Ingram dismembers this letter com¬ pletely. Vol. II, p. 103, omitting place and date, gives the first two paragraphs and the following introductory sentence; then leaps to “The criticism on Rogers - ” and continues to end of letter, omit¬ ting closing sentence: Vol. I, p. 275, begins with the third para¬ graph, “What you say, etc.” and goes through the paragraph ending “the palpitating trees.” The reference to “Politian” is not given in Ingram, but the paragraph following is inserted in Vol. II, p. 23. Ingram makes no departures from Eveleth’s copy, in these parts that he prints, except in a few details of punctuation, italics, and words for numbers instead of figures. The heading is Eveleth’s to Ingram’s copies. [7] [Source scan page 16] ford Review man” is just.2 For the purposes of poetry, it is quite sufficient that a thing is possible — or at least that the im¬ probability be not offensively glaring. It is true that in sev¬ eral ways, as you say, the lamp might have thrown the bird’s shadow on the floor. My conception was that of the bracket candleabrum affixed against the wall, high up above the door and bust — as is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some of the better houses of New York. Your objection to the tinkling of the footfalls is far more pointed, and in the course of composition occurred so forci¬ bly to myself that I hesitated to use the term. I finally used it, because I saw that it had, in its (first)3 conception, been suggested to my mind by the sense of the supernatural with which it was, at the moment, filled. No