-Poe and Whitman

https://www.lehigh.edu/~asj316/poe/poe_whitman_illustration.png

Some of the recent discoveries about the Pfaff’s bohemians center on how Whitman’s relationship with the life and legacy of Edgar Allan Poe was shaped by the antebellum bohemians. Whitman met Poe in 1845 when he published an essay on American music in The Broadway Journal, which Poe was editing at the time, but the relationship between the two writers never developed beyond that. Whitman’s career as a poet of energetic free verse ultimately went in a different direction from the dark formalism of poems such as Poe’s “The Raven.” Nevertheless, many of the bohemians were disciples of Poe, which meant that during Whitman’s time at Pfaff’s he would have been immersed in the stories, poems, and aesthetic theories of Poe.

Fred E. Lewis.
“Treasure Hunts Among Old Bookshops”.
The New York Herald Tribune, September 13, 1925.

Walter Whitman (1819 - 1892).
“Art-Singing and Heart-Singing”.
The Broadway Journal, November 29, 1845.

Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/Record/17529

A version of this text has been digitized and is available through Hathitrust.

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