Poe's Life in Boston

GIOVANNI THOMPSON
Sarah Helen Whitman
oil portrait
circa 1838

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878) was a poet and avid reader of Edgar Allan Poe before he presented himself at her home in Providence, R.I. on September 21, 1848. Helen was the widow of a Boston attorney and magazine editor who had enabled her to gain entr�e to the Boston literary elite around Longfellow and develop a close friendship with the Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Her relationship with Poe–with whom she shared the same birthday although she was six years older–was initiated by a flirtatious poem "To Edgar A. Poe," which she had addressed to him as an 1848 valentine. In turn, she was the inspiration for Poe's poem "To Helen" published that November.

Poe proposed to Helen in Providence's Swan Point Cemetery, and they became engaged despite his admission that "My heart is heavy, Helen, for I see that your friends are not my own." She accepted shortly after his December 20, 1848, lecture in Providence on "The Poetic Principle" in which he ironically referred to "we Bostonians." Days later, however, Helen terminated their engagement partly because of her alarm at his drinking and due to the romantic interest he demonstrated in Annie Richmond. After his death, she defended Poe's works and continued to hold him in high regard.

The Raymond Biswanger Slide Collection of Literary Landscapes at the University of Pennsylvania,
courtesy of the Providence Athenaeum