The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1546]
Will you please reply, at your leisure, through the P. Office? Should you not be able to accept the articles, I would be obliged if you would retain them until I see you.
Yours with the highest respect,
Edgar A. Poe.
N. P. Willis, Esqre
Nathaniel P. Willis to Edgar Allan Poe — May 26 or later, 1846
9 Park Place.
My Dear Poe, —
I need not say that I would gladly do that, or anything else to serve you, but it would be put down at once to quid-pro-quosity, & therefore bad taste.
Why reply directly to Mr. Briggs? If you want a shuttlecock squib to fall on the ground, never battledore it straight back. Mr. B’s attacks on me; never saw, & never shall see. I keep a good-sense-ometer who reads the papers & tells me if there is anything worth replying to, but nothing is that is written by a man who will be honor’d by the reply. A reply from me to Mr. Briggs would make the man. So will yours, if you exalt him into your mate by contending on equal terms. If you care to punish him, attack him on some other subject, & at an anonymous writer whose name is not worth giving. Notoriety is glory in this transition state of our half-bak’d country. But come & see me, & we’ll talk it over.
Yours in haste but very sincerely
N. P. Willis.
Nathaniel P. Willis to Edgar Allan Poe — December 23, 1846
Wednesday.
My Dear Poe, —
The enclosed speaks for itself — the letter, that is to say. Have I done right or wrong in the enclosed editorial? It was a kind of thing I could only do without asking you, & you may express anger about it if you like in print. It will have a good bearing, I think, on your law case. Please write me whether you are suffering or not, & if so, let us do something systematically for you.
In haste
Yours faithfully
N. P. Willis
Kindest remembrance to Mrs Clemm.
Edgar Allan Poe to Nathaniel P. Willis — December 30, 1846
MR . POE . — We have received the following letter from this gentleman. It speaks for itself. What was the under-current of feeling in his mind while it was written, can be easily understood by the few; but it carries enough on its surface to be sufficiently understood. In another column, we give a communication respecting his literary position, kindly furnished by one of the best of our scholars and gentlemen.
MY DEAR WILLIS: — The paragraph which has been put in circulation respecting my wife’s illness, my own, my poverty etc., is now lying before me; together with the beautiful lines by Mrs. Locke and those by Mrs. —— , to which the paragraph has given rise, as well as your kind and manly comments in “THE HOME JOURNAL .”
The motive of the paragraph I leave to the conscience of him or her who wrote it or suggested it. Since the thing is done, however, and since the concerns of my family are thus pitilessly thrust before the public, I perceive no mode of escape from a public statement of what is true and what erroneous in the report alluded to.
That my wife is ill, then, is true; and you may imagine with what feeling I add that this illness, hopeless from the first, has been heightened and precipitated by her reception, at two different periods, of anonymous letters — one enclosing the paragraph now in question; the other, those published calumnies of Messrs ——— , for which I yet hope to find redress in a court of justice.
Of the facts, that I myself have been long and dangerously ill, and that my illness has been a well understood thing among my brethren of the press, the best evidence is afforded by the innumerable paragraphs of personal and literary abuse with which I have been latterly assailed. This matter, however, will remedy itself. At the very first blush of my new prosperity, the gentlemen who toadied me in the old, will recollect themselves and toady me again. You, who know me, will comprehend that I speak of these things only as having served, in a measure, to lighten the gloom of unhappiness, by a gentle and not