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Pausing in Fordham only briefly, Poe was on the move again, traveling to Richmond to secure support for his magazine; there he renewed his acquaintance with his first love, Sarah Elmira Shelton, by then a wealthy widow, and he contacted John Thompson, editor of the Messenger, who accepted for publication his longest essay on poetry, “The Rationale of Verse.” Poe was also, as Thompson later reported, getting drunk every night and—to the puzzlement of locals—declaiming from Eureka in the bars. On the eve of an extended tour of the South, however, he received an ardent letter and accompanying poem from Mrs. Whitman that changed his plans.

Impulsively, Poe journeyed to Providence in September to court his admirer, a woman of romantic sensibility and ample means to whom he proposed marriage—two days after meeting her—as they strolled through a cemetery. Inhibited by her mother’s disapproval and her own misgivings, Mrs. Whitman declined the initial offer, but Poe persisted, returning one month later en route to Lowell. Again rebuffed, he went on to Massachusetts, where he sought affection and advice from Annie Richmond before returning to Providence. But torn between admiration for Mrs. Whitman and passionate love for Mrs. Richmond, tormented as well by the “demon” of perverseness, Poe bought laudanum and took the train to Boston, intending to kill himself or to make a scene that would bring Annie to his bedside. Instead, he became wretchedly ill before he could write to her. Returning to Providence three days later, he implored Mrs. Whitman to marry him immediately, and when she hesitated, he became inebriated at his hotel. Yet after extracting his pledge of future sobriety, she agreed to a “conditional engagement,” and a haggard Poe returned to New York, where Mrs. Clemm barely recognized him. The writer made two subsequent visits to Providence in December, and on the second occasion delivered a new lecture, “The Poetic Principle,” before a huge audience, inspiring Mrs. Whitman to accept his proposal. But the nuptials Poe arranged for Christmas day never took place. When Mrs. Whitman received an eleventh-hour, anonymous report of Poe’s recent drinking, her mother held a brief and ferocious interview with Poe that sent him slouching toward Fordham, never again to return to Providence.

Poe’s break with Mrs. Whitman only sharpened his desire for Mrs. Richmond, to whom he wrote several impassioned letters in early 1849, dedicating as well a new poem, “For Annie,” which dramatized his November near-death experience. Despite recurrent headaches, he threw himself into daily writing with renewed energy and, responding to a publisher’s invitation, produced for the Boston antislavery newspaper Flag of Our Union such tales as “Hop-Frog,” “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” “Landor’s Cottage,” and “X-ing a Paragrab.” There he also first published the poems “Dream Within A Dream,” “Eldorado,” and “To My Mother,” as well as “For Annie.” In April he also resumed his “Marginalia” in the Southern Literary Messenger and in May and June published his “Fifty Suggestions” in Graham’s. But Poe’s commentaries on intellectual tidbits signaled a lapse in creative activity. He was depressed both by fears that he would never see Annie again and by ominous trends in the periodical trade: the Columbian Magazine had failed, and other journals (including the Messenger) were suspending payments to authors. At this low ebb he received a long-delayed letter from one Edward Patterson, a young newspaper editor in Oquawkwa, Illinois, who volunteered to become Poe’s partner in a magazine venture. Dubious about launching a distinguished journal from a frontier village, Poe nevertheless accepted the offer and sent Patterson a sample title page, proposing simultaneous publication in New York and St. Louis. His consuming desire to own and edit The Stylus seemed suddenly close to realization.

But Poe was destined to be victimized again by his own compulsions. After a soulful week in Lowell