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Charles Chauncey Burr: Friend of Poe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
On 14 July 1849 Poe, who had just arrived in Richmond, wrote to his wife's mother, Mrs. Maria Clemm: “I am indebted for more than life itself to B— [Burr]. Never forget him, Mother, while you live. When all failed me, he stood my friend, got me money, and saw me off in the cars for Richmond.” Poe had left New York on 29 June. In Philadelphia he had gone on a spree and been seriously ill. Burr with the help of one or two others looked after the sick poet until he was able to resume his journey to Richmond. Poe was on his way back to New York when he died in Baltimore on 7 October of the same year.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 The Hidden Way: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), p. 214. There is a good brief account of Burr's magazine, the Old Guard, in F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850-1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), pp. 544-546. Mott, however, makes no mention of the Nineteenth Century. In the “Editor's Table” of the Old Guard, v (May 1867), 397, Burr states that he and “Artemus Ward” were “born in neighboring towns” in Maine. According to Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, i, 455, Burr married in 1851 a divorcée, Celia Kellum, who in 1865 married William Henry Burleigh. Before he became editor of the Old Guard, Burr was editor of the Bergen County, N. J., Democrat.
2 For Burr's political opinions in the sixties, see his The History of the Constitution, and of the Union … (Hackensack, N. J., 1862). A 3rd ed. appeared in New York in 1863.
3 “The Republican Raven. Written Nov. 7th, 1861, amid the Shoutings of the Republicans over Their Political Victory,” ii (Oct. 1864), 232-233; “Old Times,” iii (May 1865), 215; “What the Shadow Said to the Dreamer,” iv (Jan. 1866), 24-27; “Echoes,” vi (Oct. 1868), 777-779; “Never More,” vii (Jan. 1869), 54. There are still other poems in Vol. iii (1865) which have refrains. Often a line is repeated with variations though seldom in the Poe manner.
4 In the summer of 1876 Wertenbaker told Robert S. Burkholder that Poe had not been expelled from the University of Virginia and said: “Edgar Poe was exceedingly studious, and had little or no time for frolics or dissipation …” See Burkholder's article, “A Popular Error concerning Poe,” South-Atlantic (Wilmington, N. C.), ii (Aug. 1878), 373-375.
5 Edmund Wilson reprinted the earlier version of Lowell's essay in The Shock of Recognition (New York, 1943), not knowing that it had already been reprinted in James A. Harrison, The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1902).
6 This editorial note and a similar one inserted in “‘Elements of the Art of Poetry‘” and the use throughout both articles of the editorial “we” lead me to think that Burr wrote both articles. It was presumably to Burr as editor of a magazine that Mrs. Whitman wrote asking him to use her material in defense of Poe. Burr claims to have written practically everything he printed in the first volume of the Old Guard. In the later volumes the comparative scarcity of signed articles strongly suggests that he was still writing many of them himself.
7 The reference is to Poe's story, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaal,” first published in the Southern Literary Messenger for June 1835. Latrobe's later reminiscences contain a similar account of Poe's graphic description of the imaginary voyage to the moon.