POE-etry

Did Emily Dickinson ever meet Edgar Allan Poe?  All signs point to no.

Did Emily Dickinson ever read Edgar Allan Poe?    It’s certainly possible.

I checked info on the Dickinson family library held at the Houghton Library at Harvard – plus I checked on portions of their family library NOT held at Houghton – and I couldn’t find any books or works by Poe; however, works by Poe could have been included in various books of collections of poems or stories and/or she could have read Poe in books owned by others. 

I did find an article on one site which went as far as to say, “Dickinson was undoubtedly influenced by Poe. Everyone read him, after all” -- HEREI\

I also discovered that the Apple TV show on Dickinson had an episode where the two poets met.  Info is HERE and HERE.

Turns out someone even wrote a play about Edgar and Emily; info is HERE.

In a note from the playwright (HERE), he said this was “a story that I think is true even if none of it ever happened.”

​More on Edgar Allan Poe tomorrow!

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CONTINUED...
Yesterday I posted a bit of info on Edgar Allan Poe because I’m reading a book by Christopher Semtner called “The Poe Shrine: Building the World’s Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection.”

Poe lived from 1809 to 1849, so he would have been 21 years old when Dickinson was born, and he published “The Raven” (to instant success) in 1845 when Dickinson was 15. 

I wonder if she ever read it.

From February to December 1826, Poe attended the University of Virginia.  An interesting article about his time there is HERE.

AND – what has been called the “rarest book in all of American literature” ended up in the special collections of UVA’s Alderman Library; here’s info on it:

“‘Tamerlane and Other Poems,’ Poe’s first published work, comprises 40 pages of his boyhood verse. In 1827, the year after he left UVA and struck out on his own in Boston, the 18-year-old Poe had a local printer turn out a limited run for him, by one account only 40 copies. UVA’s copy was one of 12 known to remain, and one of only eight with their paper covers intact.”

BUT – in 1973, “The rarest book in all of American literature walked out of the McGregor Room. So did more than 50 other treasures from the University of Virginia library’s world-renowned collection.
It’s the biggest crime in the history of Alderman Library. Yet, little has ever been reported on it, and little has come to light in the nearly 50-year wait for a solution to the mystery. None of the works has ever resurfaced.”
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YEP -- that info is from the article “NEVERMORE, The Stolen Treasures of Alderman Library,” linked HERE. It’s quite an interesting read.