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[72] d “The Literati of New York City” (1846) Edgar Allan Poe . . . What poet, in especial, but must feel at least the better portion of himself more fairly represented in even his commonest sonnet (earnestly written ) than in his most elaborate or most intimate personalities? I put all this as a general proposition, to which Miss Fuller affords a marked exception—to this extent, that her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly from the one as from the other—no more readily from this than from that—easily from either. Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her literary and her conversational manner are identical . Here is a passage from her “Summer on the Lakes:”— “The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they are so swift that they cease to seem so—you can think only of their beauty. The fountain beyond Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), journalist, short story writer, and poet, was a regular critic of what he perceived as the excesses of Transcendentalism and its adherents. He met Fuller in New York during one of the literary salons hosted by Anne Charlotte Lynch, where, according to one observer, he bested her in conversation: “The Raven has perched upon the casque [that is, helmet] of Pallas, and pulled all the feathers out of her cap” (Thomas and Jackson, Poe Log, 616). They reviewed each other’s works favorably, with Fuller generally praising Tales and The Raven and Other Poems, and Poe calling Woman in the Nineteenth Century “nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive , [and] brilliant.” They probably fell out when Fuller and Lynch tried to intercede on behalf of two women vying for Poe’s attention by asking Poe to return letters one of them had written, resulting in him calling them “Busybodies !” (Miller, Poe’s Helen Remembers, 21). Poe may also have been miffed when Fuller failed to mention him in her survey of “American Literature” in Papers on Literature and Art (1846). After his death, Fuller wrote, “I did not know him, though I saw and talked with him often, but he always seemed to me shrouded in an assumed character” (6 December 1849, Letters, 5:289). Edgar Allan Poe [73] the Moss islands I discovered for myself, and thought it for some time an accidental beauty which it would not do to leave, lest I might never see it again. After I found it permanent, I returned many times to watch the play of its crest. In the little waterfall beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger design. She delights in this—a sketch within a sketch—a dream within a dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall, copied in the flowers that star its bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the lineaments become fluent, and we mould the scene in congenial thought with its genius.” Now all this is precisely as Miss Fuller would speak it. She is perpetually saying just such things in just such words. To get the conversational woman in the mind’s eye, all that is needed is to imagine her reciting the paragraph just quoted: but first let us have the personal woman. She is of the medium height; nothing remarkable about the figure; a profusion of lustrous light hair; eyes a bluish gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection , for love—when moved by a slight smile, it becomes even beautiful in the intensity of this expression; but the upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a person of this description looking you at one moment earnestly in the face, at the next seeming to look only within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously every now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, but musically, deliberately, (not hurriedly or loudly,) with a delicious distinctness of enunciation—speaking, I say, the paragraph in question, and emphasizing the words which I have italicized, not by impulsion of the breath, (as is usual,) but by drawing them out as long as possible, nearly closing her eyes the while—imagine all this, and we have both the woman...

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