Mary De Jong
"'Read Here Thy Name Concealed':
Frances Osgood's Poems on Parting with Edgar Allan Poe"
Although
Poe and Osgood stopped meeting after the scandals created in 1845-46 by Osgood's
and Elizabeth Ellet's letters to him, Osgood used her writings to maintain
and redefine her relationship with Poe. Her previously unpublished poem headed
"To —," an unconventional sonnet that covertly spells his name,
responds to his acrostic valentine for her. Evidently written in early 1847,
Osgood's acrostic compliments Poe's genius, expresses sorrow at their parting,
and states that she "must bless" the woman (probably Marie Louise
Shew) who now "watch[es] . . . o'er him," as she wishes to do. Several
of Osgood's published writings from mid-1846 likewise portray a mutual love
virtuously deferred for heaven. Not simply autobiographical, these works reflect
the contemporary romantic ideal of twin souls, which was popularized by novelists,
magazinists, and Bettina von Arnim's Goethe's Correspondence with a Child.
Osgood's poems about soul mates—some of them identified as "fragments"
of a projected "story" or "play"—dramatize a woman poet's
eternal bond with a master poet. (Her story "Athenais" [1846] portrays
poets who fall in love while reading one another's magazine lyrics.) The poems
about "poet-love" are at once consciously literary texts capable
of standing alone as romantic lyrics and dramatic monologues, strategic explications
of her position as Poe's admirer and spiritual lover, and veiled messages
for Poe. These writings yield a fuller understanding of their mutual affection
as well as the interaction of antebellum literary conventions with ideals
of heterosexual love.
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