What could be better on Halloween than a story about the master
of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe? While
trolling for lesser-known facts about the author, I came across something appropriately
eerie that might even be new to many of you.
In 1862, psychic medium Lizzie Doten published her book Poems from the Inner Life. In it, she claimed some of the works originated
from “conscious communion with disembodied spirits” of famous writers who had
shuffled off this mortal coil. (Indeed,
Shakespeare was one of them.) Six of the poems are purported to come from Poe
himself. About her experience with the spirit of Poe, Doten had this to say:
The influence of Poe was neither pleasant nor easy. I can
only describe it as a species of mental intoxication. I was tortured with a feeling
of great restlessness and irritability, and strange, incongruous images crowded
my brain. Some were as bewildering and dazzling as the sun, others dark and
repulsive. Under his influence,
particularly, I suffered the greatest exhaustion of vital energy, so much so,
that after giving one of his poems, I was usually quite ill for several days.
But from his first poem to the last … was a marked, and
rapid change. It would seem as though, in that higher life, where the
opportunities for spiritual development far transcend those of earth, that by
his quick and active perceptions he had seized upon the Divine Idea which was
endeavoring to find expression through his life, both in Time and Eternity; and
that from the moment this became apparent, with a volcanic energy, with the
battle-strokes of a true hero, he had over-thrown every obstacle, and hewn a
way through every barrier that impeded the free out-growth and manifestation of
his diviner self…. As he last appeared to me, he was full of majesty and
strength, self-poised and calm, and it would seem by the expression of his
countenance, radiant with victory, that the reward promised to ‘him that over-cometh,'
had been made his sure possession…. Upon earth he was a meteor light, flashing
with a startling brilliancy across the intellectual firmament; but now he is a
star of ever increasing magnitude, which has at length gravitated to its own
place among the celestial spheres.
As Ripley’s would have it, “Believe It or Not!” But there’s no doubt that Pscy* is a typo of
high probability. There are 61 English-language
instances of it in OhioLINK and 502 in WorldCat.
(Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe, 1849, from Wikimedia
Commons)
Deb Kulczak
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