WHITMAN

Appreciate poetry, Edgar Allan Poe’s.

Now is the time. And the Providence Athenaeum is the place. The nation’s fourth oldest library is celebrating the bicentennial of Poe’s birth, which was Jan. 19. So are many other institutions all around the country, particularly in places where he was born (Boston), where he died (Baltimore), where he worked (New York) and where he lived (Richmond).

But it’s in Providence where a particular part of Poe’s peculiar personality really shined; hence the name of Friday’s event: Sex, Lies and Edgar Allan Poe.

It’s a reference to Poe’s relationship with two women: Sarah Helen Whitman, a Providence poet, and Annie Richmond, the wife of a Lowell, Mass., businessman.

In the fall of 1848, a year before Poe’s death at age 40, he came to Providence and courted Whitman. At the same time, he made trips to Lowell to court Richmond.

“He was making pitches to this woman in her home while her husband was sitting in the room,” says Christina Bevilacqua, the Athenaeum’s director of member services, programs and development.

Richmond’s husband “liked Poe and indulged the relationship, perhaps flattered by the presence of a famous writer in his house,” Kenneth Silverman writes in his 1991 book Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance,

At least Poe got into Richmond’s home. Bevilacqua says he usually couldn’t get in to Whitman’s. Her mother, who she lived with on Benefit Street, didn’t approve of Poe. In fact, Bevilacqua says, Whitman’s mother suspected the destitute Poe was after her money, and told her daughter that if she married him, she’d receive no inheritance.

So the Athenaeum, along with Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, is where Poe wooed his woman.

“He has a longstanding interest in finding someone to take care of him because he was pretty incapable of taking care of himself.”

Before we put Poe in Providence, know a bit about him before his arrival. He was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809. His father abandoned him, and his mother died when he was 2. When he was 22, his brother died, and when he was 38, his wife — a cousin he married when she was 13 — died.

“All the people he cared about in his life, he lost. It happened over and over again. In all of his stories there is this constant sense of love being connected to early death, and there is a permeable wall between life and death.” Those stories and Poe’s poems, especially “The Raven,” made him a luminary in the literary world. “The poem made him a star on the social scene,” Bevilacqua says. “People were constantly saying ‘nevermore’ to each other.”

Poe, according to Bevilacqua, influenced some of the most prominent writers: Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others. But Poe himself was influenced by alcohol.

“He was in such bad shape.”

That became apparent in Providence. Poe arrived intent on meeting Whitman, who was a significant poet herself, according to Bevilacqua.

Poe proposed the first day he met Whitman, who said no, then after Poe persisted, conditionally said yes.

“The conditions were that he completely stop drinking — ‘never again to taste wine’ — and that her mother consent,” Silverman writes. Neither condition was met.

Poe, you might say, was a piece of work. But Whitman was, too.

“They are both tremendously dramatic people who see portent in everything. They shared the same birthday (1803 for Whitman, 1809 for Poe). That was it, it was meant to be. He met his match in a way, temperamentally and intellectually.”

People may think their relationship was romantic, Bevilacqua says, but it was actually “this tragic, strange interlude in each of their lives.”

Romantic love and sex were not motivators for Poe, according to Bevilacqua. It’s not what he was looking for with Whitman or Richmond.

“The notion of sex is out the window. He lives in the realm of a romantic ideal. He was also in such a shape that he probably didn’t seem like the Lothario.”

Athenaeum’s Poe celebration will include a reading of Poe’s “The Raven” by poet Brett Rutherford; a reading of the letters of Whitman by actress Sharon Carpentier; and a reading of letters and poetry of Poe by actor Stephen Thorne of Trinity Rep. In between readings, Alec Redfearn and Yanna Kiriacopoulos will play music that Bevilacqua characterizes as “haunting.”

There will be Poe letters on display. There will be an exhibit by Susan Jaffe Tane of Poe paraphernalia, including magazine articles he wrote and newspaper reviews of his writings. And there will also be an item on loan from the John Hay Library at Brown University: a lock of Whitman’s hair.

“At the time, people saved hair as a memento. That was a common thing. It was also a way of giving someone something that was literally a part of you.”

Sex, Lies and Edgar Allan Poe is Friday at 7 p.m. in the Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit St. For tickets, $75, call (401) 421-6970 or visit www.providenceathenaeum. org.

brourke@projo.com