Tis the season of the witch. And once again two heavyweights of American letters are uncomfortably joined at the hip — Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.
Because of Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Poe’s voluminous oeuvre of gloomy poems and short stories, the pair are inextricably linked to Halloween Inc., an industry that reached a record $12.2 billion in spending in 2023, according to the National Retail Federation.
I suspect Irving, an extrovert who had a modest opinion of his own writing, would roll with the association.
But not Poe.
The ultraserious Poe would hate having his name attached to Halloween.
Surely, it would blow his chronically troubled mind to see how “The Raven,” arguably the most famous American poem ever written (he was paid a paltry $9 for it), was bastardized for commercial exploitation and paired at drive-in theaters with campy horror flicks like The Blob. Though Irving and Poe were contemporaries and for a brief period were practically neighbors, they likely never met. Irving, of course, lived at his irresistibly cheery Sunnyside estate in Tarrytown, while Poe, from 1845 to 1847, rented a cheap, five-room cottage in Fordham, then a part of Westchester County (now the Bronx). Both homes are open to the public, and while hordes sojourn to Sunnyside, the path to Poe’s door in the Bronx is much less traveled. Visit Sunnyside and you get the feeling that you are just in time for an opulent midday repast presided over by the great man himself. At Poe’s crib, you sense despair and incipient starvation. The fare is a thin gruel.
The Bronx cottage is where Poe wrote his last poem, “Annabel Lee,” a mournful ode to his young wife, Virginia, who died of tuberculosis in a cramped bedroom on the first floor. Two years later, the heart-broken Poe, apparently drunk and disoriented, collapsed on a Baltimore street and was taken to a hospital where he later died.
If Irving was “Halloween Lite,” Poe was hardcore macabre.
In personality and outlook, Poe and Irving were two very different men. The perpetually impoverished Poe once told a friend he hadn’t read much of Irving’s stuff and what he had read was “overrated.” His low opinion notwithstanding, Poe was not above asking the older, more established writer for feedback, which Irving provided in an 1839 letter that contained gentle criticism, a generous dollop of praise, and closed with “Best wishes for your success.”
If Irving was “Halloween Lite,” Poe was hardcore macabre.
And what could be more hardcore than “The Premature Burial,” a truly blood-curdling story Poe wrote in 1844 about the Victorian fear of being sealed in a coffin while still alive? One sentence begins:
“The unendurable oppression of the lungs — the stifling fumes from the damp earth — the clinging to the death garments — the rigid embrace of the narrow house — the blackness of the absolute Night — the silence like a sea that overwhelms…”
It goes on, incredibly, for about 90 more words.
The tale of Ichabod Crane and the “galloping Hessian” (Irving wrote it in England) serves as a complementary yin to Poe’s gothic yang. Inspired by the myths and legends passed down by New York’s early Dutch settlers, it is more of a comic romp than a horror story.
Crane, the funny-looking schoolmaster, is an unsympathetic character reminiscent of the worst teachers you had in junior high. He rides Dynamite, a broken-down plow horse who, fueled by fear of the headless horseman, miraculously finds his inner Secretariat during the chase that ends when Crane is clobbered with a flaming pumpkin.
What’s funnier than that?
Irving’s Halloween Lite is a candy-corn commercial enterprise of blazing jack-o’-lanterns, haunted hayrides, and rag-a-muffin parades that will bring 80,000 to 100,000 seasonal tourists to Sleepy Hollow. Many will visit Sunnyside, which seems happily preserved in protective amber.
The rural Fordham where Poe lived, is, well, to quote a certain black bird, “nevermore.” The cottage is situated at the north end of Poe Park between Kingsbridge Avenue and the Grand Concourse — though this is not its original location, having been moved from across the street in 1913 to make way for an apartment building.
Whether he would approve or not, Poe is culturally linked to All Hallows’ Eve. But there is nothing festive about the little house where he briefly lived — and so I wouldn’t go there on October 31. Wait until a cold day in late January when the trees are leafless and the sun sets early.
Embrace the winter gloom and feel Poe’s grief over the loss of the maiden who thought only “to love and be loved by me.”
The opinions and beliefs expressed by Phil Reisman are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Westchester Magazine’s editors and publishers. Tell us what you think at edit@westchestermagazine.com.
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