Andrew Barger, “Frances Osgood’s Connections to Edgar Allan Poe’s Couplet and the Stuart Manuscript of ‘Eulalie,’” Poe Studies

 

My most recent Poe article was published by Johns Hopkins Press. You can check it out here: Andrew Barger, “Frances Osgood’s Connections to Edgar Allan Poe’s Couplet and the Stuart Manuscript of ‘Eulalie,’” Poe Studies, 55 (2022): 109-25 

What's it about? General notions regarding Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood are that an intertextual relationship between the poets lasted approximately one year before the infamous letter scandal broke them apart. Antithetical to these notions, it now appears that Osgood attempted to renew her relationship with Poe in summer of 1847 by publishing a pseudonymous effusion to him. "To — — —," provocatively signed "Anna F. Allan," calls out to Poe to strike his "wild lyre once more" for her. Given no apparent response, the following month another uncharacteristic Osgood poem, titled "Zarifa," was published. From this poem, Poe appears to have adapted a line for an unpublished couplet written on the back of the Stuart manuscript of "Eulalie." "Zarifa" demonstrates the manuscript was in Poe's possession at the time of the poem's publication, and it gives—with some confidence—an earliest date for Poe's couplet.

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