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ALS signed “Edgar A. Poe,” one page, 7.5 x 9, Philadelphia, December 30, 1840. Handwritten letter to poet Lewis J. Cist, in full: "Your letter of the 7th found me labouring under a severe illness, which has confined me to bed for the last month, and from which I am now only slowly recovering. The worst result of this illness is that I am forced to postpone the issue of the first number of the Mag. until the first of March next, when it will certainly appear, and I trust under the best auspices. 'Bachelor Philosophy,' I am sorry to say, cannot appear until the second number, as at the time of its reception, all the poetry for the first number was already in type.
Would you be kind enough to mention the delay in the issue to your friend Mr. Boyd, and if possible to procure me the insertion of this announcement in some one of your city papers. 'The Penn Magazine' owing to the severe and continued illness of Mr. Poe the issue of the first number of this journal is postponed until the first of March next." In fine condition, with intersecting folds.
Poe announced in June 1840 that he would begin publication of his new Penn Magazine in January 1841. Launching his own literary magazine was Poe’s dream from 1840 until his death in 1849. This letter from the outset of that effort represents those hopes and dreams which would be dashed again and again over the 1840s.
In this letter to banker-poet Lewis Jacob Cist of Cincinnati, Poe explains the unexpected delay in publication, reporting on a "severe illness" which may have been related to the effects of drink. Despite Poe’s assertion to Snodgrass on April 1, 1841, that he hadn’t drunk since his days editing the Southern Literary Messenger (other than a single instance of drinking cider), publisher Charles Alexander says that Poe was drinking during the Burton’s period just before Poe edited Graham’s. At different times in his life, Poe was also diagnosed with heart and brain problems. Heavy drinking likely led to his death at age forty in 1849.
Cist had submitted a poem for the first issue of the Penn Magazine, but Poe reports that its inclusion must be delayed. This was only the first of the postponements that plagued Poe’s publishing project, which he called 'the one great purpose of my literary life.' By mid-January, Poe was fully recovered from his illness, but the February bank crisis forced another delay of the new journal. Then George Graham persuaded Poe to become editor of his new magazine, Graham’s Monthly, beginning in February 1841. Poe left Graham’s in April 1842 and tried to revive Penn again, hoping to publish the first issue in January 1843. Again, nothing came of this attempt, and February 1843 found Poe sounding out support for the project under a new name, The Stylus. The change in title did not improve Poe’s fortunes. Up until his death in 1849, he still vainly sought funds and contributors for his long-planned periodical, which never appeared in print.
Poe wrote about Cist in the December 1841 issue of Graham’s in 'A Chapter on Autography,' observing: 'Mr. L. J. Cist, of Cincinnati, has not written much prose, and is known especially by his poetical compositions, many of which have been very popular, although they are at times disfigured by false metaphor, and by a meretricious straining after effect. This latter foible makes itself clearly apparent in his chirography, which abounds in ornamental flourishes, not illy executed, to be sure, but in very bad taste.'
Cist’s 'Bachelor Philosophy' appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1841 without the poet’s permission after Poe transferred Cist’s manuscript, along with many others, to another editor before obtaining the contributors’ consent. When the poem was published with the false claim that it had been 'written for The Post,' Poe wrote Cist a long letter of apology, accepting responsibility for his neglect while blaming the unauthorized publication on editor Charles J. Peterson. The two continued to correspond for several years, and in 1845 Poe favorably noticed Cist's volume Trifles in Verse in the Broadway Journal. Although Cist never achieved lasting fame as a poet, he became one of America's leading manuscript collectors, leaving at his death a collection of more than 11,000 items, including this letter.
Provenance: Lewis J. Cist, Bangs & Co., 5-8 October 1886, lot 160; H. Bradley Martin, Sotheby’s, New York, 30-31 January 1990, lot 2223.
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