One morning in September, 1848, while Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman were visiting The Providence Athenaeum, Whitman had asked Poe if he had read “Ulalume,” an unsigned contribution to The American Review. Without saying a word, Poe grabbed a bound volume of the journal off of the shelf in the alcove where they were sitting. He opened up to the poem, took a pencil, and signed his name at the bottom of the page. This was Poe’s subtle way of telling Whitman that he was the author.

The volume remained in circulation on the shelves of the Athenaeum for over 20 years until Whitman went back to secure it into good hands among the library’s special collection. 

Whitman recalled Poe’s prideful gesture in a letter to John Henry Ingram, dated April 10, 1874:

“‘Ulalume’ was published without signature and an anonymous copy had floated to me in some newspaper. I was strangely impressed with its weird imagery and vainly questioned everybody likely to have heard of it. One morning, being with Poe at the Athenaeum, I asked him if he had ever seen the poem and could tell me who wrote it. To my infinite surprise, he told me that he himself was the author. Turning to a bound volume of the Review which was in the alcove where we were sitting, he wrote his name at the bottom, and I saw it again yesterday, after an interval of more than 24 years.”

That very volume with Poe’s signature resides in the Athenaeum’s special collection and can be viewed by appointment.

Whitman called the poem “the most original and the most strangely suggestive of all Poe’s poems.” Poe had also told her that there was some autobiographical allegory in it. She wrote Poe’s aunt, Maria Clemm, in April 1859: “Virginia [Poe’s wife] died in January, did she not? Perhaps the correspondence in time was purely ideal — I know he described the emotions themselves as real.”

Scholars consider “Ulalume” one of Poe’s best poems. Whitman not only appreciated the poem from its first appearance, but was able to gain some further insight from the author himself.