Poems for Poe, No. 2

At the Grave of Poe

by William James Price
Composed in June 1911. Published in The Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911. 

Here, with a few forgotten one, reposes

A bard whose fame our long neglect defies

To him the selfish world gave thorns for roses.

And nations wonder where his body lies.

 

His haunting melodies, too few in number,

In alien hearts beyond the ocean live,

While we his virtues doom to endless slumber,

Condemn his faults, and no reward will give.

 

Ere Time's relentless tread at last has crumbled

These hallowed stones into the silent dust,

Will Pride awake, Ingratitude be humbled,

And Truth compel our spirits to be just?

Ah, grant him now a nobleman's estate,
Lest all the dead arise to prove him great!

* * *

Please note: I have inserted breaks where I believe the poet intended to but which the newspaper may have removed for the sake of conserving space in print. Note that Price's poem is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, which is broken into stanzas as I have done here.

Posted by Terence E. Hanley on the anniversary of Poe's death, October 7, 2025.

Poems for Poe, No. 1

To Edgar Allan Poe

By Howard Elsmere Fuller

Originally in Contemporary American Poets, edited by Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928). From the website Poetry Explorer.

Thou art a thing of Death--
Born of the love of Life,
Born of the love of Life-in-Death . . . .

Denizen of a world which hath no name,
Which hath no being out of Mind--
Far-flung, with the mad ecstasy of youth,
To the Attic hills where Pan first sang
To a dew-drenched world
The amorous strains of Creation.
Above, in the star-tossed main,
Thou must have sat,
In the cool grey dawn of things
And watched with knowing Messianic eye
The swirling mists of chaos
Stiffen into a world profane.

With a haunting, dreamy sadness
Is bared thy cryptic soul;
With a rhythmic rune of madness,
Thy melancholy soul.

Sea things with seaweed hair
And faces blanched with pale-eyed Death
Sleep on the motley sands--
The crested wave of the sobbing sea
Hath lapped their blood like wine.
Draped in whispering robes of satin,
There dream in weird, fantastic chambers,
Maidens with waxen faces, fragile fingers,
Drained of life by hectic living
In mansions, grim and sunless.

World-old newness exotic
To this sordid clime
Sprang to thy lips erotic
And flowed like ruby wine.

Sweet gamboler in the dewy gardens
Of jeweled Paradise,
Where ruddy roses ebb and flow
In the cheeks of sylph-like children.
Elves, in their amours sweet with thee
Fresh with the matin dews of time,
Whisper to thee things unknown
To the sodden soul of man.

Demons, ghastly, foul and gory
Infest the Stygian gloom,
Spectres, grim and grey and hoary
Come shrieking from the tomb--

Come shrieking from mouldering mausolea,
Whence vague shadows of the uneasy dead,
Eluding Cerberus, the red-eyed watcher,
Fare forth on the sable wings of night
Peopling the sentient blackness
With ghoulish wraiths of terror.

Tears unceasing, bitter sorrow
Hath seared thy lonely years--
The leprous touch of sorrow,
The agony of tears.

The love of woman was to thee
Divinest torture of the soul.
Radiant life was but to thee
The sad betokening of death.

Soft as the sighs of Eros
Is the music of thy pain,
Sweet as the breath of Zephyr,
Fresh as the cooling rain.

Pilgrims journey far to mourn thee
As they would a thing divine,
And they that sought to scorn thee
Pay thee homage at thy shrine.

* * *

 Posted by Terence E. Hanley, 2025.

The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe

The last poem printed in Weird Tales in 1925 was "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe. It first appeared in a magazine published in Baltimore by Nathan C. Brooks (1809-1898). The original title of the magazine was The North American Quarterly. In or about 1838, Brooks renamed his new charge The American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, or The American Museum for short. Evidently, the magazine was also referred to as the Baltimore Museum. That's a lot to go through, but it seems like there is a lack of clarity and precision out there on the Internet as to the original source of "The Haunted Palace." The date of publication by the way was April 1839.

Poe soon incorporated "The Haunted Palace" into his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September 1839. "The Haunted Palace" is a poem in six stanzas of eight lines each. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the stanzas are numbered. In Weird Tales, they are not. Without going through these two versions, I can't say whether they are word for word the same.

I have written before about "The Haunted Palace." First I listed it in Poe's works reprinted in Weird Tales. In writing about Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), I listed some of that author's screen adaptations of other works. These included the screenplay for The Haunted Palace (1963), which is actually an adaptation of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, May-July 1941).

In 2021, I wrote about Les Baxter (1922-1996). Baxter wrote the scores for many Hollywood movies, including The Dunwich Horror, from 1970. Inasmuch as The Haunted Palace was the first film adapted from a work by Lovecraft, the composer of that score, Ronald Stein (1930-1988), should probably get credit for the first recorded musical adaptation of a work by Lovecraft, assuming a movie score is a kind of program music and therefore an adaptation. Prior to that, I had written about what I called "The Other Forms of Lovecraft," listing The Haunted Palace as the first adaptation on film of a work by Lovecraft.

That's a lot about Lovecraft and less about Poe. I'll close by letting you know that, according to Wikipedia, "The Haunted Palace" has been adapted to music four times, first in 1904 by French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958).

The cover of an album of musical works based on two stories and a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, including Florent Schmitt's symphonic poem Le Palais hanté, Op. 49, based on "The Haunted Palace" by Poe. I have this image from a very thorough blog entry called "Florent Schmitt and the French Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe: Le Palais hanté (1904)" by Phillip Nones, posted on December 10, 2012, here. Thank you to Mr. Nones and the conductor(s) of that blog. This is the kind of thing the Internet was supposed to be instead of what it is.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

The Death of Alanson Skinner

The December 1925 issue closed out the first full year of Farnsworth Wright's tenure as editor of Weird Tales. It was also the first full year for the magazine itself, with twelve monthly issues published in all. Nineteen twenty-five was also the last full year during which the editorial offices of Weird Tales were based in Indianapolis. The magazine moved to Chicago in late 1926. I have already written about many of the authors who were in that December issue. A couple of others--James Cocks, Douglas Oliver--might prove a challenge.

There was sad news to report in "The Eyrie" that month. Alanson Skinner (1886-1925), who had had a story in the October issue, was reported killed in an automobile accident. That had happened on August 17, 1925, and so Skinner's first story in Weird Tales was published posthumously. I can't say that this was the first tribute to a deceased author to appear in Weird Tales, but it must have been one of the first. I'll reprint it here in it entirety so that we can remember again an author who died a century ago this past summer.

Those of you who read Alanson Skinner's story of Indian witchcraft, Bad Medicine, in the October issue, will be saddened to learn of the author's tragic death in an automobile accident near Tokio, North Dakota, on August 17. The car skidded on a slippery road and crashed over an embankment. A moment later, the Rev. Amos Oneroad, a Sioux Indian, dazed and bruised, crawled from the wreck, calling a name, listening for an answer. Then he struggled manfully, but in vain, to lift the mass of steel and release his dearest friend, who lay pinioned and silent beneath it. At length help was found, the car was raised, but it was too late. Alanson Skinner was dead--Alanson Skinner, sympathetic and appreciative friend of the Indian race, learned student of ancient America, prolific author of scientific works on Indian subjects, lecturer, fiction writer, poet. Gone forever was that wonderful memory, that bubbling humor, that active mind, that radiant, cheerful personality. He was only thirty-nine years old, just getting into his full stride, at the threshold of what promised to be the most brilliant and valuable part of his career. One of his last acts, before he left on the mission that cost him his life, was to send to WEIRD TALES The Tsantsa of Professor Von Rothapfel, an eery [sic] story of a South American Indian tribe that preserves and shrinks the heads of its dead enemies. This story will be published soon.

"Soon" was August 1926, a year after Alanson's death.

Reverend Amos Oneroad (1884-1937) was a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, an artist, a public speaker and performer, and a writer, as well as a Presbyterian minister. In 2005, the Minnesota Historical Society Press published his book, co-authored with Alanson Skinner, called Being Dakota: Tales and Traditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton.

Although winter begins and the sun and the day reach their nadir in December, it is--or should be--a happy month. I wish there could have been happier news in Weird Tales in December 1925. But this was as it will ever be.

From the Trenton, New Jersey, Times, March 23, 1917, page 15.

In this series I have gone month by month through 1925, now a century past. I have left out a lot of writers, but these I can still cover in the future.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Bertha Russell (ca. 1910-?)

Young Author
Born Circa 1910
Died ?

There is an extra story in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. It's not listed in the table of contents, and its author is not included with others who contributed to "The Unique Magazine." Her name was Bertha Russell and she was fifteen years old when her story was published. Editor Farnsworth Wright took the unusual step of publishing her story, entitled "Pity Me!", in its entirety not in the main body of the magazine but in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column. I have seen poetry in "The Eyrie" before, but this is the first time I have seen a short story.

"Pity Me!" is brief. Call it a short short story. It's in a necrophilic vein--pun partially intended. There were readers who liked and wanted stories of what they called necrophilia. There were others who did not. I don't think stories in this vein that appeared in Weird Tales were always sexual. I think when readers wrote about "necrophilia," they meant stories that were focused on death and corpses, maybe also stories that were especially gruesome. One of the first, if not the first, necrophilic story in Weird Tales was "The Loved Dead" by C.M. Eddy, Jr., assisted or revised by H.P. Lovecraft and published in the issue of May/June/July 1924. That story was supposed to have caused a wider controversy regarding pulp magazines. I'm not sure that that actually happened. Anyway, maybe what's needed here is some further research and a whole series devoted to stories of this type. But does anybody really want to read them?

We don't know anything about Bertha Russell except that she was fifteen years old in 1925, making her birth year about 1910 and making her yet another teen-aged author in Weird Tales. Usually "The Eyrie" included the city from which a correspondent wrote, but we don't have that for her. Suffice it to say that young Bertha Russell must have been thrilled and excited to have her story in Weird Tales.

Like I said, I have seen poetry in "The Eyrie." I have also seen it as an epigraph in various short stories. A list or discussion of poetry or lines of poetry that appeared in "The Eyrie" or stories published in Weird Tales would make for another essay or series. It would also make for an expanded list of authors whose work appeared in "The Unique Magazine."

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

William James Price (1875-1937)

Insurance Agent, Salesman, Bookkeeper, Poet, Editor, Book Reviewer
Born March 8, 1875, Maryland
Died June 2, 1937, Baltimore, Maryland

William James Price was a poet, editor, and book reviewer. He edited a quarterly magazine of verse called Interludes, published from about 1924 until the early 1930s by Interludes Publishing Company of 2917 Erdman Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland. That happened to be Price's home. In early 1923, Price had the idea of getting together a group of Maryland poets. Coincidentally, this was at around the same time that Weird Tales was first published. Price's idea came to fruition in the Verse Writers' Guild of Maryland. Interludes was its official publication. Price's own poems include the following:

• "Come Down to Maryland" (1920) 
• "A Walk Together" (1921)
• "Woodrow Wilson" (1924)
• "The Shot Tower Speaks" (1924)
• "The Wonder Song" (1926)
• "The Plight of John McBride" in Mystery Magazine (Mar. 1927)
• "The Ballade for the End of Battles" (1929)

"A Walk Together" reminds me of Robert Frost's poem "The Pasture," from 1915.

Price had four poems in Weird Tales from November 1925 to January 1927. See the list below. He also wrote a poem on Edgar Allan Poe, which was printed with his letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun on Christmas Day, 1911:

From the Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911, page 6.

This is the second tribute to Poe written by authors of 1925 about whom I have written this season, Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985) being the first. Price shared pages with Poe in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Poe's poem was "The Conqueror Worm," from 1843, a powerful and devastating work.

 

William James Price was born on March 8, 1875, in Maryland. He worked as an insurance agent, salesman, and bookkeeper. On January 14, 1904, he married Mary Isabel or Isabella Painter or Paynter (1885-1980). Notice that Price's wife had the same (or similar) surname as Orrin C. Painter (1864-1915), who provided the bronze (or iron) gate for the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe and about whom Price wrote in his letter to the editor. Painter also provided a stone to mark Poe's grave, but for some reason it was put in the wrong place, bringing to mind Price's line, "And nations wonder where his body lies." By the way, Painter was also a poet.

 

I haven't been able to find a direct connection between Mary Painter or Paynter and Orrin C. Painter. Records for this family--or at least her branch--seem scarce, even if the latter wrote a history of them. (Where is it?) I should add that the artist, photographer, and explorer William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) married into the family of Orrin Chalfant Painter. William Henry Jackson, strangely enough, was the great-grandfather and namesake of cartoonist Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead. The connections to prominent people could go on, but this mini-biography has to turn back to its subject.

 

There was in Maryland a prominent family of men named William James Price. I don't know what relation, if any, these men had with the poet who shared their name:

• William James Price, Sr. (1831-1916) was a real estate broker and at one time the largest landowner and taxpayer in Queen Anne's County, Maryland.

• His son, William James Price, Jr., or the 2nd (1863-1928), was the editor and publisher of the Centreville [Maryland] Observer.

• His son, William James Price III (1899-1972), was a military man and an investment banker.

After following those leads for entirely too long, I discovered the identity of the poet. I wasn't prepared to rule out any of them in my search, even the Third. Money and versifying may not seem to go together, but they are also not mutually exclusive: let's not forget that Wallace Stevens, who worked in the insurance business, was also a poet of renown. Stevens famously wrote, "Money is a kind of poetry." That quotation brings us back to William James Price, or the Price of poetry, who was also in the insurance business but gave us verse to outlive all of his other work.

William James Price's Poems in Weird Tales
"The Ghostly Lovers" (Nov. 1925)
"The Ghost Girl" (Dec. 1925)
"Italian Love" (Feb. 1926)
"Ballade of Phantom Ships" (Jan. 1927)

Further Reading

• "A Maryland Society of Poets Is Suggested," letter to the editor in the Baltimore Evening Sun, February 14, 1923, page 15.
• Other brief articles and items, plus the poems themselves. 

Thanks to The FictionMags Index for the extra credit for William James Price.
Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

David Baxter (1882-1949)

Poet, Nature Writer, Author, Editor, Songwriter, Printer, Foundryman, Mechanic, City Parks Commissioner
Born October 27, 1882, Hutchinson, Kansas
Died June 9, 1949, Hutchinson, Kansas

David Baxter was born on October 27, 1882, in Hutchinson, Kansas, to Jackson B. and Mollie Baxter. I believe he was the oldest of eight children fathered by J.B. Baxter, who was later married to Rachel Horn. The elder Baxter was a blacksmith. His son followed in his footsteps. David Baxter married Myrtle B. Meyers. I believe they had just one son.

Although he traveled out of state, Baxter seems to have lived in Hutchinson for all of his life. He worked in mechanical fields, as a mechanic, a foundryman for twenty-three years, and a printer for eleven or more. He was the founder of Hutchinson Foundry and Machine Works in his native city. Hammer and tongs were his tools, but on the side, he wrote, and I believe he enjoyed a career in writing that might not even be possible now but was then, before we got caught up in other things. You could say that in his side career Baxter either hammered away at a typewriter or held a pen in the tongs of his forefinger and thumb. With these he forged words and lines.

David Baxter got started as a professional writer in July 1915 when his poem "A Globe-Trotter's Plaint" was published in Munsey's Magazine. He received $6 in return. From 1924 to 1940, he had poems, stories, and articles in The Blue Book Magazine, Weird Tales, and Argosy. He also contributed to Everybody's Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science Monthly, Field and Stream, The Outers' Recreation Book, Live Stories, Snappy Stories, Santa Fe Magazine, Every Week, Farm and Fireside, and other titles.

Much of Baxter's success came from writing poems and epigrams. He also wrote for trade journals, technical journals, and specialty magazines, including Blacksmith's Journal, Concrete Magazine, Journal of Acetylene Welding, Oxy-Acetylene Welding, International Molders' Journal, Cement Era, Welding Engineer, American Garage & Auto Dealer, and Motor in Canada. Still more of works appeared in The New York Clipper, Railroad Men's Magazine, and Fun Book. Baxter sometimes illustrated his own articles, or took the photographs that accompanied them in print. After only five and a half years as a published author, he had collected seventy-five poems, 500 epigrams, and as many as half a million words of stories and articles in his scrapbook. He averaged $80 per month in income from his writing.

Baxter wrote a song in ragtime, "You Ain't Talking to Me," published in Chicago by Success Music Company in 1905. In the 1920s, he edited "Attic Anthology," a column in the Hutchinson News composed of verses by members of the Hutchinson Writers Guild. Many of his own poems appeared in this column. I think they would be well worth collecting. Baxter was co-founder of the Hutchinson Writers Guild in 1927. He was also president of the Seventh District Club of the Kansas Authors Club and a member Authors League of America.

Baxter's  stories for Weird Tales are unusual in that they are animal stories. "The Brown Moccasin" (Feb. 1925) is about a snake, while "Nomads of the Night" (Oct. 1925) is about bats and other winged night creatures. These are not fables but nature writing. Both are set in Kansas, and that setting is what led me to their author. It has been a long, long time since I read anything by Ernest Thompson Seton, but I think Baxter's stories are in that mold. Later such writers, whose books I enjoyed as a child, included Herbert S. Zim, Charles L. Ripper, and Olive L. Earle. The Wonderful World of Disney showed films in a similar vein.

David Baxter was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) and secretary-treasurer of the local Izaak Walton League. Late in life he ran for and was elected to the city parks commission in his hometown. David Baxter died on June 9, 1949, in the city of his birth. He was sixty-six years old.

By the way, the David Baxter of Hutchinson, Kansas, should not to be confused with the journalist and writer David Baxter (1908-1989) who was tried for sedition during World War II, along with George Sylvester Viereck, William Dudley Pelley, and others. That David Baxter seems to have had a Kansas connection, too, but don't go down the wrong road in looking for the man of the same name who contributed to Weird Tales. That other David Baxter had an interesting story to tell, too, and so you might want to read him as well.

David Baxter's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Brown Moccasin" (Feb. 1925)
"Nomads of the Night" (Oct. 1925) 

Further Reading

• "Works Days in Foundry; and Nights Writing Poetry: David Baxter, Hutchinson Foundryman, Making Profitable Sideline Out of Literary Work" in the Hutchinson [Kansas] News, December 28, 1920, page 9.
• "Mechanic Is Successful Writer for Magazines" in the Topeka [Kansas] Daily Capital, January 2, 1921, page 9.
• Many poems in the Hutchinson News.

 

From the Hutchinson News, March 25, 1939, page 8, when Baxter ran for city parks commissioner.

 Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley