Poem of the Day: ‘Calumny’ 

Frances Sargent Osgood (1811–1850) was one of a generation of mid-19th-century lady writers that also included the tireless Lydia Maria Child. Osgood’s reputation as a conventionally sentimental moralist is offset somewhat by her competing reputation as the woman allegedly engaged in “a heavy literary courtship” in the 1840s with Edgar Allan Poe.

Osgood, whose husband had gone to California to pan for gold, and Poe, whose wife suffered from tuberculosis, met in New York, at a literary salon hosted by the poet Anne Charlotte Lynch. As a figure of both distinction and pity, Poe apparently drew the attention of more than one married woman at these soirées. But it was Osgood with whom he exchanged poems, Osgood whose first collection of poems he promoted and praised. Their correspondence in letters and poems was ardent enough, apparently, to incite gossip — or could it be that lady writers of the mid-19th century simply liked a scandal and were capable of manufacturing one out of thin fabric? The dedication of a poem, a letter left suggestively on a table: These were the rumors, if nothing else, and grist sufficient for the mill. 

All this drama forms the backdrop for today’s Poem of the Day. “Calumny” seems, on the face of it, just another of the moralizing little poems young ladies of the era liked to copy out into commonplace books. That’s exactly how it feels, in fact: like an extended commonplace in three stanzas. But the poem is enacting a more sophisticated metrical drama. The central octet, in tetrameter lines, signals an increase in pace from the trimeter and dimeter of the first stanza, as a rumor might catch fire and spread. In the final stanza, which downshifts again from tetrameter to trimeter to dimeter, the flaming bolt of accusation finds its mark.

These effects, not simply amplifying the tragedy the speaker narrates, but actually generating it, set the poem apart as something more than an easy moral platitude. Its author did not have to imagine character assassination as an unpleasant abstraction, or invent a narrative about it. Of course, we might regard the pathos of the “gentle heart” with a measure of skepticism. Were the gossiping busybodies entirely wrong? Just how heavy was that “literary courtship?” But perhaps it hardly matters. Rumor can wound, after all, even when what it whispers is true. That gossip may be accurate does not make gossip virtuous. Meanwhile, on its own formal merits, the poem announces itself as something more serious, less platitudinous, than it might have been.