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From Chapter 5 of our Kilmarnock Survey, pp 78-9, of, "Mar'se Eddie" in the Shire, Edgar Allan Poe's Scottish Connections, I provide the following two pages, as an adjunct to Billy Kerr's "Irvine Kirkyard Tour." The Allan Family headstone did not copy here, but can be seen in the Tour, and elsewhere in our site:
"We turn now to informing the reader of The Dick Institute. It is a repository of The Kilmarnock Standard's issues containing very important facts about the question, the overall subject, and Poe in Kilmarnock. Moreover, there is far more that is not published, but available, about Poe when one visits Ayrshire. Of very great importance is Mr. James Gracie's article, published in The Scotts Magazine, 1992. This publication is well known in Scotland, but who in the United States has read it? Moreover, Mr. Gracie's article about "Poe's Scot's Connection," would not even be indexed in any of the scholarship of or about Poe.
From that article, fortunately, we learned that Eddy was made by his Head Master, of the Irvine Academy to walk amongst the gravestones of the Kirk, and copy the epitaphs of those who have died. Although several biographers, including Allen, have recorded the fact, the incident was lost under the weight of all the other facts of Poe's life. However, from old issues of The Kilmarnock Standard, now in archives at The Dick Institute only, in the Reserve Section, Mrs. Geddes gave us such facsimiles as she thought relevant. We did not take time to examine, nor scrutinize under a magnifying glass all the articles of Poe's presence and relevance in the shire that Mrs. Geddes thought relevant, until our return to California. For purposes of the reader's benefit, however, we append the transcribed renderings of the facsimiles of those editions given us by Mrs. Giddes. From these, however, we think Mr. Hervey Allen, wonderfully kind to Edgar Allan Poe as he was, plagiarized from the same sources as some of these articles? On the other hand, sometimes giving another researcher or writer credit for something of interest or relevant in one's own writing is not always practicable, as we often omit to do here. Moreover, we would later learn that Quinn, Silverman, and almost all of the other biographers who have commented upon any issue, have failed in the same way. For the reader who cannot travel to our sources, we must include as much from the originals as possible, without violating profusely, copyright law meant to return the income to each writer's intellectual property--his research--some measure of payment. Nevertheless, were this book meant to be a scholarly piece of literature, or the barrister's legal brief on points and authorities for the Court's Law and Motion Calendar, certainly every source would be properly cited. Often it is more important to simply have the facts provided. However, still other biographers simply ignored these research materials of Poe's life, as a period not worth inquiry!
Nevertheless, we learned from these old issues of newspapers, for example, that John Allan also required the same exercise of Eddie in Kilmarnock! We learned later that as Allan had attended the Irvine Academy in his early years, and from where he learned this exclusive Scots' education practice, he would transfer the technique to his son as well. Those "exercises" would later express themselves in Poe's writing, yet their origins go unknown and unreported. Allen has told his readers,
"After a day spent in piling up horrors and cannibal feasting in the chapters of A. Gordon Pym, one can easily imagine him going on a walk with the pallginia amid the graves of old St. John's [church-yard graves in Richmond, Virginia]. There was, to him, an inevitable attraction in such places. [Poe's] mind must have traveled back frequently to Shockoe Cemetery[ ], or to the ancient epitaphs copied over and over upon the slates of the schoolboy at Irvine. There, on the graves of the Allan relatives, a carven ship bellied its stone sails to an eternal breeze from the realms of nowhere."
Years after we wrote the above quote from Allen, a local historian of Irvine, Billy Kerr, sent us several photographs that he had taken, as well as the Church records out of which John Allan certainly had access. One photograph is of the headstone below, as well as of many others, as well as the factual data in which they are indexed, relevant to the Allan Family, and Edgar Allan Poe’s connection with them.
Irvine Cemetery headstone with "carvan sales," from Allen
Irvine Registry of Buried. Notice [the] name of Poe.
These reminiscences of Irvine and Kilmarnock must have created such tension in a mind and body already taut as a harp's string that he had to learn to express them in some objective fashion. He developed, therefore, a genre of hieroglyphs that were metaphors raised to the highest level of cryptography. At the time such genre was his alone. We believe that Poe was not traveling "back frequently to Shockoe Cemetery," but rather to those at Irvine, Kilmarnock, and Saltcoats. And we agree completely with Allen's assessment that, "the ancient epitaphs copied over and over upon the slates of the schoolboy at Irvine." But where did he learn about "the graves of the Allan relatives, a carven ship bellied its stone sails to an eternal breeze," which so captures the death at sea of not only Allans, but Galts, and probably some Poes in Ayrshire shipping as well? Allen then states that, "Amid Poe's various orchestral fugues and lyric songs composed upon the theme of fear, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym may be regarded as a somewhat fumbling prelude to the masterpieces which were to follow. So many others have stated that this was his finest work of prose fiction. But we need to bring the reader forward to the clairvoyant Poe, about whom our correspondent in Ayrshire, Frank Beattie, provides the following factual event from that story:...."
Unfortunately, our footnotes in the book do not transfer to these web pages.
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