lemm to come over from Philadelphia and join the two in New York. Leaving his family at the Greenwich Street lodgings, Poe then boarded alone for a time with a Mrs. Foster at number 4 Ann Street. During the spring and summer of 1844 he managed to scrape enough together by hack articles, some of which appeared in the Columbia (Pa.) Spy, and Godey's Lady's Book, the Ladies' Home Journal of the day, to exist himself and just barely keep his family. Virginia's health grew steadily worse and in the early summer of 1844 the whole group moved out to the country to a farm located on Bloomingdale Road at what is now Eighty-fourth Street and Broadway. The farm was owned by a kindly Irish couple with a large family, the Brennans. Here for a few months in what was then a charming rural solitude in the beautiful Hudson Valley, Poe seems to have enjoyed a brief period of peace. During this interval he composed "The Raven," or rather put it into final form, as the poem is known to have been in existence in earlier versions as far back as 1842. The idea of the raven itself was taken from Barnaby Rudge. During the summer Poe carried on a correspondence with James Russell Lowell who was writing a brief biography of Poe for Graham's, and with Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, a Georgia poet whose work undoubtedly influenced the Raven's author. By autumn the poet was again destitute and Mrs. Clemm now exerted herself to secure him some salaried work. She called on Nathaniel P. Willis, then editor of the New York Evening Mirror and persuaded him to employ Poe in a minor editorial capacity. Sometime in the fall of 1844 the family again moved to a town lodging at 15 Amity Street, New York City, where they occupied a few rooms. Poe continued to turn out considerable hack work for Willis and also through the columns of the Mirror found opportunity to call attention to himself, to notice Miss Barrett's (later Mrs. Robert Browning) poetry favorably, and to involve himse...
