Last modified: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 12:22 PM EDT D'ARCONTE: Poe letters from 1840s hit home BY ORESTE D'ARCONTE Say you're a young man in the mid-19th century, a teenager living in a rural area of New England, and you have a dream - to be a poet. What do you do for advice and guidance? Why, you write to as many of the famous writers of the time as you dare and ask for some help with your craft. You write to James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and that irascible Edgar Allan Poe. And they all write back. This is not fiction. It happened. The teenager was Abijah M. Ide Jr. And he lived on a farm in Attleboro. Ide's Hill comes to mind. "A literary reputation, it is true," Poe wrote to Ide, "is seldom worth much when attained ... but in the struggle for its attainment is the true recompense." Two letters from Poe to Ide turned up in 2001 during an auction in Boston. Poe scholar Kent Ljungquist, a professor of American literature at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, edited the letters and published an article on them in the journal Resources for American Literary Study. The letter quoted above was written by Poe in 1843 while he was in Philadelphia. In 1845, from New York City, he sent another letter. In it he called a piece sent to him by Ide "a remarkably fine poem," although he saw a dim future for it. "I do not believe you will be able to sell the poem anywhere. Its merits are higher than those of many poems that are sold for high prices," he wrote to Ide, "but what is paid for is the name of the poet." Of this, Poe knew. Ide, the farmer boy from Attleboro, went on to edit a number of newspapers, including the Taunton True Democrat, and contributed poems to several magazines. Poe, we know, came to a more tragic end. While Poe may surely have travelled through the Attleboro area on his trips between Boston, Providence, New York and Boston, this local connection is especially poignant as the city celebrates Poe in the ongoing fall tribute by 1ABC in conjunction with The Big Read. The logo 1ABC stands for 1 Adventure, 1 Book, 1 City, and everyone who is around and about in Attleboro is being touched by Poe in some way during this time, if you are aware of it or not. Dreams are good. Especially in a world where coincidence knows not of "nevermore." Thanks for the papers Tom Higgins of North Attleboro just returned from a "whirlwind" business trip to Seoul, South Korea, and Sydney, Australia, and brought me back some papers, only one of them in Korean. "Brought back these papers from our recent 'Mediterranean Enchantment' cruise to Rome, Monaco, Nice, Barcelona, Tunisia and Naples," write Barbara and Les Negus. "The historic site of Carthage, outside Tunis, the Coliseum and Roman forum in Rome and the Sistene Chapel at Vatican City, were awesome. Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast in Southern Italy, as well as coastal Monaco, France and Spain were beautiful. We celebrated our 15th wedding anniversry on the Mediterranean between the Belearic Islands, off Spain, and Tunis, Tunisia. Our first visit to Spain and Africa. A great trip, but also great to be back in the good old USA." See you next week.