Sarah Helen Power Whitman (January 19, 1803 – June 27, 1878) was an American poet, essayist, transcendentalist, spiritualist and a romantic interest of Edgar Allan Poe.

[4] She had a penchant for wearing black and a coffin-shaped charm around her neck and may have practiced séances in her home on Sundays, attempting to communicate with the dead.

I experienced a sensation of such intense horror that I dared neither look at anything he had written nor even utter his name... By degrees this terror took the character of fascination—I devoured with a half-reluctant and fearful avidity every line that fell from his pen.

Though they shared a common interest in literature, Poe was concerned about Whitman's friends, though he had little regard for many of them, including Elizabeth F. Ellet, Margaret Fuller, and several other Transcendentalists.

After Poe lectured in Providence in December 1848, reciting a poem by Edward Coote Pinkney directly to Whitman, she agreed to an "immediate marriage".

Whitman supposedly received an anonymous letter while she was at the library suggesting that Poe had broken his vow to her to stay sober, directly leading to an end of the relationship.

"[16] The work likely inspired William Douglas O'Connor to write The Good Gray Poet, a similar defense of Walt Whitman, published in 1866.

[18] Sarah Helen Whitman died at the age of 75 on June 27, 1878[19] at the home of a friend at 133 Brown St [20] (then 97 Bowen St.) in Providence, Rhode Island,[21] and is buried in the North Burial Ground.

She also left money to the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Children and the Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.