CHAPTER 5

In Transit (1848–1849)

Each of the previous chapters has focused on Poe’s experience in a specific city, while chronicling a discreet period of his life. This last chapter has no such anchor. Although Poe still called Fordham home—it was, if nothing else, where his beloved mother-in-law could be found—he was away from the little cottage and from New York for almost half of the last fifteen months of his life and all of his last three. He spent the summer and fall of 1848 shuttling between Fordham, New York; Richmond, Virginia; Providence, Rhode Island; and Lowell, Massachusetts; then, after spending the first half of 1849 mostly in Fordham, he hit the road again, spending most of the summer in Richmond before his ill-fated attempt to return home.

In a sense, living out of a suitcase or a trunk was the story of Poe’s life. Despite nearly four years spent at the “old place” near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia and the relative stability of Fordham, Poe changed addresses an average of once a year. After breaking with the Allans, he had found a family with Virginia and Maria Clemm, but he never put down roots in a community. As a young man, he had considered Richmond to be “home,” but since leaving the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837 he had been merely an infrequent visitor there. His devotion to Muddy comes through in his letters throughout his travels, as well as his poem “To My Mother”: “You who are more than mother unto me, / And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you / In setting my Virginia’s spirit free” (P 467). And yet that bond of maternal affection was not enough for Poe to feel “at home” with her in Fordham. He wanted a wife, and he was bound to keep moving until he found one. His other motivation during this final, unsettled period was his career-long magazine ambition and the quest for subscribers. As he traveled from city to city, those two goals—marriage and a magazine—were constant.

During Virginia’s illness, Poe had developed a close relationship with a Manhattan housewife named Marie Louise Shew, who had learned about the family’s troubles through a friend and volunteered to nurse Virginia and provide comfort as well as material aid to Edgar. There is no suggestion of a romantic attachment in their correspondence, but clearly her feelings for Poe, and his for her, ran deep. The non-churchgoing Poe even accompanied “Loui” to a midnight service at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion at Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street in late 1847. Their friendship continued after Virginia’s death but ended as a consequence of Poe’s publishing Eureka in June 1848. Shew’s friend John Henry Hopkins Jr., a theology student, published reviews of both the lecture and print versions of Poe’s cosmology, and even met with Poe to discuss his work. Hopkins initially admired much about the treatise but was scandalized by its author’s overt pantheism, and he convinced the devout Mrs. Shew to cut her ties with Poe. She did, and Poe’s written response to Shew has a familiar ring—a mixture of manipulation through guilt and sincere dejection—as well as a sadly accurate premonition: “Are you to vanish like all I love, or desire, from my darkened and ‘lost soul’ … unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me, I shall hardly last a year longer alone!” (L 2:677–78).

Meanwhile, other women were taking an interest in the newly widowed Poe, who was still in his thirties and well known, if not financially well off. Jane Ermina Locke, a poet from Lowell, began corresponding with him a few weeks after Virginia’s death. She visited him in Fordham and invited him to Lowell around the same time his friendship with Loui Shew was dissolving in mid-1848. Meeting her in person, Poe learned what he had been unable to uncover through Locke’s letters: that she was married with five children. Poe agreed to a lecture, arranged by Locke, in Lowell that July, but otherwise he tried to distance himself from her, partly because of her marital status, perhaps more because he didn’t find her very appealing, but mostly because, during his visit to Lowell, he became infatuated with a woman Locke introduced him to—her neighbor Nancy Richmond.

Unfortunately for Poe, Richmond was also married, but, even though he had no intention of carrying on a sexual affair with her, he repeatedly expressed his devotion in letters throughout the next year. He would include a thinly fictionalized description of her in his story “Landor’s Cottage,” in which the narrator encounters “a young woman about twenty-eight years of age—slender, or rather slight, and somewhat above the medium height.… I said to myself, ‘Surely here I have found the perfection of natural, in contradistinction from artificial grace.’ … So intense an expression of romance, perhaps I should call it, or of unworldliness, as that which gleamed from her deep-set eyes, had never so sunk into my heart of hearts before” (T 2:1338–39). Poe named this idealized fictional creation “Annie,” the same name he bestowed on Nancy Richmond not long after meeting her. For her part, Annie (who adopted the new name) regarded Poe as someone apart from, implicitly above, the ordinary run of men: “He seemed so unlike any other person, I had ever known, that I could not think of him in the same way—he was incomparable—not to be measured by any ordinary standard—& all the events of his life, which he narrated to me, had a flavor of unreality about them, just like his stories.”¹

Mrs. Richmond’s husband Charles, a successful paper manufacturer, tolerated Poe’s chaste adoration of his wife—at least initially—but, even so, Poe must have realized that the “true and tender and pure womanly love” that he needed to save him would not come from a married woman living two hundred miles from Fordham. So he hoped instead that it might come from Sarah Helen Whitman, who, much like Frances Osgood a few years earlier, established a relationship with Poe by publishing a love poem she wrote for him. Whitman, a widow living in Providence, was sufficiently connected to New York City salon culture to send a valentine—a poem titled “To Edgar A. Poe”—to one of Anne Lynch’s literary gatherings in February 1848. Lynch, who was collecting the salon poems for publication, explained to Whitman that, while she admired her verses “exceedingly,” she hesitated to publish a tribute to Poe, who by this point was “in such bad odour with most persons who visit me that if I were to receive him, I should lose the company of many whom I value more.”² But Whitman, who would receive multiple warnings about Poe’s reputation throughout their courtship, persisted, and Lynch helped her publish the poem—which addresses Poe as “the Raven,” concluding, “Not a bird that roams the forest / Shall our lofty eyrie share”—in N. P. Willis’s magazine the Home Journal. That got Poe’s attention. He sent Helen a copy of his early poem “To Helen,” cut from a copy of The Raven and Other Poems, then followed up with a new, 66-line blank-verse poem (posthumously titled “To Helen” as well).³ In late September, Poe traveled to Providence to meet her.

Poe’s travels in the second half of 1848 also included a visit to Richmond, the city where he had grown up, ostensibly to enlist subscribers and support for the Stylus. While he was there, he paid a surprise visit to the woman to whom he had been secretly engaged as a teenager: Elmira Royster, now the widowed Elmira Shelton. Poe was testing the waters for a renewed courtship, but Elmira was ambivalent about the attentions of an impoverished and somewhat notorious writer. She probably was not even aware that, while in Richmond, Poe tried to challenge a hostile editor, John M. Daniel, to a duel before cooler heads prevailed.⁴ Lecturing, promoting the Stylus, pursuing a new wife and/or soul mate, Poe was spending little time in Fordham.

Travel for Poe, like most northeasterners, meant a combination of railroad and steamboat. Rail travel had gone from experimental to ubiquitous during Poe’s adult life; by the year after his death, the United States would have some nine thousand miles of rail. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “Americans take to this contrivance, the railroad, as if it were the cradle in which they were born.”⁵ In 1854 Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau, recognizing the tyrannical potential of new technology, warned, “We do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us,” but even Thoreau also expressed a kind of admiration for the locomotive as a symbol of self-reliant determination. The actual experience of riding on a mid-nineteenth-century train was probably both exhilarating—moving at the unheard-of speed of twenty miles per hour—and nauseating. Dickens, in his American Notes, referred to the cars as “shabby omnibuses,” and Fanny Kemble’s description suggests the nineteenth-century equivalent of traveling on a small, no-frills commuter jet: “The windows … form the walls on each side of the carriage, which looks like a long greenhouse upon wheels; the seats, which each contain two persons (a pretty tight fit, too), are placed down the whole length of the vehicle, one behind the other, leaving a species of aisle in the middle for the uneasy (a large portion of the traveling community here) to fidget up and down, for the tobacco-chewers to spit in, and for a whole tribe of itinerant fruit and cake-sellers to rush through.”⁶

Even as rail was revolutionizing travel, in the late 1840s there was nothing like a national rail system; short lines served local and regional customers, and they did not always intersect at common depots. In Fordham, Poe himself lived near a stop that had recently been added to the New York and Harlem line, one of the nation’s earliest commuter trains, and he alluded in letters to living “about 14 miles from New-York along the Harlam Rail-Road” (L 792). Because of the uncoordinated patchwork nature of rail lines, travel even between major cities involved changeovers and, frequently, multiple modes of transportation. Steamboats, the more established alternative to horsepower, connected northeastern cities by way of rivers, canals, bays, and inlets. For instance, it was possible for Poe to travel between New York City and Providence by steamboat, but it was probably faster to combine modes of transport.⁷ When he traveled home to Fordham from Providence on September 25, he took a late afternoon train to Stonington, Connecticut, where he caught a steamship that paddled its way overnight through Long Island Sound to Manhattan, made his way from an East River dock to a stop on the New York and Harlem line (probably in or near the Bowery), and rode for about an hour to get within walking distance of his rural cottage.⁸ On another trip, he wrote to Helen Whitman from the steamboat: “It is 5 o’clock & the boat is just being made fast to the wharf. I shall start in the train that leaves New York at 7 for Fordham” (L 2:720).

Poe’s letters to Helen Whitman reveal his desperate state of mind in the fall of 1848. A nine-page letter from October 18, between his first and second visits to Lowell, responds frantically to her having told him that she has heard numerous reports of his lacking principles or “moral sense.” “Is it possible,” Poe asks, “that such expressions as these could have been repeated to me—to me—by one whom I loved—ah, whom I love—by one at whose feet I knelt—I still kneel—in deeper worship than ever man offered to God?” (L 2:707) It’s a manipulative letter: he has no wish but to die now that he knows she can’t really love him; she is listening only to his worst enemies; and the class difference between them (“you are comparatively rich while am poor”) means that “the World” would never sanction their marriage. On November 26 he writes, “My sole hope, now, is in you, Helen. As you are true to me or fail me, so do I live or die” (L 2:734). On the next page Poe goes from abjection to promises of conquest, inviting Helen to share his publishing ambitions: “Would it not be ‘glorious,’ darling, to establish, in America, the sole unquestionable aristocracy—that of intellect—to secure its supremacy—to lead & to control it? All this I can do, Helen, & will—if you bid me—and aid me” (L 2:735).

It is hard to tell how much of this full-throttle pleading stems from Poe’s histrionic nature and how much was a calculated attempt to access the “aid” to which he refers. Helen’s family was well-off; she lived in a large colonial house on fashionable Benefit Street with her mother, Anna Marsh Power, who disliked Poe and suspected that he was after her daughter’s money. Of course, Poe insisted that money was an obstacle rather than an incentive for him, and he was forced to back up that claim by signing a consent agreement acknowledging that Mrs. Power would now have sole legal control of the family estate. Aside from hoping that Helen’s family money would still benefit him somehow, Poe had other reasons to want to marry her: she was attractive; she was compatible with him as a poet, freethinker, and mystic; and she loved and admired him. Helen was concerned that he would be unhappy with her because she was older that he (by six years, to the day) and in fragile health, which included an inability to have sex (yes, she told him this). Poe assured her that none of that mattered.

What he didn’t tell her was that he was in love with Annie Richmond. Back in Fordham on November 16, Poe wrote to Annie proclaiming his love in terms reminiscent of his letters to Helen, with slightly more tortured syntax: “So long as I think that you know I love you, as no man ever loved woman—so long as I think you comprehend in some measure, the fervor with which I adore you, so long, no worldly trouble can ever render me absolutely wretched.” He calls her “my own sweet sister Annie, my pure beautiful angel—wife of my soul” (L 721). This emphasis on her being a sister, and pure (both words underscored by Poe, “sister” repeated three more times in this letter) while also his soul’s wife acknowledges the unconsummatable nature of his desire. But it also recalls his relationship with his child bride Virginia, “Sissy,” with whom he had no children, and who, like Annie, was much younger than himself.

But the letter’s most intense drama lies in an incident related by Poe: he had recently tried to kill himself. If Poe is to be believed, he took the train from Providence to Boston, where he swallowed an ounce of laudanum, an elixir of opium dissolved in alcohol. His plan was to send for Annie, who would rush to his side as he swallowed another ounce, so he could die in her arms. His poem “For Annie,” which he sent to her a few months later, is a fantasy of this attempted suicide:

When the light was extinguished

She covered me warm,

And she prayed to the angels

To keep me from harm—

To the queen of the angels

To shield me from harm.

And I lie so composedly,

Now, in my bed,

(Knowing her love)

That you fancy me dead—

And I rest so contentedly,

Now in my bed,

(With her love at my breast)

That you fancy me dead—

That you shudder to look at me,

Thinking me dead:—

But my heart it is brighter

Than all of the many

Stars in the sky,

For it sparkles with Annie—

It glows with the light

Of the love of my Annie—

With the thought of the light

Of the eyes of my Annie. (P 458–59)

An ounce of laudanum might have been enough to kill Poe—in fact, it impaired him to the point that he could not mail the letter urging Annie to join him—but, he later told Annie, “a friend was at hand, who aided & (if it can be called saving) saved me,” probably by inducing vomiting. He then went back to Providence and visited Helen Whitman again: “Here I saw her, & spoke, for your sake, the words which you urged me to speak”—surely words of devotion, as Annie was probably encouraging him to marry Helen (L 2:722).

So Poe trudged on in his pursuit of Helen Whitman as he recovered from the laudanum overdose, and Helen agreed to an engagement on the condition that he give up drinking entirely. Poe returned to Providence in late December to present a new lecture, “The Poetic Principle,” and he and Helen began making wedding arrangements. But when she learned, during this visit, that Poe had broken his pledge to abstain from alcohol, she called it off. Poe’s attempts to change her mind only made matters worse, and he finally stormed out of her mother’s house, never to see her again. Two weeks later he expressed relief in a letter to Annie Richmond, adding that he had gotten back to work and “resolved to get rich—to triumph—for your sweet sake” (L 2:749).

He would not get rich, but Poe did resume his career as a magazinist in early 1849. After a long fiction-writing drought, he published five new stories, including the futuristic satire “Mellonta Tauta” and an unsettling tale of a court jester’s revenge, “Hop-Frog.” He sent what turned out to be his last four tales, as well as the new poems “For Annie,” “To My Mother,” and “Eldorado,” to a cheap Boston weekly paper, The Flag of Our Union, because it paid promptly and reasonably well, and its editor would print whatever Poe gave him. He also sent a few poems, including then-unsold “Annabel Lee,” to Rufus Griswold for a new edition of his Poets and Poetry of America. Meanwhile, Poe revived his “Marginalia” series for the Southern Literary Messenger and added a similar series called “Fifty Suggestions” in Graham’s. In February, he reported to his old friend F. W. Thomas that “living buried in the country makes a man savage—wolfish. I am just in the humor for a fight.” That Poe saw this rural “wolfishness” in positive terms is verified by his next lines: “You will be pleased to hear that I am in better health than I ever knew myself to be—full of energy and bent upon success” (L 2:771).

And yet, by May 1849, he was mired in depression. As he wrote to Annie Richmond, “I am full of dark forebodings. Nothing cheers or comforts me. My life seems wasted—the future looks a dreary blank; but I will struggle on and ‘hope against hope’ ” (L 2:796–97). Poe told Annie that his sadness was “unaccountable,” suggesting an organic mood disorder. At the same time, he did have specific reasons for feeling defeated: he was barely getting by financially, he was in love with a married woman, and he was now more often mocked than celebrated by his contemporaries. In late 1848, his former friend James Russell Lowell had published A Fable for Critics, a popular pamphlet-length poem that satirized (sometimes gently, sometimes severely) the field of contemporary American writers. Lowell summed up Poe’s reputation as a pedantic critic who might be too smart for his own good:

There comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge,

Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge,

Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,

In a way to make people of common sense damn meters,

Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,

But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind.⁹

A few months later, Holden’s Dollar Magazine (edited by Poe’s embittered former partner C. F. Briggs) published the first installment of a similarly conceived satire by “Motley Manners, Esquire” titled “A Mirror for Authors,” with a silhouette depicting Poe as a dancing “Indian” brandishing a tomahawk:

With tomahawk upraised for deadly blow,

Behold our literary Mohawk, Poe!

Sworn tyrant he o’er all who sin in verse—

His own the standard, damns he all that’s worse;

And surely not for this shall he be blamed—

For worse than his deserves that it be damned!

Who can so well detect the plagiary’s flaw?

“Set thief to catch thief” is an ancient saw.¹⁰

While these caricatures provide a sense of how Poe was seen late in his career, Lowell and “Motley Manners” (A.J.H. Duganne) restricted themselves to Poe’s public persona as a poet/critic. Others, like Poe’s recent antagonist John M. Daniel of the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, took more personal shots: responding in January to the erroneous news that Poe and Helen Whitman were about to be married, Daniel wished the couple well before adding, “We also hope [Poe] will leave off getting drunk in restoratives, and keep his money in his pockets, except when he takes them out to pay his bills.”¹¹

If Poe was depressed in the spring of 1849, he also had a ray of hope, emanating from, of all places, Oquawka, Illinois. Edwin H. N. Patterson, the twenty-one-year-old editor of the Oquawka Spectator, had just come into a large inheritance, and had written to Poe offering to partner on a national magazine, under Poe’s editorial control. Patterson’s letter had been misdirected, so Poe received it some four months after it was sent, but he wrote back eagerly, explaining the delay and laying out his well-rehearsed formula for a successful five-dollar literary magazine. He then proposed “to take a tour through the principal States—especially West & South,” lecturing to pay expenses and to drum up subscriptions (L 2:794). Later, the two men agreed to meet in St. Louis, Missouri, to finalize their plans at the conclusion of Poe’s tour. Meanwhile, Patterson was to send fifty dollars to Richmond to defray his partner’s expenses. Poe traveled once more to Lowell in late May to see Annie and solicit subscriptions; he planned to start the “tour” soon after returning to Fordham, but he lingered there until the end of June. He finally set out for Richmond on June 29, taking a steamboat to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he caught a train to Philadelphia.¹²

Poe arrived in Philadelphia as cholera was again sweeping through the city. Believing he had contracted the disease, he tried to counteract it by taking calomel, a mercury chloride mineral widely used as a purgative, which almost certainly made him sicker (L 2:828–29).¹³ Whatever the cause, Poe’s symptoms were not just physical. He wrote to Muddy that he had been “totally deranged,” describing an attack of mania-à-potu (delirium tremens), though he also claimed not to have been drinking. He was jailed briefly in Moyamensing Prison in South Philadelphia, probably for drunkenness. He lost his valise, and when he found it (at the train depot) he discovered that his lectures were gone (L 2:824). John Sartain, an engraver and publisher whom Poe knew from his years in Philadelphia, later recalled a disturbing encounter during Poe’s long, unscheduled stay in the city. Poe came to Sartain’s studio seeking shelter, explaining that he had narrowly escaped being thrown from a train by men who were out to kill him. He had Sartain clip off his moustache with scissors to alter his appearance, and that night led his friend to Fairmount and the Schuylkill River, not far from where he had lived six years earlier. Sitting on the steps of the waterworks, Poe described horrific hallucinations he had recently experienced, in which he was forced to watch as his tormentors dismembered his beloved mother-in-law.¹⁴ Eventually, with help from Sartain, George Lippard, and another friend, Chauncey Burr, Poe regained sufficient strength, sanity, and borrowed funds to complete his journey to Richmond.¹⁵

In Richmond, Poe gradually recovered from the hallucinogenic near-death experience of his two-week layover in Philadelphia. Upon his arrival on July 14, he stayed at the American Hotel on Main Street before moving to the Swan Tavern, a boardinghouse on Broad Street, and later, less expensive lodgings at the Madison House on Tenth and Bank Streets, all in the center of town near the capitol, where Poe grew up, and where he, Muddy, and Virginia had lived throughout 1836.¹⁶ Over the next two-plus months, he spent time at the homes of the Mackenzies, old family friends of the Allans and the foster family of his sister, Rosalie, and their neighbors the Talleys, in the western suburbs along Broad Street.¹⁷ Just two years younger than her brother, Rosalie had stayed in Richmond, adopted by the Mackenzies, living the comfortable but constricted existence of an unmarried adult woman, her life prospects limited even more by some degree of intellectual disability. She and Edgar had not remained close, but during this extended visit “Rose” was often nearby, clinging to her brother’s reflected celebrity, even delivering notes and manuscripts for him.¹⁸ At Talevera, the home of the Talley family, Poe seems to have focused his attention on twenty-seven-year-old Susan Talley, who later recalled their relationship in an article for Scribner’s Magazine and in her (otherwise unreliable) biography The Home Life of Poe. “He became the fashion” in Richmond, according to Talley, “and was fêted in society and discussed in the papers.” He was asked to recite “The Raven” so often that her family tried to protect him by discouraging visitors from making the request.¹⁹ Talley remembered Poe as charming and upbeat during most of that summer, although she also recalled two episodes when he was incapacitated for days due to heavy drinking.

It is unclear how much progress Poe was making enlisting subscribers for the Stylus; he was at least earning some money—and publicity—through lectures, but those earnings were barely enough to keep up with his expenses.²⁰ He continued to negotiate the terms of his partnership with Patterson but delayed the projected magazine launch from January to July of the following year. Meanwhile, having given up on finding an audience for Eureka, he gave three presentations on “The Poetic Principle,” at the Exchange Hotel’s Concert Room in Richmond on August 17 and September 24 and at Norfolk Academy on September 14. In this summation of his poetic theory, Poe refrained from trashing other poets or “talking like a book of iambs and pentameters”; he even recited, with admiration, Longfellow’s “The Day Is Done.” Instead of applying painstaking analysis, he pleased his audiences with lofty pronouncements: “I would define … the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty” (E 78); “while [the poetic] Principle itself is, strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty, the manifestation of the Principle is always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul” (E 92–93). While in Norfolk for the lecture, he visited Old Point Comfort, where he had been stationed in the Army two decades before; now he recited poems—“Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume,” and, of course, “The Raven”—to an admiring group of young women in white dresses on the grounds of the waterfront Hygeia Hotel.²¹

Though not entirely healthy or consistently sober, Poe enjoyed a measure of stability that summer in Richmond, so it seemed like a good time to renew his pursuit of Elmira Royster Shelton, whom he had visited the previous year. The most significant obstacle, from Mrs. Shelton’s perspective, was financial: as a stipulation of her husband’s will, if she remarried she would lose control of the estate, along with three-fourths of “all profits and income.”²² And yet Poe seems to have won her over: on September 22, Elmira wrote to Maria Clemm, introducing herself in terms that indicate an impending marriage to Edgar. (On the other hand, she maintained long after Poe’s death that there was no formal engagement and that she “[did] not think I should have married him under any circumstances.”)²³ Poe felt he needed the marriage but did not really want it. In an August 29 letter to Muddy, he professed his love to his mother-in-law and Annie Richmond, while providing detailed information about Elmira’s income. On September 10, while at Old Point Comfort, he told Muddy that “my heart sinks at the idea of this marriage. I think, however, that it will certainly take place & that immediately” (L 2: 836). But a week later, in a more sanguine mood, he wrote, “I think she loves me more devotedly than any one I ever knew & I cannot help loving her in return” (L 2: 837).

Figure 5.1  Elmira Royster Shelton’s house on Church Hill in Richmond, Virginia, where Poe visited her during his stay in 1849. Poe’s mother, Eliza, is buried in St. John’s Churchyard, across the street from the house.

While vacillating on this potential marriage, Poe had received an offer from the husband of an aspiring poet, Marguerite St. Leon Loud of Philadelphia, to edit a volume of her poems for one hundred dollars. Broke as he was, Poe could hardly turn down the offer, so he planned to leave Richmond in the last week of September, stop in Philadelphia to work with the Louds, then proceed to New York and, presumably, accompany Maria back to Richmond. When Mrs. Shelton saw Poe the night of September 26, he was “very sad, and complained of being quite sick” and feverish. She was surprised to discover the next day that he had left on a steamboat for Baltimore, where he was to catch a train for Philadelphia.

Poe made it to Baltimore, but no further. Five days later, a printer named Joseph Walker discovered him in a tavern on East Lombard Street known variously as Ryan’s, Gunnar’s Hall, and the Fourth Ward Hotel, and wrote to Poe’s friend Joseph Snodgrass describing “a gentleman, rather worse for wear … who appears in great distress, & says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance.”24 Poe was either unconscious or incoherent, and he was wearing clothes that did not fit him. What had happened during the previous five days remains a mystery. There is no evidence that Poe had planned to stay in Baltimore, but he must have encountered someone or something he hadn’t expected: a worsening illness, an old acquaintance who insisted on a drink, possibly even a mugger or some other form of foul play. His cousin Neilson Poe, who lived in Baltimore, believed Edgar had left for Philadelphia on a train, started drinking en route, and was conducted back to Baltimore in a state of delirium. A later theory seized on the fact that Ryan’s was being used as a polling place on the day he was found there: had Poe been “cooped”—plied with alcohol and forced by partisan thugs to vote at various precincts?²⁵ Whatever the lost details, Poe had been ill upon his arrival in Baltimore and drank heavily in the days that followed. His springtime depression and his derangement a few months earlier in Philadelphia underscore the suggestion that he was suffering from neurological disease, possibly caused, or at least worsened, by alcohol.

Snodgrass came to the tavern and, along with Henry Herring, a relative of Poe’s by marriage, helped convey Poe to Washington College Hospital, about a mile and a half away in the eastern part of the city. He lingered there, semiconscious, for another three days, and died on October 7. The year before, Poe had tried to die in the city where he was born; instead, he died in the city where he had found a career and a family. But, in light of his peripatetic life, the location of his death seems less significant than the fact that he died “on the road.” Appropriately, the journey he had begun should have taken him to each of the four cities that shaped his career and where he lived most of that life: leaving Richmond, bound for New York by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Like so much of his life, though, this trip didn’t go as planned.

Poe was buried on October 9, in a Presbyterian graveyard in central Baltimore. The weather was cold, and only about eight mourners attended—Snodgrass, Neilson Poe, and Henry Herring among them. One can only speculate, but it seems likely that if Poe had died in Richmond, where he had recently enjoyed some celebrity and reconnected with old acquaintances, his funeral would have been better attended; even in New York, despite the scandals of the past few years, he would have drawn mourners from the literary and publishing world. But, over time, the fact that Poe died in Baltimore would allow that city to claim him in a way that no other “Poe place” has quite matched.

Figure 5.2  The building where Poe died in Baltimore, Maryland, known as Washington University Hospital at the time.

It took a while, partly because Poe’s reputation was clouded by the work of his own literary executor, his sometime rival and successor at Graham’s Magazine, Rufus Griswold. In a long obituary published in the New York Tribune and in a longer memoir included in Poe’s collected works, Griswold exaggerated Poe’s faults and fabricated a few incidents to depict his subject as thoroughly selfish, dishonest, and unstable. At the same time, Griswold consistently attested to Poe’s literary genius, and his edition made the magnitude of Poe’s achievement clearer than it had been during his lifetime. Griswold’s characterization and the responses it elicited framed all discussion of Poe’s work well into the twentieth century (and to some extent, into the twenty-first), creating a mystique and a narrative of controversy that have helped sustain interest in his poetry and fiction ever since.

Poe attracted many defenders in the long aftermath of Griswold’s defamations, and, in a sense, the city of Baltimore became one of his most prominent advocates. In 1865 the Public School Teachers’ Association took the lead in fundraising for a suitable monument to redeem Poe’s unmarked grave; a memorial committee took over the project several years later and eventually raised sufficient funds to commission an eight-foot marble and granite monument. In 1875 his remains were moved to a more prominent location on the grounds where the new marker was erected near the corner of West Fayette and North Greene Streets—a destination for Poe pilgrims and, from about 1949 to 2009, a mysterious visitor known as the “Poe Toaster,” who left a tribute of cognac and roses each year on Poe’s birthday, slipping in under cover of darkness. The occasion of the reinterment was marked with speeches, choral performances, and the reading of letters from poets and dignitaries. Though he was not asked to speak, Walt Whitman was among the attendees.

In the decades following his reinterment, Poe was canonized in every American city where he had lived. In 1885, a memorial commissioned by a society of New York actors, featuring a marble female figure placing a wreath around a bronze bust of Poe, was dedicated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the fiftieth anniversary of Poe’s death, the University of Virginia unveiled a bust of Poe that still adorns the reading room of the main library; reporting on the event, the New York Times noted that the depiction of Poe by sculptor Julian Zolnay “is an intellectual man in a state of dejection.… It is not the Poe of Griswold.”26 Baltimore, Richmond, and Charlottesville held centenary celebrations of Poe’s birth in 1909; around the same time, Richmonders formed a Poe Memorial Association and began raising funds to enshrine Poe on the city’s Monument Avenue. Their efforts to place Poe among the procession of Confederate generals fell short, but the association later reformed under the leadership of Poe collector James H. Whitty to establish the Poe Shrine in 1922, which evolved into what is now Richmond’s Poe Museum.²⁷ Meanwhile, New York City purchased the Fordham cottage, moving it a short distance to the newly dedicated “Poe Park” in 1913, where it still stands.²⁸ Poe’s last residence in Philadelphia was purchased by department store magnate and Poe aficionado Richard Gimbel in the 1930s; having established it as a museum, Gimbel bequeathed the property to the National Park Service in 1978.²⁹ In the same year Poe Park was established in the Bronx, Boston renamed the intersection near his birthplace, Broadway and Carver Street, “Poe Place”; a century later, the city would dedicate Stefanie Rocknak’s life-sized statue “Poe Returning to Boston” nearby at the corner of Boylston and Charles Streets.

Rocknak’s Boston statue may capture Poe better than any other single image: in full stride, on a busy city street, returning to Boston, or possibly leaving, or—if we imagine the same statue on a street in Richmond, Philadelphia, or New York—staying a step or two ahead of his last landlord. As much as Poe seems to have preferred living in the semirural outskirts, he was very much a city creature, participating in a period of rapid urban development. His career as a magazinist was a product of that development: he not only wrote for but worked in various editorial roles in magazine offices located in the centers of Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. His unrealized dream of artistic and editorial self-sufficiency was to control one of those offices. He made city life part of his fiction, incorporating mystery, pestilence, con artists, violence, and alienation into urban tales such as “The Man of the Crowd,” the Dupin trilogy, “The Business-Man,” “King Pest,” “The Man That Was Used Up,” and “Some Words with a Mummy.” As a journalist and critic, he surveyed New York City in “Doings of Gotham” and its prominent writers in “The Literati of New York City.” Moreover, spending his life on the move, between or within cities, Poe became essentially cosmopolitan in his outlook, arguably America’s first modern writer.

Figure 5.3  Stefanie Rocknak’s sculpture Poe Returning to Boston stands at the corner of Boylston Street and Charles Street South, near the site of Poe’s birth.

In his landmark 1925 book In the American Grain, the poet William Carlos Williams asserted that Poe was “a genius intimately shaped by his locality and time.… It is the New World, or to leave that for a better term, it is a new locality that is in Poe assertive; it is America, the first great burst through to expression of a re-awakened genius of place.” But Williams makes clear that Poe’s new American “locality” is no single region or town—he “founded” American literature by clearing the ground and sweeping away “colonial imitation”: “What he wanted was connected with no particular place; therefore it must be where he was.”30 Indeed—and he was, invariably, as Rocknak depicts him, on the move, whether the city was Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Richmond. The statue suggests that he packed in a hurry: Poe is leaving a trail of manuscripts (and a human heart!) spilling out of his unclosed suitcase. Also emerging from the case is a very large raven, his own symbol of grief and loss but here also a symbol of his achievement and fame, accomplished even though, or maybe because, he had to keep moving.