Edgar Allan Poe c Kristin Helberg 2012
Edgar Allan Poe is certainly in the news right now with the new John Cusack movie coming out this week. During the last few months, I attended some birthday celebrations here in Baltimore honoring Edgar Allan Poe at Westminster Hall where he was finally laid to rest. I decided that I wanted to read everything that I could about him and then attempt to create a portrait worthy of this creative genius.
He was born Edgar Poe in New England on January 19, 1809 but was soon orphaned when his father abandoned him and his mother died. The Allan family of Richmond, VA took himin and provided him with the Allan name. But they never formally adopted him, which was a painful thorn in his side for the rest of his life. It is believed that like many other men of creative genius, such as Vincent Van Gogh, that Poe suffered from right temporal lobe seizure which heightened his creative sensibilities. Unfortunately any amount of alcohol was not a good mix with this chronic condition.
He parted ways with the Allan Family after he failed at West Point, married a 13 year old cousin, and began his life as a writer. His young wife died two years later. Poe embarked on a successful but stormy career as a writer of the macabre, a poet and a literary critic. A string of romances with a series of women caused some scandal, his bouts with drinking and long periods of poverty were to continue for Poe for years.
It was in 1849 that he reunited with his first love, Elimira Royster Shelton in Richmond, Virginia and the two had agreed to an engagement leading towards marriage. Poe had sworn off alcohol and was traveling to New York City to begin a new literary journal. No one truly knows what happened on his stopover in Baltimore on his way to New York, but he was found stripped of his normal elegant clothes, wearing rough working man’s apparel and raving mad in a bar in the Fells Point area of the city. Many accounts of the incident believe that Poe had been drugged and perhaps used in a political voting fraud scheme. He died in a Baltimore hospital on October 7, 1849 at the age of 40.
His arch rival Rufis Griswold seized the opportunity to write both a libelous obit and memoir of Edgar Allan Poe accusing him of being a drunken, womanizing madman. His poor fiance only found out his death by reading about it in the newspaper.
Poe will always be recognized as one our most original American writers and the creator of a new genre of writing known as the detective story.
I look forward to seeing the movie this week. Check out this website to find out more about Poe. www.poemuseum.org
