Edgar Allan Poe c Kristin Helberg 2012
This past February, I decided that I wanted to read everything that I could about Edgar Allan Poe and then attempted to create a portrait worthy of this creative genius. It is believed that like many other artists with inspired vision, 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.
No one truly knows what happened on Poe's 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.
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. Check out this website to find out more about Poe. www.poemuseum.org
