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The Great Poe Debate

by Julia M. Klein

JANUARY 27, 2009        TAGS: WRITERS, LEGACY, POE, BOOKS         COMMENTS (3)

Born in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) died mysteriously in Baltimore. Despite the publication of his stories and poetry and a reputation as a literary critic, he was chronically indigent and not much appreciated in his time. His personal life was no better. He was orphaned young, perpetually at war with his foster father, married at 27 to his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia, and then tragically widowed when she died of tuberculosis.

During a peripatetic and alcohol-addled career that also took him to Richmond and New York, Poe spent six highly productive years (1838-44) in Philadelphia. Here he penned such iconic short stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” and began his most famous poem, “The Raven.”  

Now, that the 200th anniversary of his birth (Jan. 19, 2009) has passed, three cities – Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia -- are battling to claim him, not just with competing bicentennial events but with a spirited and mostly good-humored debate over who has the greatest right to his legacy.

For a poet and short-story writer devoted to elegy and horror, a man whose great subject was death, such posthumous popularity is rich in irony. But the debate also raises some serious questions – about what constitutes a literary blood tie, and why claims of legacy should matter centuries later.

Literary provocateur Edward Pettit ignited the sparring with an Oct. 2, 2007, cover story in Philadelphia City Paper headlined, “We’re Taking Poe Back!” The declaration was addressed primarily to the city of Baltimore, which now reveres Poe but where Pettit said he died “a stranger’s death.”

The issue to Pettit was not just one of literary production, but of Poe’s sensibility and the forces that shaped it. He argued that Poe’s characteristically macabre work was rooted both in Philadelphia’s Gothic literary tradition, which included the writers Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard, and in the violent, rowdy atmosphere that plagued the city in the 1830s and ’40s. Pettit described a nearly forgotten Philadelphia “of race and labor riots, poverty and crime” – in short, “a stinking effluvia of corruption and decadence” that Pettit says Poe transformed into memorable tales of madness and death. 

Pettit closed his piece with a ghoulish provocation. He suggested that Philadelphians “appropriate a body from a certain Baltimore cemetery” and “re-inter it under the floorboards at Seventh and Spring Garden,” the location of the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site or even “brick it into the wall,” a reference to one of the most celebrated deaths in world literature. (Baltimore mystery writer Laura Lippman argued back, noting that Baltimore had awarded Poe his first literary prize and that, besides, “possession is nine-tenths of the law.”)

The contretemps flourished for a while in newspaper articles and blogs (including Pettit’s own Ed & Edgar blog). But it attained a mock-serious apotheosis on Jan. 13 in “The Great Poe Debate” at the Parkway Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Pettit, making a grand entrance with a shovel, an entourage, blaring music from Rocky, and a boxing robe emblazoned with his nickname “Philly Poe Guy,” faced off against two articulate opponents: Jeff Jerome, the longtime curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore, and Paul Lewis, professor of English at Boston College and an advocate for Poe’s Boston connection.

The event, moderated by Philadelphia comedian Grover Silcox with unabashed boosterism and a small Liberty Bell, and featuring an Edgar Allan Poe impersonator, played to a standing-room-only crowd. It was more fun than a typical literary memorial, but it also served as a primer on Poe and a promotion for other bicentennial events.  

While the Free Library has a major rare-books show on Poe, with the only extant manuscript  copy of “The Raven,” and the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site (www.nps.gov/edal) is also mounting a new show and other events, Baltimore planned the most lavish celebration (www.poebicentennial.com). (The Free Library earlier had hosted Poe impersonator extraordinaire David Keltz – but Keltz is based in Baltimore, where he gives Poe bus tours.)  Boston, with only two nights of Poe on tap  (www.bc.edu/schools/cas/english/poe2009.html) and a dubious claim on the writer’s affections, entered the library an obvious underdog.

But Lewis, a vivid personality and sharp debater, made headway by emphasizing a surprising literary argument. He said that Poe’s sensibility, far from being indebted to Philadelphia, was shaped largely by his opposition to New England writers, including the moral preachments of the Transcendentalists. “He hated all that stuff,” said Lewis, “and that’s what made him Poe.” 

Instead of reiterating his elaborate and persuasive City Paper argument, Pettit kept it simple. He called Philadelphia “the crucible for Poe’s imaginative genius,” and his time in the city “the most productive and most successful of his writing career.”  He also made it clear that he was talking only about a metaphorical reburial. “We all know the body will never really be moved,” he said, “so let’s claim his legacy.”

Jerome, whose demeanor was relatively low-key, noted that Poe was from an old Baltimore family, and that it was in Baltimore that he wrote his first horror story. Certainly, Baltimore has long been gaga over Poe, appropriating him for literary tourism and even naming its football team the Ravens. While Philadelphia and other American cities were still ignoring him, Jerome said, “Baltimore stepped up to the plate.” 

Lewis pointed out that Poe struggled mightily in both Baltimore and Philadelphia. “These cities should be ashamed of how they treated him,” he said. And in their posthumous devotion to Poe’s memory, he said, they represented stale tradition -- while Boston offered Poe acolytes “change that we can believe in.”  It was, after all, an argument that had worked before. 

To no one’s great shock, the hometown audience nevertheless voted Pettit, and Philadelphia, the winner. The truth, however, seemed to be that while Poe had ties to all these cities, he truly belonged nowhere -- a restless soul whose alienation was integral to his art.           

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