The Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe
Daguerreotype probably taken in June 1849 in Lowell, Massachusetts

I suspect there is an uptick of web searches on Edgar Allan Poe around Halloween. That is too bad because this fascinating and misunderstood man should be better known for other things. I think people today think of him as an early days Stephen King, but he was a poet, critic and mystery writer too.

I am really surprised that no one has ever made a major movie biography about him. His death would be one of several mysterious parts of his story. That might be appropriate for someone considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.

He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, though he was hardly financially stable as a result.

Poe (age 26) obtained a license in 1835 to marry his cousin Virginia Clemm (age 13). That seems "wrong" today. In his time it was unusual but not rare. They were married for 11 years until her death. She certainly inspired some of his writing.

“Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.”

On September 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found unconscious outside a tavern in Baltimore reportedly “in great distress and … in need of immediate assistance,” according to the man who found him.

We know that Poe had been traveling from Richmond to Philadelphia on a business trip. he made a stop in Baltimore on September 28 for an unknown reason. He was found on Lombard Street, outside Ryan’s Tavern, dressed in dirty and ill-fitting clothing. He was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he lapsed in and out of a coma until he died four days later on Sunday, October 7, 1849.

Unfortunately, he was not coherent long enough to explain how he came to be found or what had happened to him. The common story that he was an alcoholic and drank himself into a death stuporin doesn't match with him not recovering from a bad night after 4 days in the hospital.

Add to the mystery the report that in hospital he repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death. That has never been explained. I've read that his final words were the unsurprising "Lord help my poor soul." All of his medical records including his death certificate have been lost.

In newspaper accounts at the time, his death was described as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation." Those vaguely medical terms were common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. We don't know his cause of death.

So, theories abound. All unproven and probably unprovable. Those theories include the DTs (delirium tremens via alcohol), heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera,[and rabies.

One theory that was put forward a few decades after his death was "cooping." Cooping was an alleged form of electoral fraud. Unwilling participants were forced to vote, often several times over, for a particular candidate in an election. Innocent bystanders would be grabbed off the street by "cooping gangs" working for a political candidate. They were drugged or forced to drink enough alcohol or sometimes beaten so that they were compliant and kept in a "coop" room (as in "chicken coop). They were then dragged to polling places, sometimes in disguises and different clothing and forced to vote multiple times.

But cooping stories are often questionable and though it might explain Poe's clothing and his state of mind, there is no evidence to prove this cause of death either.

Cooping was also a practice said to be done during the American Civil War to get men to enlist. Men were "cooped up", plied with alcohiol to the point of stupefaction, and tricked into enlisting.

It is unfortunate that Poe was found outside a tavern (which was a logical place to dump a cooped person) because alcohol became the cause. Poe was a drinker and drug user and in that time the temperance movement was building and so Poe’s death could be held up as example of the evils of alcohol.

Poe took up drinking back in his college days at the University of Virginia. He was sober for long periods but not sober consistently. he was supposed to have been an easy drunk in that after only a few drinks he would be insensible or ill. It was a disease with him and one he battled for most of his life.

Without an autopsy, there is no real chance of determining the cause of his death, but a more recent theory is that he died of rabies. Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center, thinks that rabies is a good possibility. In the final stages of the infection victims are combative, disoriented, and refuse water  (hydrophobia) which fits Poe at the end.

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, 

whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…” 
- from Poe's “Eleanora“

Here's the real tragedy that came after his death. He had a literary rival, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who wrote an obituary under a pseudonym that trashed Poe. It was full of lies and made him seem a madman. The long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune signed "Ludwig" on the day that Poe was buried and was reprinted across the country. It opened by saying, "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it."

Griswold was later outed as the writer of the obituary, and he was known to have held a grudge against Poe since 1842. I can find no explanation of this, but Griswold somehow became Poe's literary executor! Griswold convinced Poe's mother-in-law to sign away the rights to his works, and Griswold went on to publish the collected works attached with his own fabricated biography of Poe.

He continued to try to destroy Poe's reputation after his death. Griswold's obituary and the later memoir hurt Poe's reputation. It was denounced by those who knew Poe well, but the sensationalized, scandal-sheet version was one of the few "biographical" pieces at that time and it gained popular acceptance.

I have visited Poe's home and grave in Baltimore. The bar still stands where legend says Poe was last seen drinking before his death. That tavern is in Fell's Point, Baltimore. It is now known as "The Horse You Came in On.  I went there too and heard that a ghost whom they call "Edgar" haunts the rooms above. He was found just a few blocks away, so it's possible he drank there at some point that day, but this tavern visit is no more proven than the cause of Poe's death.

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. 

Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

- from Poe's ”The Premature Burial”