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Philadelphia and Baltimore square off -- over Edgar Allen Poe
Submitted by JPROF on Sun, 2008/09/07 - 7:17pm.
This is the kind of fight I like. I'm pulling for Bal'mer. According to an article in the New York Times this weekend, two scholars have gotten into a clash over which city -- Philadelphia or Baltimore -- has the most claim to the legacy of Edgar Allen Poe. Baltimore is the city most associated today with Poe. He died there in 1849. How he died is, for some, an open question. Some say it was alcoholism, some say other diseases, some even say murder. He had lost his wife about two years before that while they were living in New York City. Poe lay in an unmarked grave in Baltimore for two decades, but then th city embraced him and today he is honored as a native son. But Philadelphia has more claim on Poe than Baltimore, according to a Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar. It was in the City of Brotherly Love that Poe wrote some of his most famous works. Pettit argues that the city's rampant violence and crime served as a natural inspiration to Poe's marcabre outlook and his detective fiction. Poe is widely acknowledged as having invented the modern detective genre. Pettit wants Poe's body moved to Philly. Not so fast, says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House in Baltimore. Poe is too much a part of the city's lore and character to be moved now. Besides, Philadelphia is a little late in claiming Poe since the city has ignored him for 160 years. Of course, there is always Richmond, where Poe grew up and to where he had planned to return eventually. Poe always considered himself a Virginian. But Richmond (wisely?) has not asked for the return of the body. In all this, I stand with Baltimore, which is a far more interesting place than Philadelphia. Baltimore is a dank, working class town with no Mainline pretentions but lots of interesting character and architecture. It's the city where Edgar Allen Poe should be from, even if he isn't. ___ Note: My old blog, Staying Booked, has morphed in a new one, The Writing Wright. |
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It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee;
The rest...
My Junior English teacher in high school had a Poe fetish, we were sure that she had once dated him. We had to memorize Annabel Lee and, of course, The Raven.
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
I hated it until I aged a few years and grew to love the memory of that old lady and her wisdom.
Visit us at
The Home
As a displaced Knoxvillian living in the Baltimore area, I must point out one of Bawlmer's great Poe traditions: the Poe Toaster.
In short, every year on the anniversary of Poe's birth, someone shows up at the grave, drinks a toast with cognac, and leaves three roses (for Poe, his wife and his mother-in-law), and the remainder of the bottle. This has been going on since 1949 (it has been passed from father to son, and many feel the son has sullied the tradition.)
As an aside, I will add that, at least at one time, since I'm not sure if its still there, there was a restaurant near the gravesite called "The Tell-Tale Hearth." Its slogan was "Pizza Worth Raven About". (It was good pizza, the pun aside.) It also had a spookily lifelike mannequin of Poe.
EDIT: I checked. The Tell-Tale Hearth went out of business ages ago.
Another reason to favor Baltimore in this fight:
What NFL football team's mascot is a literary allusion?
Jim Stovall
The Titans?
Or would that be a literary I-llusion?
WhitesCreek,
You got me on I-llusion. Bad mistake.
To what literary work does the "Titans" refer? Or is it just alliteration (il-literation?)?
Jim Stovall
Either
or
My money is on the former...
Oh, I'm all about mythology. But actually, I wonder if Greek legends qualify as literature? I admit to stretching the point for a cheep joke, but you guys are used to that by now.
Randy may need to give me an auto-tag that says: "Lame attempt at humor and possible snark"
Well, the Iliad and the Odyssey are essentially Greek myths, and pretty much any commentator (except the "anti-dead-white-male" types) would consider them one of the foundations of Western literature.
I'll bet a cask of amontillado that Balmer wins this battle.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
Hunter S. Thompson
Hey, Bawlmer is tough.
It's a blue-collar port town at its heart. Bawlmer could kick Philly in the Brotherly Love any day.
I was introduced to Poe by my 5th grade teacher, Miss Rattery, who had us read "The Gold-Bug" as a class participation assignment. We were a bunch of nerds collected up in one spot so they could keep us under close observation, and we wrote secret code notes to each other from then on. I never figured out what the note from Gracie Efird said but the girls all laughed at me from then on.
I have taken my family on vacation to Sullivan's Island, the setting for the Gold-bug, and talked about pirates, treasure, and secret code pirate maps in the evenings. The WWII bunkers behind the park are still way creepy to go inside, but I do it every trip to Charleston.
I don't know who the Titans are named after, but I know that my brother, who at the moment lives in Clarksville, believes that the Nashville teevee people are too in love with the Titans.
But the bro's wife just got a promotion that means they are moving to Bawl'mer, so I'll probably be hearing a bunch of complaints about their tee vee paying too much attention to the Ravens and the Orioles.
This is a man who until five years ago had only lived in East Tennessee and rather loves his Vols.
Pam Strickland
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." ~Kurt Vonnegut
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
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