Text: Anonymous, “Poe and Baltimore,” Academy (London, UK), whole no. 1917, January 30, 1909, pp. 729-730

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POE AND BALTIMORE

There will be no celebration of the Poe centenary in Baltimore, Maryland; “that's a cinch,” as they say “out there.”

The other day a writer in the Daily Mail accused Richmond, Virginia, of neglecting Poe. Richmond, Va., does neglect him — though really only on the surface: actually, they are very proud of him there, and the University of Virginia misses no chance to celebrate him. But Baltimore is a good distance away from Richmond, and different. Baltimore, Maryland, ignores Poe. And yet in Baltimore Poe lies buried.

You remember the squalid tragedy? Poe, on his last legs, had gone to Richmond to find a wife among the people of his youth, the people who had always been kind to him, and he had become engaged to Mrs. Shelton, a wealthy widow. Had this marriage come off, what dreams we might still have had, what reveries, what magnificent pieces of prose! Poe never occurs to us as a man who had at all said his last word; as Baudelaire, to take the nearest name, very evidently does. But the marriage didn’t come off: it was the fifth act of the tragedy — not the harlequinade that follows or, as Poe himself probably supposed, the first act of a new comedy. He left Richmond, intending to come back in a few weeks. A number of friends gave him a farewell supper and saw him to the train. He seems to have been more or less dazed; he slept, and was carried to Havre de Grace, a little station on Chesapeake Bay. The conductor — the guard as we say — put him out there, and he was bundled into another train going back to Baltimore. Then a thick foggy curtain falls, veiling the operation of the tragedy for hours and hours. Finally a printer recognised him as he lay on the sawdust floor of a bar-room, and notified a certain Dr. Snodgrass. He was carried to the Washington Hospital. As he lay there they heard him crying interminably for some man named Reynolds. To Dr. Moran, bending over him, he said: “It's all over, doctor; write, Eddie is no more.” Then he said: “Lord help my poor soul.” And shortly after he died in a place which society has set apart for its castaways.

If Poe was unlucky in his life and wretched in his death, after his death he was singularly fortunate. A man of as great, though not of so prolific genius as his own, a man, as one uneasily thinks, whose writings Poe would have denigrated with a will! — a supreme poet, a master of prose, Charles Baudelaire, made him a European classic. Through Baudelaire, everybody who knows anything has heard of Poe. Mallarme said to the present writer that Poe was “le Dieu de sa jeunesse.” Marcel Schwob said that much of the present-day popular literature was derived from Poe. And Villiers de l’Isle Adam, and Huysmans? He broke a way for their genius.

But before all this Baltimore, Maryland, remains impassive, even disdainful, as the old impoverished noble families of the Faubourg St. Germain economised on sugar and sneered at Napoleon. Those people had. after all, their excuse and their motive, and we can all make allowance for it; but what excuse has . Baltimore, Maryland?

Baltimore, Maryland, is one of the few places in the I world where you are landed happily at the station; not as at Cologne, too happily, right under the towers of the Cathedral, taking your breath away; and not as at Verona, on the other hand, where you are pitched out into a desolate landscape far away from the little jewel of a town. In Baltimore the train lands you, not amid squalor and slums — one can hardly fancy slums in Baltimore — nor yet in the best part, but just happily into grave Charles Street; and walking up that you come by degrees, with ever-increasing pleasurable surprise, [column 2:] on the “best bits,” as they say. And over the whole place hangs, for the promenader filled with European traditions, used to finding in the city he visits the things he visits it for salient, the terrible tragedy of Poe. Baltimore — Baltimore — how often have we thought of that, the last station of his martyrdom?

But Baltimore, the distressing, irritating little place, seems to make a point of showing that it would never be so ill-mannered as to reveal — or rather, that it is not in the least conscious of — the fact that the bones of a great genius lie within the city. That might put a slur on the respectable families who have inhabited it from colonial times, from the times of Lord Baltimore himself. Nothing in the shop-windows, scanned eagerly by the pilgrim, gives a sign that within these precincts are the bones of a man who has influenced the literatures of the world. And he thinks of Edinburgh and Sir Walter Scott, or he thinks of Frankfurt and Goethe, and a mild wonder rises in his mind about the mentality of the people of Baltimore. Perhaps, however, there will be something further on.

Further on, the evening has fallen and the lamps are lighted. In the square, near the somewhat impressive Washington Monument, one perceives by the dim light a statue. Can it by chance be a statue of Poe? You see, one has fallen in love with Baltimore; one expects all sorts of wonderful things from it. One has been so captivated after coming from New York by the “let up on the money hunt “ — a condition that sheds a dignity which a power to abide in your own house, not wanting anything from anybody, confers. All adds to the bewitching captivation: the slow, darky postman collecting his last mail in his little slow-moving cart; the sight in the distance of the coffin carried through the deserted streets. Is the already so charming Baltimore going to have the added charm of intelligence? Is it going to have a statue of Poe?

Alas, no! The statue one has sighted is of some worthy person all the world has forgotten — all the world, save Baltimore. After all, you will say — Baltimore people might possibly say — it will be a long time before a statue of Baudelaire is set up in Paris. Yes; but many geniuses for many centuries have lived and died in Paris; Poe is the only man of genius we have ever heard of who has died in Baltimore.

But if Baltimore pays no attention to Poe, it must be said that Poe paid little attention to Baltimore, a city where he sometime sojourned and where he met Kennedy, his only true friend. Poe, in fact, paid little attention to any American city, his chief preoccupation with them being what chance they offered for journalism and magazine writing. It is remarkable that in his writings there is never a word of grumbling at his surroundings, which must have been often so ugly and drear. Here, if anywhere, we have a case of absolute self-absorption, an unrivalled power of living in a vision. Poe probably figured the various cities of his pilgrimage by the people he liked or hated in them — not by any distinct impression of streets and squares. Nowhere does he mention any special feature in any one of them, and nowhere does he express any opinion about them as places of residence. Think of Baudelaire and his furies against Belgium!

But Poe, on the other hand, finding he could not escape from America, must have made up his mind to ignore it, and proceeded to create for himself a fantastic world in which he lived. From Poe's poetry no man could tell where he lived: there is no Rêve Parisien.

About his tomb in Baltimore, in the graveyard of the old decayed church, which must soon be pulled down, a high wall is raised. Except at the hours of service, the gates leading into the neglected graveyard are locked. Poe was buried in the poorest part; some years after, the piety of friends created an ugly, unimpressive [page 730:] tomb, which shows through the railings to the passers in the street. On a sunshiny day the birds drift over and find it a resting-place, and the butterflies play hide-and-seek. The lounging, Southern men in straw hats, the nigger washerwomen, the street-cars, all pass by with never a look. And Poe lies there, as; detached, as isolated from the American city as he was in his life.

A few years ago somebody made an appeal to the city authorities that the wall of the churchyard by Poe's tomb might be thrown down, so that passers in the street might see more plainly where the genius lay buried. But the city authorities refused. No. there will be no celebration of the Poe centenary in Baltimore, Maryland: “that's a cinch,” as they say “out there.”