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Poe's Rise to Fame

Edgar Allan Poe died 2 years after his wife Virginia’s death on October 7th 1849. He was found on the streets of Baltimore in a state of delirium and died in a hospital. Poe died a grisly death, and never saw the fruition of his writing career. He’s died a destitute writer, and it would not be for many years after his death that Poe became the famous master of macabre that he is known as today.

Unfortunately right after Poe’s death, his reputation had become even more tarnished than it was. He was already known as an insufferable drunk, suffering through terrible bouts of insanity, paranoia and depression. Poe at one point became so paranoid of people following him that he’d asked a friend of his to cut off the famous mustache we so know him for. However even after death Poe could not escape the slander that befell him.  

Rufus Wilmot Griswold was Poe’s literary nemesis. A Former minister who had become an editor. Griswold had worked together professionally with Poe. Both men deeply mistrusted one another; Griswold thought Poe was immoral, while Poe thought Griswold was a literary lightweight. The two had a falling out when Griswold accused Poe of writing a brutal, anonymous review of an anthology that Griswold had edited. Back then Poe was known for his biting and sharp tongue in the literary world, gaining the nickname “The Tomahawk man,” he’d always butt heads with his bosses and get into fights with other writers.

After Poe's death, Griswold deceived Poe's mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, into selling him Poe's papers in order to slander Poe even further by writing a false biography of his life. It wasn't until 1870, when Poe’s friends fought back against these false accusations with their own Pro-Poe biography, correcting all the wronging that had been done to the poet.

After that Poe’s fame and reputation as the master of macabre had begun to grow, especially in france where he was first recognized as the literary genius he was. Writers like Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé were heavily influenced by Poe, not to mention Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the acclaimed Sherlock-Holmes series, who was inspired by Poe’s own detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Aside from being the master of macabre, Poe is also known as the father of the detective genre thanks to this short story. The story follows a detective from paris, C. Auguste Dupin, who solves the mystery of the brutal murder of two women. Finding a tuft of animal hair at the scene of the crime, the mystery soon unravels to reveal the murderer as a captured orangutan brought to Paris by sailors from Borneo. The Orangutan had somehow learned how to use a shaving razor, and had escaped it cage and fled to the Rue Morgue, where it was frightened and sent into a fit of rage by its first victim. Ripping the hair from the women and slashing her throat with the razor, the Orangutan then strangled the woman's daughter.

These tales of darkness and decay would go on to inspire dozens of writers and fans of literature. There is even a Edgar Allan Poe museum in Richmond, Virginia. The museum was founded in 1922 and serves to commemorate Poe’s time in Richmond. The museum holds one of the world's largest collections of original manuscripts, letters, first editions, memorabilia and personal belongings of Poe. The museum is only blocks away from the sites of Poe's Richmond homes and place of employment, the Southern Literary Messenger. It is also a few blocks from the grave of his mother Eliza Poe, who was buried in the graveyard of St John's Church. The museum building is noted as one of the oldest in Richmond and serves as a memorial to Poe.

Other places where Poe once lived in such as Philadelphia and, New York have also been memorialized and preserved for fans to come visit. You can go to see the cottage Poe stayed in with Virginia and Maria Clemm during the last years of Virginia’s life, on Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse in The Bronx.

Sadly Poe died before any of this could happen, his grave is located in Baltimore, the remains of Virginia’s bones buried with him. On his headstone is a raven sitting beneath the engraved words “Nevermore” a memorial to Poe’s most famous work and the writer himself. The city of Baltimore declared January 19th “Edgar Allan Poe Appreciation day” and pay tribute to the author by leaving three roses on Poe’s grave-site every year on the poet's birthday. The anonymous Poe fan would then crack open a bottle of cognac, toast the poet, and leave the bottle on the grave. This tradition is known as “Poe Toasting” and has been occurring since the 1940’s.

Virginia's Portrait/Post-Mortem Photography

An interesting fact about Virginia Clemm’s death was, upon her burial Poe realized he did not have a picture of his lost love, and after commissioning an artist to paint a portrait of her, Poe had her freshly lain corpse dug back up to capture her likeness in watercolor. The portrait was then passed down to Maria Clemm, who evidently passed it down to the family of her relative Neilson Poe, which suggests it is genuine. However the portrait wasn't made public until 1893, and although there is some evidence to back up it’s authenticity, I still find it odd that Virginia, who had grown very gaunt and sickly during her long fight with tuberculosis, was as facially plump as the girl in the portrait; especially if the portrait was painted with her corpse as the model. The painting shows a young woman with hazel eyes, when the most reliable descriptions of Virginia described her eyes as being unusually large and very dark. It may be that this painting was not done from an "in-person" view of Virginia, but merely from a description of her provided to the artist.

As odd as Poe request may have seemed, the practice of post-mortem photography or art was not uncommon at all in the US and Europe during the 1800’s. Especially after the invention of the daguerreotype (one of the first cameras) in 1839, it became common place for families to take photographs with their dead loved ones in them, as a sort of coping mechanism. With sickness running rampant families were in desperate need of a grieving process, this was especially true for children who died at an early age. After Virginia’s untimely death, Poe commissioning an artist to preserve his wife's likeness in a painting doesn't seem as morbid as it sounds. The corpses were posed upright, with rosy tints even added to their cheeks to make them seem more lifelike, but as camera technology developed and became more cheap, the need for post-mortem portraits and photography disappeared as families could take pictures of their loved ones themselves. (Hopefully still alive).

Whatever the case, this portrait of Virginia is the most trustworthy of the ones available. Other more questionable images of Virginia have surfaced over the years, all of which are highly unreliable depictions, sadly we may never know Virginia’s true likeness.