Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Our mission is
always the same, to take a colossal figure, strip
away the pop culture myths, and see what the
raw source material reveals. And today we are
plumbing the depths of a writer whose very name
conjures darkness, terror, and the relentless
tapping of a beak on a chamber door, Edgar Allan
Poe. That's right. Poe, who lived from 1809 to
1849, is instantly synonymous with the macabre.
He is the central brooding architect of American
Gothic. fiction and so critically the inventor
of the detective story. He really is. But if
you only know him as the mad genius who wrote
The Raven, you are missing the most fascinating
parts of his story. Our sources today take us
far beyond the crypt, revealing a surprisingly
modern, complex and intensely analytical mind.
Yeah, analytical is the key word. So we're going
on a deep dive to examine how this perpetually
struggling writer managed not just to shape global
literature, but also to function as a highly
successful cryptologist. a caustic literary critic,
and incredibly a cosmological theorist. And his
work anticipated elements of the Big Bang Theory
by nearly a century. It's wild. We're going to
understand the calculation behind the chaos.
And to understand the chaos, you really have
to start with a perpetual struggle. It is the
single most important lens through which to view
his entire career. The money. Always the money.
Yeah. Poe was, you could argue, the very first
well -known American author who tried to sustain
his life exclusively through his writing. And
that was a bad idea back then. Oh, it was an
act of financial self -destruction. In the mid
-19th century American literary marketplace,
it was basically impossible. We often talk about
the starving artist, but why was the system so
specifically rigged against him at that precise
moment in American history? It boils down to
a colossal legal loophole. The complete and utter
lack of international copyright law. Ah, okay.
So imagine trying to sell a product that a major
competitor can just distribute globally for free.
Right. American publishers, driven by pure economics,
preferred to sell cheap, unauthorized copies
of popular British authors. We're talking figures
like Charles Dickens or Sir Walter Scott. Because
they didn't have to pay them. They didn't have
to pay them a cent in royalties. So this meant
Poe, trying to sell original American content,
was competing directly with literally free content
from world -class established talent. That's
an impossible situation. It made his existence
a brutal decade -long scramble for scraps. His
groundbreaking work, regardless of its literary
merit, was instantly hampered by market forces
that preferred piracy over paying their own domestic
talent. This desperation, it dictates every failed
magazine launch and every abrupt relocation we
see in his life. OK, so let's unpack the biographical
foundations of all this turmoil. He was born
Edgar Poe in Boston on January 19th, 1809. His
parents were traveling actors and his early life.
I mean, it really does read like the prologue
to a gothic novel. It's pure melodrama. His father
abandoned the family in 1810. Just gone. Vanished.
And then his mother died of consumption pulmonary
tuberculosis just a year later. He was an orphan
before he was three. Wow. And that profound,
repeated, early loss of a mother figure to disease.
It's not just a personal tragedy, is it? It becomes
this massive, defining shadow over his entire
literary output. Absolutely. The two -year -old
Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allen in
Richmond, Virginia. They were a wealthy merchant
family involved in everything from cloth and
tobacco to, and this is notable, the slave trade.
But they never formally adopted him. Never. He
gained the name Edgar Allan Poe, but he was always
an outsider. And John Allen's role was intensely
complicated, wasn't it? He wasn't exactly a stable
parental figure. Far from it. The relationship
was volatile and just completely inconsistent.
Allen would alternately spoil Poe with an expensive
European education and these extravagant gifts,
but then he would aggressively discipline him
and withhold affection. That's a classic push
-pull. It is. This pattern of lavish support
followed by cruel abandonment, it created an
enduring psychological template for Poe. It fed
right into his lifelong issues with stability
and authority. That initial spoiling did, however,
afford him a superior early education, right?
Oh, absolutely, yes. From 1815, the Allens took
him to the United Kingdom, where he attended
grammar school in Scotland, which was Allen's
birthplace, and then a boarding school in London.
He returned to Richmond in 1820. So he gets this
deep classical education fluency in languages
that would serve him well later. Yes. But the
psychological instability was already baked in.
You can see it a few years later. Right. When
the relationship with Alan completely fractures
once Poe enrolls at the University of Virginia.
So tell us about that descent into academic chaos
and financial desperation. The University of
Virginia, which was founded on Thomas Jefferson's
ideals of self -governance, was a... A hot mess
in 1826. A hot mess how? Well, students were
supposed to govern themselves, but the strict
rules against gambling, alcohol, and guns were
utterly disregarded. The atmosphere was just
chaos, and the dropout rate was astronomical.
And Poe gets caught up in it. He does. Trying
to keep up appearances among the wealthier students,
he accumulated heavy gambling debts during his
single year there. He was completely out of his
depth. And he immediately cast the blame on Allen.
Now... Was that justified or was that just a
convenient narrative for his own self -sabotage?
I think it's a mix. Poe accused Allen of not
providing sufficient funds for tuition, texts
and living expenses, which that was partially
true. Allen was famously tightfisted. But Poe
didn't help his own case. No, he significantly
worsened his own position through reckless gambling
and spending. The estrangement was complete enough
that when he left the university after only one
year, he couldn't return to Richmond. And his
childhood sweetheart had moved on? Exactly. Sarah
Elmora Royster had married another man during
his absence. So he's broke, he's heartbroken,
and he's got nowhere to go. Unable to support
himself in Boston, he took the most drastic step,
which resulted in this truly spectacular confluence
of identity deception. He was completely desperate.
By April 1827, he's living hand -to -mouth in
Boston, even using the pseudonym Henri Le René.
Henri Le René. By May, he enlists in the U .S.
Army as a private. And get this. He signs up
under the assumed name Edgar A. Perry and claims
to be 22 years old, who's only 18. So the eventual
literary titan starts his public life with a
total flop, published under a false identity,
while he's serving in the military under another
false identity. It is the definition of Poe drama.
While he was stationed at Fort Independence,
his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was
published that year. A slim 40 -page collection
credited only to a Bostonian. It just vanished.
Completely. Only 50 copies were printed and it
just disappeared without a trace. But... Despite
this quiet, unrecognized literary debut, Poe
was actually a competent soldier. He rose quickly
to the rank of sergeant major for artillery.
He eventually revealed his true identity to get
a discharge, and this led to a temporary reconciliation
with Allen. That reconciliation was primarily
prompted by tragedy. Francis Allen, his foster
mother, died in February 1829. The woman who'd
been kind to him. Yes, John Allen. maybe softened
by grief and recognizing Poe's potential, agreed
to support Poe's application for an appointment
to the United States Military Academy at West
Point. So he's back on track, seemingly. For
a moment. He was honorably discharged from the
Army and entered West Point in July 1830. But
that reconciliation was terminally fragile. It
was doomed from the start. John Allen had remarried
and bitter quarrels erupted, partly concerning
children Allen had fathered outside of his marriage.
Allen completely disowned him. Completely removed
him from his will permanently. And Poe, recognizing
that the military path was no longer a viable
route to any kind of financial or social stability,
intentionally got himself court -martialed. He
engineered his own failure. He totally engineered
his own academic and military failure. Exactly.
He was found guilty in February 1831 of gross
neglect of duty for refusing to attend classes,
church, and formations. And what's wild is that
he pleaded not guilty. Right, but that was just
a tactic. It was to ensure the sentence was dismissal,
which he achieved. This episode, it illustrates
a crucial pattern. When Poe felt trapped or abandoned,
he would ruthlessly self -sabotage to secure
his freedom, regardless of the financial cost.
So following this dramatic exit, he finds a new
domestic nucleus in Baltimore with his widowed
aunt, Maria Clem, and her daughter, Virginia,
his cousin. And Maria Clem, whom he affectionately
called Muddy, she really provided the emotional
stability and domestic anchor that had been missing
his entire life. But this stability was laced
with unconventionality, to say the least. It
was. In 1836, at age 27, Poe married Virginia
Clem. The records show she was only 13 years
old. Thirteen. Thirteen. And they had to get
a witness to falsely attest that she was 21.
Regardless of the unusual age difference, though,
the relationship seemed to be built on a deep
mutual dependency, which makes the subsequent
tragedy all the more acute. It was a complex,
loving, and just deeply tragic relationship.
And tragedy struck in January 1842. While Virginia
was singing and playing piano, she showed the
first signs of consumption tuberculosis imposed
description of it is just wrenching he described
it as the sudden breaking of a blood vessel in
her throat that moment must have been devastating
i mean an almost exact horrible echo of his mother's
fate It was crushing. And biographers widely
agree the psychological toll was immense. Virginia
suffered from this chronic illness for five years,
dying in their small cottage in Fordham, New
York, in January 1847. And this is when he starts
drinking heavily. Allegedly, yes. The stress
of watching the woman he loved, who was also
his family connection and his cousin, slowly
waste away is what pushed him into heavy drinking.
And this triple -loss mother, foster mother,
and then his wife. It fuels his most persistent
literary theme. Absolutely. The repeated death
of vital women in his life is the direct psychological
source for his recurring theme, the death of
a beautiful woman. It is a motif that defines
so many of his most famous works. And after Virginia's
death, his search for stability just became desperate
and erratic. Completely. He attempted to court
the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, which resulted
in a failed engagement, mostly due to his erratic
behavior and heavy drinking. Yet in the final
months of his life, he was back in Richmond,
having resumed a relationship with his childhood
sweetheart, Sarah O'Meara Royster. He's forever
seeking to recapture an idealized, stable past.
A past that never really existed. So despite
this continuous personal turbulence and financial
peril, Poe manages to achieve something monumental.
He pivots from being a failing poet to a successful
prose writer and editor. And in doing so, he
engineers the foundation of modern genre literature.
The shift was absolutely essential. After the
early failures in poetry, Poe focused permanently
on prose. He needed immediate, practical wins.
And that win came in 1833. That's right. October
1833, his short story, Emma's Script Found in
a Bottle, won a prize sponsored by the Baltimore
Saturday Visitor. And that single victory was
his ticket into the editorial world, which gave
him the consistent income he craved. Precisely.
It brought him to the attention of influential
figures like John P. Kennedy, who mentored him
and introduced him to Thomas W. White, the editor
of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.
And this began the era of Poe. The tireless editorial
entrepreneur. Mastering the system. Mastering
the mechanics of the burgeoning American periodical
system. He became assistant editor of the Southern
Literary Messenger in 1835, but even this stability
was immediately threatened. Oh, immediately.
White discharged him within weeks, allegedly
for drunkenness. And he came back. He came back.
The undeniable quality of Poe's writing and his
critical acumen meant White reinstated him after
Poe promised to reform. He stayed there until
1837. And during his tenure, he was a force multiplier.
A force multiplier. He claimed the magazine's
circulation shot up from 700 to 3 ,500. He wasn't
just a writer. He was a circulation manager,
a critic, and an ideas man all rolled into one.
He continued this pattern, right? Moving through
the centers of American publishing, Philadelphia,
New York, working for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine,
and later the highly successful Graham's Magazine.
He did. But his true aspiration was always complete
editorial control. That was the dream. That was
the dream, the antidote to poverty and compromise.
He yearned to produce his own journal, first
called The Pen, and later rebranded as The Stylist.
And he got so close. So close. He planned meticulously
even buying advertising space in the Saturday
Evening Post in 1840 to announce its prospectus.
This failed dream, the financial security and
critical platform of The Stylist. It just represents
the constant tension between his massive ambition
and his brutal economic reality. And it's such
a profound irony that this man who lived hand
to mouth essentially invented two incredibly
lucrative global genres, the formalized short
story and, most notably, detective fiction. He
was instrumental in shaping the modern short
story, codifying it as a genre with structure
and rules. His 1839 collection, Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque, that cemented his reputation.
But his creation of detective fiction is arguably
his greatest structural legacy to world literature.
We credit him as the inventor, based on his three
tales featuring C. Auguste Dupin, The Murders
in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget,
and The Purloined Letter. So what specifically
did Poe invent that didn't exist before? Okay,
so before Poe, you had mysteries, certainly,
but you didn't have detective fiction. Poe invented
the entire blueprint. The whole formula. The
entire formula. The brilliant, eccentric, amateur
consulting detective that's Dupin, who solves
crimes through pure intellect. The relatively
dull, loyal sidekick who is the narrator. The
incompetent official police force. The bumbling
cops. The bumbling cops. And the mechanism of
the locked room mystery. It's all there. And
Dupin operates through a method Poe called ratiocination.
Ratiocination. It's a cold, logical deduction
that elevates reason above physical evidence.
He doesn't rely on luck or brute force. He relies
on analytical insight into the psychology of
the criminal and the police alike. And that framework
is the foundation for everything that comes after.
It is the foundation upon which Sherlock Holmes
and every single subsequent detective has been
built. The impact is just undeniable. Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle credited Poe directly, saying, Each
of Poe's detective stories is a right from which
a whole literature has developed. And the mystery
writers of America acknowledging this by naming
their annual awards the Edgars. it's a genre
so essential today that it's easy to forget it
was codified by a struggling magazine editor
in the 1840s shifting now to his most famous
mode gothic horror Poe wasn't just telling scary
stories. He was psychologically dissecting terror,
a key characteristic of dark romanticism. Exactly.
Dark romanticism, a subgenre of American romanticism,
emerged as a direct reaction to what they saw
as the naive optimism of transcendentalism. So
while transcendentalists saw inherent goodness
in nature and humanity, the dark romantics like
Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, they focused on
human fallibility. Inherent evil, decay, madness,
and melancholy. And Poe's fiction is preoccupied
with the physics of death. That's a great way
to put it. He explores the psychological terror
of decomposition, the fear of premature burial,
which is a huge societal fear at the time, and
the reanimation of the dead. It's horror that
is deeply internal, focusing on the deterioration
of the mind as much as the body. And during his
lifetime, he was perhaps most widely known not
as a fiction writer, but as a fiercely opinionated
literary critic. That's a crucial point most
people miss. The vast majority of his writings
were actually non -fictional reviews and essays.
He was revered, yet deeply feared, and critic
James Russell Lowell called him the most discriminating,
philosophical, and fearless critic who has written
in America. And the fearless part led directly
to his nickname, the Tomahawk Man. The Tomahawk
Man. He was brutal. And he saved his sharpest
attacks for the biggest names in American letters.
Tell us about the Longfellow War. Ah, yes. This
was Poe's most famous critical battle. Henry
Wilesworth Longfellow was, at the time, America's
most beloved and commercially successful poet.
An absolute giant. And Poe just went after him.
Relentlessly. He attacked him, accusing him of
the heresy of the didactic. Meaning? Meaning
Longfellow wrote poetry that was overly preachy,
tried too hard to teach a moral lesson, and often
lacked originality. Sometimes, you know, bordering
on plagiarism. So it's interesting that Poe,
a writer who struggled for money, was essentially
attacking a poet who is universally popular and
financially secure. It speaks to Poe's deep -seated
elitism about art. He correctly predicted that
Longfellow's reputation, while huge in the moment,
would decline because his style lacked the necessary
originality and depth. For Poe, popularity was
a suspicious indicator. He often equated commercial
success with artistic compromise. And his disdain
for the transcendentalists went beyond literary
theory and became deeply personal. Oh, absolutely.
He ridiculed them as frog pondians, a reference
to the Boston Common Pond, and mocked their style
as metaphor run mad and lapsing into obscurity
for obscurity's sake. Poe, the analytical engineer,
couldn't tolerate what he perceived as their
mystical vagueness and intellectual laziness.
This brings us to his philosophy of art. How
did his pursuit of of beauty reconcile with his
frequently brutal critical style. For Poe, beauty
was the critical standard. It was the only standard.
In essays like The Poetic Principle, he argued
that the ultimate goal of art is the attainment
of beauty, not truth, not morals, and certainly
not political messaging. And he emphasized originality.
And the importance of achieving a single specific
effect where every element of work, every word,
every image. contributes meticulously to a preconceived
emotional or psychological result, and everything
extraneous is removed. This concept of the single
specific effect feels incredibly modern. It's
almost like he was pioneering user experience
design. Exactly. Poe wasn't just influencing
literature. He was essentially writing the rules
for modern high impact content creation. If you
think about a perfectly crafted short film or
a tightly edited suspense trailer. Or even a
viral video. That is Poe's unity of effect in
action. He demanded ruthless efficiency in storytelling.
He then formalized this concept of calculation
in his controversial essay, The Philosophy of
Composition. Ah, yes. That essay is legendary
because Poe claimed to describe, in reverse,
the precise, calculated, step -by -step, logical
method he used to write his most famous poem,
The Raven. He deconstructed his own creative
process. It's an almost scientific deconstruction
of creativity, arguing that no part of the poem
was accidental. He claimed he chose the length,
the meter, the central theme melancholy, and
the refrain. But critics suspect this was perhaps
Poe's greatest fictional work. Many do. Critics
like Joseph Woodcrush suggest the essay was less
a truthful memoir and more an ingenious exercise
in the art of rationalization. So he wrote the
poem first and then came up with the theory after.
That's the idea. He wrote the poem organically.
experienced its massive success, and then reverse
engineered a perfect logical theory to prove
his artistic genius was entirely premeditated.
Either way, it underscores that his mind operated
like an analytical engine, applying cold logic
whether he was creating a terrifying poem or
dissecting the literary failures of his peers.
And whether it was calculated or spontaneous,
the result was shattering. When The Raven was
published in the Evening Mirror in January 1845,
it made Poe an instant household name. Instant,
vast, popular fame. Yet here's the ultimate punchline
of his financial life. Despite achieving unprecedented
notoriety that reached across the country, he
was paid... Only $9 for its original publication.
$9? $9. His fame was boundless, but his profit
was microscopic. It's a perfect encapsulation
of the market forces that were always working
against him. Okay, here's where it gets really
interesting. We transition from Poe, the literary
engineer, to Poe, the scientific visionary. The
ruthless calculation he applied to poetry and
criticism, he also applied to the physical universe.
This is the most surprising layer of his genius,
his fierce analytical interest in hard science.
We're talking specifically about his 1848 essay,
Eureka, a prose poem. A prose poem? He intentionally
called it that because he insisted it was a work
of profound truth derived from pure intuition,
which he considered superior to the laborious
scientific method. He thought he could intuit
his way to cosmic truth. He did. And this intuition
led him to two extraordinary scientific anticipations.
Let's start with Olber's Paradox. Okay, remind
us what that is. Right, so Olber's Paradox asks
a fundamental question. Why is the night sky
dark if the universe contains an infinite number
of stars? Right, if it's infinite, shouldn't
we see a star in every direction? Exactly. If
the universe were infinite and static, every
line of sight from Earth should eventually terminate
on the surface of a star, meaning the entire
night sky should be blindingly bright. So how
did Poe, the writer of horror, plausibly solve
this paradox in 1848? Poe proposed the correct
modern day solution. The night sky is dark because
the universe is finite in age, not necessarily
finite in size. Okay. There's a horizon of light
determined by how far light has been able to
travel since the universe began. So distant stars
whose light hasn't reached us yet simply cannot
illuminate our sky. That's a profound, simple
insight that predated formal cosmology. It's
an incredible leap of intuition. But the truly
mind -bending prediction is his anticipation
of the Big Bang theory. How did his theory in
Eureka map onto that concept? Poe postulated
that the universe originated from a single primordial
particle, which he termed the original unity.
The original unity. This particle, via divine
volition, expanded outward due to a repulsive
force, dispersing matter evenly across space.
He further proposed that this expansion would
eventually stop and reverse, contracting back
into the single particle in an event we now know
as the Big Crunch. So the universe starting from
a single point and expanding. A pulsating universe
model. It's remarkably close to modern Big Bang
theory. He anticipated it by roughly 80 years.
That is just extraordinary, especially since
he threw out the scientific method entirely.
You mentioned it wasn't perfect, though. No,
not at all. While the intuition was powerful,
Poe ignored established laws in favor of his
unified theory. For instance, he disregarded
Newtonian principles, specifically concerning
the conservation of angular momentum, which led
to inaccuracies about planetary density and rotation.
But he believed in it. Oh, he was so convinced
of its truth that he insisted Eureka was his
masterpiece, a work of art that was also scientifically
true okay so moving from the universe to secret
communication the same analytical mind that created
dupin was obsessed with cracking ciphers turning
code breaking into a public sensation this was
a magnificent promotional stunt that simultaneously
highlighted his genius he publicly challenged
readers of the philadelphia paper alexander's
weekly express messenger to submit ciphers promising
to solve them all and people sent them in they
did and he solved them He then published the
essay A Few Words on Secret Writing in 1841 and
made ciphers a central, essential plot device
in the gold bug. So was Poe actually a master
cryptographer or was he just an acute observer
of human ignorance? He was definitely the latter,
utilizing his analytical edge. Poe's method was
mostly limited to solving simple substitution
ciphers, where one letter is consistently replaced
by another. He wasn't solving the truly complex
codes of the age. His brilliance lay in something
else. His brilliance lay in realizing the general
public was completely ignorant of frequency analysis.
Explain frequency analysis for us. Sure. If you
look at the English language, certain letters
appear with far greater frequency than others.
E is the most common, followed by T, A, O, and
so on. So in a simple substitution cipher, the
most frequently used symbol in the coded message
must correspond to E. Poe used this analytical
insight, the same kind Dupin uses in the Detectives
stories, to quickly break ciphers that seemed
impossibly complex to the average reader. The
public was so easily fooled, and Poe just capitalized
on that analytical edge. But the impact of this
stunt was far -reaching. It truly was. Poe's
theatrical code -breaking played a major role
in popularizing cryptograms in American media.
But more profoundly, America's foremost cryptologist
of the 20th century, William Friedman. The guy
who cracked the Perpetua Code. The very same.
Friedman credited reading The Gold Bug as a child
with inspiring his entire career. He later led
the team that deciphered Japan's critical military
and diplomatic Perpetua Code during World War
II. An 1840 short story fueled a critical real
-world intelligence victory. That's incredible.
And just to add a fun footnote to his cryptographic
expertise, two ciphers he published in 1841 under
the pseudonym W .B. Tyler proved so challenging
they defied professional efforts. And they weren't
fully cracked until 1992 and 2000. So even when
he tried to be simple, he could still hide complex
secrets. He was a fascinating mixture of showmanship
and profound insight. And speaking of defiance,
we have to integrate his political opinions,
which were as caustic as his literary criticism.
They absolutely were. Poe was highly critical
of the American political system, which he often
labeled a mobocracy. How did this political elitism
manifest? It's crucial to connect his political
views back to his artistic ones. Just as he distrusted
popular taste, like with Longfellow, he distrusted
the masses politically. He viewed the government
as being led by an ignorant, easily - manipulated
electorate. Which got him labeled anti -American.
Yes, and bitterly hostile by some contemporaries.
But he didn't shy away from controversy, even
speaking out against specific societal evils.
No, he didn't. In the Southern Literary Messenger,
he explicitly critiqued the practice of lynching,
calling its proponents a trained band of villains
and unlawful and abandoned wretches. This was
a rare, unambiguous moral stance against a horrific
practice of the time. And his critique extended
to the point of proposing a political secession.
He did in Graham's magazine in 1846. He proposed
a geographical and political split. He suggested
separating the Appalachian South from the existing
United States and naming this new nation the
United States of Alleghenia. This highly provocative
thought just underscores his profound dissatisfaction
with the structural flaws he perceived in the
American experiment. So this intensely analytical,
genre -inventing, politically defiant writer
meets his end in what is arguably the most dramatic
and confusing death in literary history. Let's
talk about the final strange days of Edgar Allan
Poe. The mystery of Poe's death is perfect material
for one of his own stories. On October 3, 1849,
he was found semi -conscious in Baltimore. by
a man named Joseph W. Walker. And the details
are just bizarre. Bizarre is the word. Crucially,
he was found lying outside a polling place, described
as being in great distress and wearing clothes
that were conspicuously not his own, ill -fitting,
dirty and cheap. He was completely incoherent.
Unable to explain his condition. Not at all.
And that detail about the clothes, the bizarre
disguise, that is the key to some of the most
sensational theories, isn't it? It is the most
compelling detail. He was taken to Washington
Medical College, where he remained confused,
hallucinating, unable to endure light or sound.
He repeatedly called out the name Reynolds before
his death four days later on October 7th, 1849.
He was 40 years old. And his final recorded words.
Lord help my poor soul. And the mystery only
deepened because the crucial evidence was immediately
lost. Vanished. All relevant medical records,
including his death certificate, have disappeared.
Contemporary papers listed the vague cause as
congestion of the brain or cerebral inflammation.
Which were just euphemisms. Exactly. Euphemisms
often used for deaths linked to intoxication
or public scandal, usually to protect the reputation
of the deceased's family. But modern medical
speculation ranges wildly. It covers almost every
severe ailment. Delirium tremens from alcoholism,
epilepsy, syphilis, brain tumors, even rabies,
a theory proposed in 1996 based on the description
of his final symptoms. But the most compelling
specific historical theory that accounts for
the strange close is cooping. That's the one.
We need to unpack cooping for the listener. What
was this specific electoral fraud that might
have killed him? Cooping was a horrific, violent
form of voter fraud common in Baltimore in the
19th century, especially around elections. Gangs
working for political campaigns would kidnap
vulnerable men off the street. Often homeless
or drunk individuals. Right. They'd take them
to a secluded room, the coop, give them heavy
drugs or alcohol to ensure compliance, and often
beat them. And then what? They would then forcibly
disguise the victim in different sets of cheap
clothes and parade them to multiple polling places,
forcing them to vote repeatedly for the specific
candidate. So Poe being found semi -conscious
in strange, ill -fitting clothes near a polling
place. The cooping theory provides a rational,
historically specific explanation for the bizarreness
of his final state. He was simply discarded once
he was no longer useful, likely suffering from
the drugs and trauma. It's a tragic, violent
end for a man who often wrote about victims abandoned
in bizarre, inexplicable circumstances. But the
story doesn't end with his death. It ends with
a literary smear campaign orchestrated by his
rival. Tragically, Poe's final narrative was
hijacked by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a minor writer
and editor whom Poe had mercilessly savaged in
his criticism. Griswold held a deep, profound,
years -long grudge. And Griswold struck immediately,
starting a smear campaign on the very day Poe
was buried. He did. He wrote a high -profile,
vicious obituary under the pseudonym Ludwig that
appeared in the New York Tribune. The opening
line set the tone. Edgar Allan Poe is dead. This
announcement will startle many, but few will
be grieved by it. And then Griswold secured a
position that allowed him to control the historical
record. He somehow convinced Poe's aunt, Marie
Clem, and others to appoint him Poe's literary
executor. Griswold used this position to systematically
attempt to destroy Poe's reputation. In the 1850
collected edition of Poe's works, Griswold included
a biographical article titled Memoir of the Author,
where he depicted Poe as a depraved drunken drug
addled madman but this depiction was built on
massive distortion and outright falsehoods entirely
for instance the claims that poe was a habitual
drug addict are largely fabricated Those who
knew Poe well, like his friend John Neal, immediately
denounced Griswold in print, pointing out the
gross exaggerations and lies. The letters. The
most damning pieces of evidence, Poe's personal
letters that Griswold presented, were later revealed
to be outright forgeries. But the damage was
already irreparable. Absolutely. Griswold's biography,
though poisoned by malice, was the only comprehensive
account available and was widely reprinted. It
ensured the public consumed Poe's thrilling dark
works through the sensationalized lens of an
evil and tormented genius. In a perverse twist
of fate, the man who tried to destroy him guaranteed
his lasting popular notoriety. He did. He made
Poe's biography as thrilling as his darkest fiction.
the story of poe's life is just defined by mystery
tragedy and relentless analytical genius his
literary legacy is one of explosive enduring
influence particularly across the atlantic Poe
was one of the first 19th century American authors
to become profoundly more popular in Europe,
particularly France, than in his native United
States. Why France specifically? This overseas
fame was largely cemented by the early and deeply
sympathetic French translations by the great
poet Charles Baudelaire, who saw Poe as a kindred
spirit. His renditions became the definitive
versions of Poe's work in continental Europe.
And that influence just rippled through major
literary and cinematic figures for generations.
Oh, for sure. It impacted the pioneering science
fiction writer Jules Verne, who was so taken
with Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym, that he wrote a sequel
to it. And horror writers. American horror masters,
most notably H .P. Lovecraft, called Poe his
god of fiction. and directly utilize Poe's concept
of the unity of effect in creating cosmic terror.
And the thread extends directly to film. Directly.
The famed director Alfred Hitchcock acknowledged,
It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's story
so much that I began to make suspense films.
However, not all of his peers appreciated the
calculation or the darkness. Far from it. As
we noted, Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson
a man Poe despised, derisively referred to Poe
as the Jingle Man in reaction to the rhythmic,
calculated nature of poems like The Raven. The
Jingle Man. And Aldous Huxley, decades later,
dismissed Poe's writing as vulgar, suggesting
it was too poetical, equating his style to wearing
a diamond ring on every finger gaudy and excessive.
Despite the controversy and the criticism, Poe's
physical legacy remains robust, immortalized
in the mysterious narrative he left behind. You
can trace his life through commemorations. The
Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia,
the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx where
Virginia died, and the Poe Museum in Richmond.
Though he never lived there. Right. Ironically,
he never lived in that specific oldest standing
house in the city. More recently, the memorial
sculpture, Poe Returning to Boston, unveiled
in his birthplace in 2014, captures this persistent
sense of a solitary figure striding against the
wind, his life's work trailing behind him. And
nothing captures the enduring mystery more perfectly
than the Poe toaster tradition. The toaster is
perhaps the ultimate piece of anonymous, spontaneous
mythology built around Poe. For exactly 60 years,
between 1949 and 2009, an unknown visitor left
a bottle of French cognac and three roses at
Poe's original grave marker every January 19th,
his birthday. A private ritual that became a
public legend. It was a beautiful, deeply private
ritual that added immensely to his cult status.
And the anonymity, the fact that the tradition
ended as mysteriously as it began on his bicentennial
in 2009, ensures that Poe, the master of the
macabre, continues to be defined by a permanent...
unsolvable enigma. Which brings us back to that
essential, brutal irony of his life that we began
with. The man who tried to destroy his reputation,
Rufus Wilmot Griswold, inadvertently guaranteed
Poe's lasting popular appeal by sensationalizing
his life and cementing the enduring myth of the
tormented, depraved artist. So our final thought
for you to explore is this. What if Poe had actually
lived long enough to stabilize his finances,
launch the stylus, and realize his dream of becoming
America's ultimate literary gatekeeper? Could
he have maintained a successful journal with
his analytical demand for beauty and his caustic
tomahawk man style? Or would his controversial
political views and relentless critical attacks
on the establishment have inevitably doomed that
effort regardless?