Edgar Allan Poe 1840s Tales

1840 tales

THE JOURNAL OF JULIUS RODMAN

A journal has been found written by one Julius Rodman, which purports to suggest he, and his dozen or so companions, were in 1792 the first white men to cross the Rocky Mountains and reach the Pacific Ocean.  This being one year prior to the Mackenzie expedition which was, at this point, regarded as the first.

However, the document only chronicles the period from June 3rd 1781 to May 20th 1782, abruptly ending with the expedition still some way from the Pacific Ocean.

Julius Rodman was intended to be Poe's second novel, after Arthur Gordon Pym.   The plan was to initially publish the tale in twelve monthly instalments in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, during the whole of 1840.

However, when in June 1840, Poe was fired from his post as contributing editor with Burton's he, perhaps not surprisingly, chose not to submit any further instalments for publication.  Indeed, it appears he decided to abandon the whole project.

What does exist in those six published chapters is a detailed (at times very detailed) account of the expedition's travels up the Missouri River in two boats.  There are a couple of episodes of real excitement: the stand-off with the Teton Sioux and the encounter with the brown bears.

But for the most part we are treated to recordings of eventless days' travel, peppered with comprehensive lists of the numbers and species of animals the party had shot each day for their dinner.

Moderately entertaining and, rather oddly, the reader (or this reader) did not feel remotely short-changed for only hearing half the story.  For I am sure whatever Poe had in mind for the unwritten chapters seven to twelve, probably represented just more of the same.

WHY THE LITTLE FRENCHMAN WEARS HIS HAND IN A SLING

Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, a rough and ready Connaught Baronet living in plush Bloomsbury, relates the story of his wooing of his neighbour Misthress Tracle in the face of a love rival in the shape of a little Frenchman.

Written in broad faux Oirish accent, I found I enjoyed this one better as an audio book, rather than trying to do an O'Donovan Brothers' accent in my head whilst reading.

And whilst Poe does set up a rather funny situation during the double-wooing, most readers will have worked out "Why the Little Frenchman....." by about halfway through the tale.  Which sorta leaves the narrative to dribble to a rather predictable and (dare I say it) dull close.

THE BUSINESS MAN

A business man yammers on about stuff.

Another Poe satire with no target obvious to the 21st century reader.  Capitalism in general, perhaps.  Or the business practices of his moderately successful step-father, John Allan.  He does take a featherweight swipe at the phoney "science" of phrenology early on in the narrative, but I cannot believe that to be the sole target of Poe's stylus here.

In either case, this is another piece of writing which would probably have never seen the light of day again after initial publication, had it been written by any other author.

But then again Poe himself was editing the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, at the time the periodical published this story.

THE MAN OF THE CROWD

We are in London here, and the narrator is sitting in a coffee shop watching the populace of the metropolis scurry by in the street outside.  He believes he can identify the profession, social class and status of each, simply by observing them.

When a elderly chap wanders into view, whom the narrator cannot categorise, he spontaneously jumps up and leaves the coffee house, determined to follow the old man to find out as much as he can about him.

So begins a lengthy game of follow-my-leader which goes on the for the better part of the subsequent 24 hours.

Very much a game of two halves this one, as Poe spends the first half of the narrative having the narrator yak on about his wonderful observational skills.  The narrator comes across as a rather unpleasant individual, arrogant in the extreme.  For he has no way of demonstrating if his condescending assertions arrived at by "scrutinizing the mob" are in any way correct.

Once the "decrepid old man" comes into view, and the narrator gets up off his arse, the hunt is on.  And Poe (via the narrator)  leads the reader on a delightfully descriptive journey through London's streets; both salubrious, and those rather less so.  

The reader's mindset moves from curiosity, avid interest, then even mild excitement as the chase progresses.  But incrementally the reader begins to suspect Poe is leading us all on a wild goose chase, and that he may be setting us up for a disappointing let down.

Which he most assuredly does.


1841 tales

THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

Screams ring out at 3AM from the fourth floor of a mansion on Paris' Rue Morgue.  When the neighbours force entry, the horribly mutilated corpses of an elderly woman and her daughter are discovered.

  
But no perpetrator is apparent, and the apartment's doors and windows are all locked from the inside.

Sounds like a job for Sherlock Holmes.

And so it came to pass that Poe did invent the detective story.  Or maybe he did not.  The most cursory internet digging will unearth all manner of claimants or, strictly speaking, folks asserting even earlier examples.

 
What I feel is pretty much irrefutable is that without C. August Dupin, there would, in all likelihood, never have been a Sherlock Holmes.  Or if there had, Conan Doyle's creation would have been a very different beast altogether.

Consider the basic similarities: both Poe and Conan Doyle have a borderline autistic amateur sleuth of independent means solving cases which baffle the police, using mere observation and logic.  Each lives with a nice-but-dim buddy who is generally used as a sounding board by the sleuth, but also exists to facilitate expositional dialogue for the benefit of the reader.

The main difference, of course, is the Conan Doyle swiftly divined what the reading public wanted and learned to churn out his stories by the dozen.  Something Poe never quite grasped.

A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

An elderly Norwegian fisherman relates the story of his shipwrecking in a storm, and the subsequent pulling of his wrecked boat, with him still aboard, into a whirlpool.

And of how he escaped with his life.

No lengthy verbose preamble on some related topic or other here, for with the very first letter, of the very first word of the very first sentence the reader is dropped into the narrative:

"We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag.  For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak."

We do get a bit of expositional dialogue between the old sailor and his listener informing us readers just what a maelstrom is.  But once we get into the real meat of the story, around a third of the way through, Poe presents us with a hair-raising (hair-whitening, even) adventure yarn capturing the feel of being caught within and drawn down into a whirlpool remarkably well.

The slight weakness of the nested story format is, of course, that because the old sailor is relating his tale first hand, we all know he escaped the whirlpool.  Leaving the How to entertain the reader.

There is a bit of a Rime of the Ancient Mariner thing going on here, and I cannot help but wonder if Poe was perhaps poking fun at Coleridge's almost unreadable epic.

THE ISLAND OF THE FAY

A chap out wandering contemplates the joys of experiencing, first music and then the great outdoors alone, before contemplating the heavens.

He comes across a small circular island in a river.  The island is an odd one indeed, for it's western extremity is a veritable botanical Eden.  Or as the narrator puts it: a "radiant harem of garden beauties".  The eastern end, in marked contrast, appears in perpetual shade, with twisted trees resembling spectres and small hillocks putting the narrator in mind of graves.

Into this scene arrives an ethereal figure on a canoe (a Fay), who makes a number of seemingly pointless circumnavigations of the island before disappearing.

It really is hard to love this one, as Poe crams all manner of nonsense into the narrator's musings early on in the narrative.  Witness:

  
"I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the grey rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all—I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity; whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculæ which infest the brain—a being which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as these animalculæ must thus regard us."

And, yes, that is all a single sentence.  Later the reader is presented with such gibberish as: 

"The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies.  The forms of those bodies are accurately such as, within a given surface, to include the greatest possible amount of matter;—while the surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged."

I would swear Poe is parodying the Scottish geologist James Hutton, whose perceptive insights into how rock features suggested the Earth to be very old, were often lost within his almost impenetrable writing style.    

Once we reach the island, and the ethereal Fey, things do pick up.  But not much.  I had assumed each circle of the island represented a day in the life of the Fay, but Poe suggests each circumnavigation is a year.  Not that it makes much difference, I suppose.  

I am guessing the message here to be some sort of comment on the impermanence of existence, but after wading through those early paragraphs, I would suggest many readers would almost welcome oblivion.


THE COLLOQUY OF MONOS AND UNA

A year after his death, Una has just been reunited with her husband/lover Monos in the afterlife.  She asks him to relate his experiences since dying, as she burns "to know the incidents of your own passage through the dark Valley and Shadow".

Although quite why she should be so interested, given she made, one assumes, the same journey is not made plain.

In my self-imposed journey to read all of Poe's tales in the order of publication, I have occasionally found myself struggling to maintain interest in some of his more verbose passages.

But never have I felt like just giving up on a story, as I did on more than one occasion when wading through this particular glob of literary treacle.

The notion of exploring whether or not an individual retains any level of sentience, or is still in receipt of stimuli from the five senses is actually quite a promising one.  But with Poe in his Why-use-a-dozen-descriptive-words, when-a-hundred-will-do mode, any thoughts are soon drowned in quicksand.

And when Poe introduces a sixth sense, which he termed "mental pendulous pulsation", I really thought I was done.  But gritted my teeth and ploughed on.

The last paragraph is interesting, though, in its use of the words "nebulous", "quiescence" and a reference to "The worm".  All of which would be recycled in the poem Ulalume, published a few years later.

But for the tale as a whole - just a box ticked on my part.


NEVER BET THE DEVIL YOUR HEAD

The narrator of this one, after the usual tedious Poe rambling intro, relates the life and death of his friend Toby Dammit.  Charting his vices as an infant ("catching and kissing the female babies") to his (unexpanded upon) "very equivocal behavior" in adulthood.

Amongst his lesser flaws, Dammit had developed the irritating habit of uttering the phrase "I'll bet the Devil my head," to emphasise any point he made during conversation.

Out walking with the narrator one evening, the pair come across a bridge with a turnstile.  Dammit, predictably, bets the Devil his head he can leap across the turnstile.  At which point "a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect" appears to witness Dammit's attempt.

Who the devil could this be, wonders the narrator.

An extremely lightweight piece of fluff this one, with little really to encourage repeated (or even a second) reading.  Other than perhaps the delightfully surreal last paragraph, which sits uncomfortably with the rest of the narrative, I feel.  

Poe takes a few swipes at the then-in-vogue transcendentalism movement, with the pseudo-science of homeopathy also not escaping his ire.  But to what ends, I do not know.

It is probably worthwhile noting that this one was first published in the Philadelphia based Graham's Magazine in September 1841.  The periodical's editor at the time?  Why Mr. Poe of course.

ELEONARA

The narrator (Pyrros) is living an idyllic life with his beautiful younger cousin Eleonara.  The pair are in love.....but she is ill and soon dies (you don't say), but not before extracting a promise from her lover that he will never marry another.  A promise, if broken would bring down "a penalty the exceeding great horror of which will not permit me to make record of it".

But marry another Pyrros surely does.  But fortunately, Eleonara's ghost pitches up to whisper in his ear "thou art absolved".

It has been suggested that there is perhaps an autobiographical element to this one given Poe, at the time of publication in 1841, was living with his aunt and younger cousin Virginia whom he had married a few years earlier.  And that this tale sorta represented Poe justifying to himself, and to his readers I suppose, any romantic encounters which he may have subsequent his wife's death.  Or even during her illness perhaps, for Virginia had apparently already begun to exhibit early symptoms of the tuberculosis which would kill her.

If so, this would appear to be some particularly morbid long-term planning by Poe, given Virginia lingered until 1847.

THREE SUNDAYS IN A WEEK

Bobby's great-uncle Rumgudgeon is a cantankerous old goat, generally through habit rather than conviction.  So when he initially refuses to approve Bobby's marriage to Kate, the pair know it is on principle, rather than he harouring any real objection to the union.

Nevertheless, when great-uncle asserts the pair may marry "when three Sundays come together in a week", Bobby and Kate realise they have to come up with something crafty.

So they enlist the aid of two sailor friends who have recently just returned from voyages circumnavigating the globe in opposite directions.

Good fun this one, and I found I rather warmed to Kate, who was that rarest of creatures in a Poe tale - a woman who not only did not die, but was actually given intelligent dialogue to say.

The ruse would only work, of course, if the two sailors' respective ships did not alter their calendars as they crossed the International Date Line.

But hey, why spoil a happy ending? 


1842 tales

THE OVAL PORTRAIT

The narrator of this one has somehow (we are not told how) found himself both injured and lost in the Italian Apeninne mountains.  His valet Pedro, breaks into a recently abandoned chateau, so the pair can shelter for the night.

In one of the bedrooms, the narrator encounters a portrait of a beautiful young woman.  And, rather conveniently, a book which describes each of the pictures in the bedroom.

Within this he reads of a monomaniacally obsessed artist, and of his wife who starves to death patiently sitting for the portrait.  

The Oval Portrait is a long time favourite of mine from Poe's tales, and one I frequently return to.  I would find though thinking it would have maybe benefited from some back story to the narrator and his valet, and how they came to be in the pickle they were in.

And then, I learned the story as originally published (then titled Life in Death) did in fact house an introductory paragraph, which Poe had chose to later excise.  

From which I learned the narrator and his valet Pedro had been involved in an "affray with the banditti".  But little else - for the paragraph was mainly taken up with the narrator's ruminations upon how much opium to take, and in what form, to alleviate his fever.  I could understand, with hindsight, why Poe chopped it.  (The paragraph.....not the opium).

So, what do we think the moral of this tale is?  Arsa longa, vita brevis perhaps?  I don't know.  The real mystery here, is just how much of subjugated wet-wipe of a wife does the model have to be, to remain posing for weeks, without once thinking to ask: "Can we maybe stop for a while, honey, so I can grab a sandwich.  And a pee?".

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

With the plague The Red Death devastating his lands, Prince Prospero attempts to hide from it, along with a thousand of his knights and dames of his court, in a remote abbey.

The gates are welded closed, and the throng settle in to sit out the pestilence outside.  The abbey is well-provisioned, and all manner of entertainments are laid on the keep the guest entertained.

Six months into the self-imposed quarantine, a masked ball is held.  But a stranger appears to have found his way into the abbey.

Another one where I have to make a conscious effort to remove any mental references to Roger Corman's 1964 movie version.  Particularly the incongruous Gino/Francesca love story Corman bolted on to his film to pad it out.  I also have to remind myself that the marvellously grotesque Hop-Toad sequence is from a completely different Poe composition altogether.

Poe's story is a short, sharp treatise on the inevitability of death, no matter what we may do to attempt to avoid it.  There is only ever one winner in that particular tussle.

Beyond that fairly blunt message, I do not think the reader should go digging around in the prose attempting to unearth for themselves any more subtle message to the business.  Rather the reader should simply luxuriate in Poe's sumptuous prose throughout.  None better than the final line:

"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

The Masque of the Red Death (published in May 1842) was Poe's final contribution to Graham's Magazine during his spell as co-editor.

THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN

A young man by the name of Ellison inherits the improbably large sum of four hundred and fifty million dollars.  So he decides to become a landscape gardener.

Another one of Poe's rambling essays, which has the reader contemplating ripping his own eyeballs out midway through.  

There is an element discussing the relative merits of "natural" vs "artificial" landscape-gardening.  To what conclusion I neither know nor care.

And what the feck is anyone with any duplicity of brain cells meant to make of:

"Now, if we imagine this sense of the Almighty Design to be harmonized in a measurable degree, if we suppose a landscape whose combined strangeness, vastness, definitiveness, and magnificence, shall inspire the idea of culture, or care, or superintendence, on the part of intelligences superior yet akin to humanity—then the sentiment of interest is preserved, while the Art is made to assume the air of an intermediate or secondary Nature—a Nature which is not God, nor an emanation of God, but which still is Nature, in the sense that it is the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God."?

THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET

The corpse of a young woman has been discovered in The Siene.  It is suspected as being that of Marie Roget, a perfume shop employee, who had disappeared three days earlier.  But the body's post-mortem appearance makes identification far from certain.

Despite extensive enquiries, and the offer of a reward of 20,000 francs, the gendarmerie fail to make progress.

Sounds like a job for C. Auguste Dupin.

I have to own up to having approached this one with a little trepidation, for it is probably the only Poe tale I have on a number of occasions in the past, started but failed to finish.  I think this was down to the fact I, having enjoyed The Murders in the Rue Morgue so much, I was expecting more of the same here: gore, charismatic sailor boys and blade-wielding apes.

But instead was faced with what was to all intents and purposes a rambling newspaper review by Dupin.

Approaching a new encounter with the story with a more open mind, and lower expectations, I found actually rather enjoyed reading the thing this time around, only occasionally shouting at Dupin to "Get on with it!"

The problem, of course, is that Poe had a blank sheet of paper in front of him before beginning to write "Rue Morgue", so could build up as complex and seemingly intractable a crime as he wished.  Scattering clues around like hidden easter eggs, for Dupin to unearth and, hence, solve the case.

With Marie Roget, Poe had set himself the silly task, via Dupin, of solving a real life murder: that of a New Jersey woman Marie Rogers.  Thus did Poe build the Marie Roget story around known details from the real murder, pretty much hamstringing himself in the process from a detective fiction point of view.

Failing to solve the Rogers' murder using Dupin's "rationication", Poe ended up (with a publication deadline looming) presenting his readers with a whopping cop out with his Marie Roget ending:

"For reasons which we shall not specify, but which to many readers will appear obvious, we have taken the liberty of here omitting, from the MSS. placed in our hands, such portion as details the following up of the apparently slight clue obtained by Dupin. We feel it advisable only to state, in brief, that the result desired was brought to pass."

In other words: Dupin's work helped solve the Marie Roget case, and bring the murderer to justice.  But I am not going to tell you who the murderer was.


THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

After a lengthy ponder upon what does and does not constitute a "swoon", the narrator of this one relates the nasty experiences he underwent in, and his subsequent rescue from, the Toledo dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition.

Playing fast and free with historical facts Poe, after his usual tedious preamble, thrusts us down into the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition.  Even if the reader is already aware the protagonist survives - he has, after all, written down the account we are reading - it is a never less than gripping yarn, with the reader keen to see how the poor chap extricates himself from the various predicaments he is placed in.

The weakness of the narrative is that the "apartment" is such an architecturally complex arrangement, with its circular pit in the centre, the pendulum/blade contraption and the heatable, movable iron clad walls.

  
Who could be bothered planning and building such a construction, for it merely to be used as a mode of execution? 


1843 tales

THE TELL-TALE HEART

A man murders his father/grandfather/landlord/flatmate because he doesn't like the old man's eyeball.  And is brought to justice by his own conscience.

This story is perhaps Poe's best known, and has been analysed to death over the 180 years since it was written, so I do not intend to add much to the pile.

Other than; one thing which struck me when re-reading it recently, is the fact I had always assumed the murderer to have been making a confession either to the police, or to a doctor or priest during the monologue.

But this time around had me wondering if he was not in fact sitting in the condemned cell, chattering away to his inner self.  To a voice inside his head, which kept insisting: "You are completely mad.  You do know that?"


THE GOLD BUG

Having fallen on hard times William Legrand has built himself a small hut on Sullivan's Island near the city of Charleston, South Carolina, where he lives with an elderly negro and former slave Jupiter.

As a bit of an amateur entomologist, Legrand is delighted to find a particularly beautiful gold coloured specimen, although less delighted to receive a bite from the creature upon picking it up.  Quite literally, being bitten by the gold bug.

On his way home he meets one of the officers from the local fort, who shares his interest, to whom he lends the bug.

Arriving back home, Legrand is pleased to discover an old friend (the narrator) waiting for him.  He excitedly tells his visitor all about the insect, but as it is not presently in his possession, he instead draws a picture of it on a piece of scrap paper.

And so initiates an exhilarating Boy's Own adventure involving a treasure map, secret writing, a cryptogram, pirates and buried gold.

  
I first encountered this story as a teenager in a compilation of Poe's short stories where it immediately struck me as so unlike any other of the author's work, as to make me wonder if it had been placed in the collection in error.

It was, I suppose, the first inkling I received that Poe's work went way beyond those creepy tales like The Black Cat and The Fall of the House of Usher.

I loved it, and still regard as one of my favourite Poe stories, although it is not without flaws.

Upon first reading, I can recall being uncomfortable, and still am, by the way Neptune spoke: here he is relating his first encounter with the gold coloured beetle.

  
"Claws enuff, massa, and mouff too. I nebber did see sich a d—n bug — he kick and he bite ebery ting what cum near him. Massa Will cotch him fuss, but had for to let him go gin mighty quick, I tell you — den was de time he must ha got de bite." 

But then perhaps many poorly educated elderly former slaves did speak using this pigdin/patois back in Poe's day.

The other aspect which I have long pondered is whether Legrand's lengthy explanation of how he solved the cryptogram should have been placed earlier in the narrative i.e. before the trio set out on their treasure hunt.  I know this would have altered the dynamic between the narrator and Legrand.  But placed as it is, at the end of the yarn, just seems so anticlimactic.

The Gold Bug was one of the few Poe stories from which he made a significant sum of income, it winning a $100 dollar prize in a writing competition run by the Philadelphia based Dollar Newspaper.


THE BLACK CAT

A convicted murderer chooses to “unburden his soul” on the evening prior to his execution, with a tale of alcohol fuelled spousicide and animal cruelty.

Although a dreadful crime is committed and the perpetrator unearthed in The Black Cat, Poe’s story is actually an examination of descent into ruin and madness through alcoholism.  An impressive drinker himself by all accounts, Poe was never one to shirk from confronting his own demons and fears (premature burial, loss of those close to him) in his work.

But although the death of a beautiful woman is a strong recurring theme throughout his writings generally, here the narrator’s wife is such a lightly sketched character she appears to serve little purpose other than to be murdered.

We never hear her views on any of the proceedings, indeed she has nothing to say at all throughout the whole yarn, not even uttering a sound when killed.  Paradoxically she only finds a voice after death through proxy, as it were.

Despite the title there are actually two black cats in the story, although they may actually be one and the same – that both have lost an eye would suggest so.  Perceived differences between the two may be a consequence of the storyteller’s deteriorating mental state, for we are well into unreliable narrator territory with this story.

DIDDLING

In which our Edgar informs us all exactly what diddling is (low grade swindling, apparently), lists the nine attributes required of a competent diddler, before detailing the procedures used in a number of successful diddles.

  
As if helpfully warning the reader to beware them, lest they become a victim themselves. 

Well, lets get the childish snickering out of the way first shall we.  That word "diddling".  Growing up, as I did, in a scruffy Scottish former mining town, diddling was what you did once your girlfriend (over sixteen, of course) finally allowed you to put your hand down the front of her knickers.

I suppose the word "fiddling" may have been our equivalent of Poe's word: fiddling the books, fiddling the dole, fiddling the leccy.  That sort of thing.  But even this word has grown salacious arms and legs over the decades.

Whatever term should or should not have been used, what is undisputable here is that when Poe brought a lightness of touch, and deftness of word to his "humorous" stories, they really could be very funny.  And, even more remarkably, retain their charm and ability to entertain readers over the years.  As Diddling assuredly does.

 
I did wonder, as I was reading the tale, why Poe would have chosen such a topic upon which to base an essay (which I suppose this is).  And pondered if the poor chap had recently been the victim of a diddle himself.  Not one of those outlined in the tale, but perhaps the failure of some scamp to pay a promised publication fee for a story, or reprinting royalties or similar?  


1844 tales

THE SPECTACLES

The narrator of this tale is one Napoleon Bonaparte Simpson.  Although he regards himself as being "well made, and possesses what nine tenths of the world would call a handsome face", his eyesight is extremely poor.  Vanity prevents him from wearing spectacles to correct this.

So his friend Talbot and an elderly distant relative (who plans to make Simpson her heir) conspire to construct an elaborate hoax to teach him a lesson.

Another piece of well-constructed hokum from Poe; he deftly painting Simpson as a likeable if willing fool.

Although I am sure most modern readers would have worked out what was going on well before the end, as the two co-conspirators contrive to ensure Simpson only ever sees his paramour either from a distance or in very dim light.

  
So, the moral of this story?  Love at First Sight only works if you can see properly, I suppose.

A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS

Augustus Bedloe likes nothing better, after having taking his daily morphine dose to subdue his "neuralgic attacks", than a long ramble in The Ragged Mountains, southwest of Charlottesville VA.

He returns very late from one such trip and relates to the narrator, and also to his doctor, all he encountered during his day.

Specifically: somehow finding his way to the Indian city of Benares, then joining with the British garrison there in attempting to quell a local insurrection.  Before being apparently killed with a poisoned arrow, then being returned to life, once his spirit has floated back to The Ragged Mountains.  (That, my friends, is a day trip!)

The narrator, not surprisingly, listens with increasing skepticism to the account.....whilst the doctor does so with the increasing horror of recognition.

Poe would frequently include in his short stories a lengthy, oft times impenetrable, discourse on some scientific (or psuedo-scientific) topic related to narrative.  Anyone who has attempted to wade through the first few pages of The Pit and The Pendulum will know what I mean.

Here Poe rambles on about mesmerism, or hypnotism, as I suppose it may be termed these days.

After getting the theory out of the way, what follows is rather confusing yarn - a jumble of impressions and scenes, described at times, as if in compensation, utilising some wonderfully evocative descriptive prose.

We are gradually eased down a path of believing that Bedloe and Dr. Templeton have, through the latter's persistent attempts at hypnosis, built up some form of low grade mutual telepathy.  Using which Bedloe has somehow sub-consciously imbibed the details of a journal the doctor has been writing recording his time in India, half-a-century before.

And that Bedloe had subsequently incorporated aspects of the doctor's memoirs into a morphia withdrawal induced hallucination, whilst lost in the mountains?  Maybe?

I can just about go for that.

But then Poe tosses in a couple more red herrings before the end: the Bedlo/Oldeb name business before, finally, the silly nonsense of the poisonous leech.

Great title though.

THE BALLOON-HOAX

The title The Balloon-Hoax is a retrospective one given to this piece of writing - originally printed as a bona fide news article in the April 13th 1844 edition of The New York Sun newspaper.

The article headline proudly proclaims:

"ASTOUNDING NEWS!

BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK:

THE ATLANTIC CROSSED

IN THREE DAYS!"

In two sections, the article first outlines the properties of the balloon used, and how by the innovative use of an "Archimedean screw for the purpose of propulsion through the air", the ballon could be steered against the wind.

The second section part is a nested journal entry, which describes how the crew (six toffs, and a pair of anonymous seamen) set out from North Wales, initially aiming for Paris.  But a temporary glitch with the propulsion system over The Bristol Channel, put the balloon at the mercy of an easterly storm, and the lads are swept out into the Atlantic.

Not remotely fazed, they simply decide to make for America instead.  

It is a moderately entertaining read this one, with Poe's desire for the hoax to be (at least by some people) believable, probably tempering any temptation to insert much in the way of jeopardy into the journal part of the article.

Indeed, the journey is so devoid of any incidents of note as to have "been without any great apparent danger" and "Crossing the ocean in a balloon is not so difficult a feat after all."

No mention is made of the fact the eight intrepid explorers must have been sorely lacking in food and water throughout the journey.  Bear in mind, until the storm blew them westwards, they were only intending a jaunt across the English Channel.

Once the hoax was uncovered, The New York Sun retracted the story two days later.  And I rather doubt Poe was asked to contribute any further articles to that particular newspaper

THE PREMATURE BURIAL

Afflicted with what he terms "catalepsy" - a condition whereby the victim is prone to falling into temporary coma-like trances pretty much indistinguishable from death - our narrator is perhaps understandably concerned about ending up interred whilst still living.

 
And, horror of horrors, he emerges from a period unconsciousness to find himself in an enclosed wooden structure, with the "strong peculiar odor of moist earth" all around him.

Poe had, of course, utilised the notion of inadvertent premature burial twice already, in his stories Berenice and The Fall of the House of Usher.  But here he gives over a full tale to the business.  Well, sort of.

The actual story of the "premature burial" experienced by the narrator makes up but a modest portion of this tale.
The opening half of the story has Poe relating the details of a number of (?fictitious) recorded instances where individuals were indeed buried alive.  Most, if not all, due to the poor unfortunates suffering from the self-same catalepsy, which did for Berenice and Madeline Usher.

Whilst much of the second half is given over to the paranoid whiny ramblings of the narrator, and the lengths he has taken to prevent himself joining the ranks of early-buried bods previously listed.

  
Not one of Poe's finest.

MESMERIC REVELATION

A doctor (I think we have to assume he is thus) chats to a patient who is under the influence of mesmerism about life, the universe and everything, killing him in the process.

Having read this one through a couple of times, I am still left unsure whether or not Mesmeric Revelation is a satire upon the, then, fashionable pseudoscience of mesmerism.

Poe opens the story by having the mesmerist arrogantly assert:

"Whatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted."

I rather doubt if that was ever the case amongst the scientific community of the mid 19th century.  He then goes on to give his opinion that all doubters are dickheads.  (I paraphrase, here).

The reader is then treated to a rambling, shambling dialogue between the mesmerist and one of his patients (M. Van Kirk); the latter in a mesmeric sleep at the time.  The pair talk such impenetrable psychobabble, the reader is soon thinking: surely, surely, surely, this must be the impish Poe satirising somebody.

And yet, I cannot help but feel Poe felt there to be something of substance in the practice, for him to have used mesmerism as a device in three of his tales:  this one, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains and the yet to be published Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.

THE OBLONG BOX

The narrator here is off on a sea voyage from Charleston to New York on the passenger ship Independence.

He is delighted to note a friend is also travelling: Cornelius Wyatt, along with his wife and his two sisters.  But is a touch puzzled as to why Wyatt has paid for three staterooms for his party, one of which has no passenger allocated.

The narrator is equally intrigued to note Wyatt has brought on board a large wooden box, which he has chosen to have stored in his own stateroom, rather than in the empty third one.

Surely a job for Inspector Clouseau.

This surely must be Poe's satire on that very genre he helped to create: The Detective Story.  For here we have an earnest, if rather dopey, young man setting out to solve a mystery with a wealth of clues at his disposal.  Pretty much all of which he completely and utterly misreads, leading himself totally Up the Garden Path, as we say.

For I am sure, even the least attentive of readers would not have failed to divine the most likely contents of a wooden box "six feet in length by two and a half in breadth" and emitting "a strong, disagreeable, and.....a peculiarly disgusting odor".

THE ANGEL OF THE ODD

This one opens with our narrator replete following a large meal, and enjoying a post-prandial read of his newspaper in the company of "some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit, and liqueur".

Encountering a most unlikely article in his newspaper, he rants to nobody in particular: "This thing.....is a contemptible falsehood—a poor hoax."

At which point a bizarre-looking creature appears in the apartment; his body an amalgam of wine bottles and rum kegs with a funnel on his head a la Wizard of Oz's tin man.  He introduces himself as The Angel of The Odd, and he goes on to claim he is responsible for all those "odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic".

The narrator treats the interloper with contempt, so is taught a lesson.

At first glance the moral with this tale would appear to be something along the lines of: Do not disregard reports of unlikely events, just because you feel there is something odd about them.

But, with so many references to alcohol throughout the tale - not to mention the kegs and bottles which make up the angel's anatomy - I cannot help but feel this is more of a warning against the perils of the demon drink.  For there is a suggestion that the whole business, including the appearance of the Angel, had been naught but a Lafitte-induced dream. 

Of course Poe himself, by all accounts, was heavily drinking at this point in his life, in response, it has been suggested, to the stress of dealing with his wife Virginia's deteriorating health.

THOU ART THE MAN

Mr Barnabas Shuttleworthy is one of the wealthiest and most respectable citizens of the borough of Rattle.  His best buddy is one Charley Goodfellow, with whom he spends most evenings downing copious amounts of the finest red wine.

One weekend Shuttleworthy fails to return from a trip to a nearby town, his horse wandering home alone muddy and sporting a bullet wound.

A search (eventually) initiated and led by Goodfellow,  unearths a number of clues which unequivocally point to the missing man's feckless nephew Pennifeather as having done away with the old man in order to inherit his fortune.

Sounds like a job for....(oh, stop this!)

Another of Poe's whodunnits, this one solved not by C. August Dupin using ratiocination, but by the narrator with the aid of a whalebone and his ventriloquism skills.  Although the chap was undoubtedly aided in his investigations in that there were only two other living cast members: smooth and slimy Mr. Goodfellow, and dim and dopey Mr. Pennifeather.

Generally regarded as one of Poe's lesser efforts, I found I rather liked this one.  There was no rambling prologue to wade through, and the cast of three (four, if you count the narrator) made for an easily digestible read.  I enjoyed the unique, and rather gross, method employed to obtain the confession from murderer.  Although quite why Poe had the latter keel over dead immediately afterwards, I have no idea.

THE LITERARY LIFE OF THINGUM BOB, ESQ.

The esteemed and widely-respected editor Thingum Bob relates his rise to fame.  From being castigated for attempting to pass cut and paste jobs of classical verse as his own to, somehow, being lauded as a literary genius for his two-line ode to the hair product Oil-of-Bob.

A pretty vicious diatribe upon the vagaries and hypocrisies of the publishing industry, as perceived by a clearly very disgruntled Poe.  The text, however, contains far too many 1840s in-jokes and caricatures of long dead publishers and publications for the tale to hold the interest of the modern day reader.

Indeed, by the point where I reached the reviews of Thingum Bob's "poem" quoted directly from four different periodicals, I really struggled to stay awake, and I found I really did not care how the thing finished.

THE PURLOINED LETTER

A female member of the French royal family has been up to some naughty shenanigans, so when (what we are led to believe is) a love letter is stolen from her boudoir, she naturally is desperate to have it returned.  The gendarmerie know who took it: "the Minister D--, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man".

But searches of both the thief's person and his apartments draw a blank.

So, the prefecture of the Paris Police turns to C. August Dupin for guidance.  The latter simply advises the prefecture to search the Minister's abode once more.

This was Poe's third and final C. August Dupin story, and whilst it was no Rue Morgue, it at least represented an improvement on Marie Roget.  

Unfortunately it acutely suffers from Poe's tendency to oblique verbosity.  Whilst I am sure most modern, and 1840s readers alike, would have welcomed an insight into how Dupin came to his conclusion that the letter must be being hidden in plain sight.  Poe has Dupin dribble on about his thought process on the matter for paragraph after dreary paragraph.  With a typically pretentious quote in French tagged onto the end of the yarn to further annoy the reader.
   
Rarely, I am sure has there been a short story written which would have benefitted more from the ministrations of a ruthless and impartial editor. 

Interestingly (to me anyway), The Purloined Letter utilises the closest representation of the format many of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' stories would take.  In that a visitor to Baker Street would arrive with a seemingly intractable problem, which the detective would solve mainly using logic from the comfort of his armchair, but also with the aid of some judicious, but nevertheless vital, piece of fieldwork.  

Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest Conan Doyles' first Sherlock Homes story A Scandal in Bohemia, to be a blatant plagiarism of The Purloined letter.  Properly edited.

1845 tales

I am not going to review it here, but it is perhaps worth recording that in January 1845 Poe had published, in the Evening Mirror, his best known work The Raven.  It made him little money, but the poem did bring a moderate amount of fame.  

THE THOUSAND-AND-SECOND TALE OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

(I will assume readers are familiar with the story of Scheherazade, and how she postponed her imminent execution by telling her husband, the King Sharyar, a series of gripping fantasy stories for 1,oo1 nights.)

In this sequel, having, probably correctly, assumed the King has forgotten his vow to take a new queen every day, and to execute her on the morrow, Scheherazade is persuaded by her sister to tell one more story: that of Sinbad's Eighth Voyage.

Bad move. 

Fairly dull stuff here.  It almost feels like an Edward Lear children's story at times, as Poe has Sinbad relate the many weird and fantastical places he visited on his eighth voyage.  

It gradually dawns upon the reader that a number of these encounters house a grain of truth at their core: the massive flock of birds which flew overhead reflecting those passenger pigeon clouds millions strong which once darkened the skies of North America.  And those islands constructed by caterpillar-like creatures, clearly referring to coral reefs built up by polyps.

And so on.

The King, of course, chooses to believe none of these "true" stories, and sends Scheherazade to a date with the executioner.

SOME WORDS WITH A MUMMY

Basking in the afterglow of a hefty supper of Brown Stout and Welsh rabbit (rarebit, I assume), our narrator has just dropped off when he is awoken by a knocking at the door.  His old friend Dr. Ponnonner has apparently finally obtained permission to unwrap and dissect an ancient Egyptian mummy, obtained by the local museum some years ago.

The great unveiling is going to take place at the doctor's house in the company of a few friends, with the cutting-up scheduled to take place on the dining-table.

Another of Poe's funnies this one with sly digs at Calvinism, mesmerism and phrenology.  And, I suppose, the oft-held view that the current era represents the pinnacle of civilisation and scientific advancement.

Once the mummy revives with a swift dose of electricity from the "Voltaic pile", he proves to be a rather chatty individual indeed.  And the conversation develops into a bit of a Pythonesque What-Did-The-Egyptians-Ever-Do-For-Us? tit-for-tat, as the mummy effortlessly rebuffs all the boasts from the assembled group regarding modern achievements.

Well, nearly all.

I did enjoy this one, and I found I was really keen to learn what the mummy had to say for itself.  But I rather doubt that I will be returning to it terribly often.

THE POWER OF WORDS

A conversation between a recent arrival in heaven Oinos, and an angel Agathos, about something or other:  

"It is indeed demonstrable that every such impulse given the air, must, in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe;—and the being of infinite understanding—the being whom we have imagined—might trace the remote undulations of the impulse—trace them upward and onward in their influences upon all particles of an matter—upward and onward for ever in their modifications of old forms."

If this is the sort of conversation which awaits me in heaven, count me out.  Were I Oinos here, I think I could quite happily, nay joyously, spend the whole of eternity punching Agathos in the face.

Very hard.


THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE

A man succeeds in committing what appears to be the perfect murder, with the use of a poisonous candle, inheriting a fortune as a consequence.  He enjoys five years of suspicion-free affluence, before his conscience starts to chat to him.

A vastly inferior re-write of The Tell-Tale Heart this one, with Poe padding things out by having the murderer/narrator expounding, not upon why he committed the crime, but why he felt compelled to confess some five years after the event.  A period during which, it should be pointed out, he was never under any suspicion.

Poe here may be attempting to explain away some of his own more self-destructive actions, both to himself and his readers, I suppose.  The Longfellow Feud was in full spate at this time, but I rather doubt this weak tale would have rebuilt any bridges. 


THE SYSTEM OF DOCTOR TARR AND PROFESSOR FETHER

A chap is enjoying a tour on horseback around southern France when he decides, as you do, to drop into a nearby private lunatic asylum for an educational visit.

Being granted access is not a problem, for his companion for the day is acquainted with the Superintendent Maillard, and so effects an introduction.  The superintendent gives his guest a tour of the establishment, during which the latter is surprised to learn Maillard has dispensed with the then fashionable "Soothing" approach to treatment of the inmates, for something altogether more radical.

I am not quite sue who Poe is poking fun at here - perhaps no-one in particular, and has just written a funny story to be read as such.

The main element of humour are the naive observations at the dinner table by the well-written nameless clot of a narrator/traveller who only, finally, realises the lunatics have truly taken over the asylum long, long after any reader will have.

  
An enjoyable romp nevertheless, although suffering, as many of Poe's short stories do, from a rather too-neat gathering up loose-ends in the plot.

A far better ending to the story, I feel anyway, would have been for the narrator to have been relating his yarn from a padded cell.  He having been scooped up with all of the rest of the patients, once the authorities regained control of the place.  

With no-one believing he was just visiting.  :-)

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR

In the interests of science, the terminally ill M. Ernest Valdemar has agreed to be mesmerised (hypnotised) at the moment of death.  Afterwards, although to all intents and purposes deceased, Valdemar remains able to communicate, even informing those conducting the experiment “I am dead”.  

He is maintained in his mesmerised state for almost seven months, before an attempt to wake the patient results in a decidedly messy and unexpected conclusion.

Poe loved a hoax – perhaps his most celebrated example was his epic adventure yarn The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfall.  “Valdemar”, with its use of the word facts in the title and the authoritative tone to the opening paragraph, almost purports to be an actual scientific report.  Indeed Poe published the tale in The American Review - a periodical covering “Politics, Literature, Art and Science” giving no indication that it was a work of fiction.

  
An early example of the body-horror genre and, whilst the science may not stand up in these more sophisticated times, the final line still packs a punch.

1846 tales

THE SPHYNX

With New York in the grip of a cholera outbreak, our narrator accepts an invite from a relative to spend a few weeks in the country with him.  But, being a bit of a skittish hypochondriac, he still believes the disease is out to get him.

One evening he is shocked to witness, through an open window, a huge monstrous creature crawling down a nearby mountainside.  Which he takes as an omen of his own imminent demise.

A bit of good clean family entertainment here, as we all (including his host) get to poke fun at the silly hen-like narrator.  He, of course, rather like Father Dougal McGuire, having become confused over the complicated business of Small versus Far Away.

Although exactly what tiny insect the narrator has succeeded in transposing onto the local scenery, I am not quite sure.  Poe describes it as a member of "the genus Sphinx, of the family Crepuscularia of the order Lepidoptera, of the class of Insecta", clearly suggesting a Death's Head Hawk Moth.

But such moths are whoppers, and certainly not a "sixteenth of an inch in its extreme length", as described in the tale.  And even if it were that small, there is no way the narrator's eye could keep such a tiny creature and a mountain in focus at the same time.

THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge."  

These are the opening words of Montresor, the narrator, and gain revenge he most surely does.

Another of Poe's best-known stories and, in my opinion, his best.  For there is barely a word wasted in this short, sharp shock of a tale of revenge and madness.  Made all the more delicious by the fact <SPOILER ALERT> the clearly bonkers Montresor, quite literally, gets away with murder.

An all too infrequent reminder to us all, that evil often can and does prevail.

1847

THE DOMAIN OF ARNHEIM

The self-same incredibly wealthy Mr. Ellison from Poe's earlier tale The Landscape Garden has decided to travel the world (inviting the narrator to join him) in order to discover "a landscape whose combined vastness and definitiveness (has) a nature which is not God, nor an emanation from God, but which still is nature in the sense of the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God."

When I first started reading this one, I thought we were going to be presented with some sort of further adventures of the Mr. Ellison from Poe's earlier tale The Landscape Garden.  But I (relatively) promptly realised this particular yarn was a re-write of the older one.

Well perhaps a re-write is not the most appropriate term, for what Poe has done is to take the bulk of the original tale and to bolt on a description of a lengthy river journey to a place called Arnheim - which Ellison has decided is the only place on Earth which meets his criteria outlined above.

The narrator's description of the river trip represents some of Poe's most florid and evocative depiction of nature, and is a joy to read.  

Although, it has to be said, after such a build-up, the details of The Domain of Arnheim itself comes, perhaps inevitably, as a bit of an anti-climax.  Poe mostly relying on a florist's shopping list growing amongst architecture created by Fairies and Gnomes, in an attempt to impress us all.


1849

MELONTA TAUTA

What we have here is another MS found in a bottle, this one apparently having been written in the year 2848 by a woman known only by the name of Pundita.

The manuscript takes the form of a series of letters written to a friend, whilst a bored Pundita is taking a long-distance journey in a balloon.  The letters are crammed into a bottle and tossed into the sea when it becomes apparent the balloon is about to crash.

Much of the text of the letters consist of Perdita utterly misunderstanding snippets from history. 

So, what is Poe saying with this one?  The passage of time leads to the distortion, or at the very least, the misinterpretation of the past?  And that all the silliness spouted as historical facts by Pundita, we today could be equally arrogantly misinterpreting what we currently accept as historical facts from two thousand years ago?

I am sure there is a lot more than Poe just making that clumsy assertion, for 1840s US politician Zachary Taylor (soon to be elected President) gets a mention, as does (the long dead) British military General Lord Cornwallis.

What I am markedly less sure about is whether the MS in the bottle was found in 2848, or in 1848 and there has been some time-slip element to the narrative.  If the latter, this must surely be one of the first published works to feature time travel - even if it just a bottle which has wandered back to the past. 

The title Mellonta Tauta, which vaguely translates from the Greek as Future Life, does not really help with any of the above.

HOP-FROG

Hop-Frog is the name cruelly given to the crippled, dwarf jester of the King's court.  Hop-Frog's sole friend is another of the court entertainers, the petite dancer Trippetta.  

The King is a corpulent drunkard, and one day he throws a goblet of wine into Trippetta's face, to the delight of his seven equally uncouth and rotund ministers.

Enraged, Hop-Frog decides it is time to teach these apes some manners once and for all.

Another perfectly constructed yarn by Poe, with the reader cheering on the murderer (for like Montressor, a murderer Hop-Frog truly was), as he carries out his revenge and successfully effects his escape.   

Various sites on the internet will have us believe the story is in some way semi-autobiographical, with Poe wishfully via print immolating a group of literary folks who have somehow irked him.  But who cares?  The tale more than stands up alone, without anyone attempting to layer some vacuous inner-meaning onto it.


VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY

A chap called Von Kempelen has made his local police suspicious by purchasing a large property in his home town of Bremen, Germany without being willing to state where he obtained the funding.  Suspecting he has been counterfeiting notes, the police assiduously keep a track on his movements, eventually tracing him to a small room in the poor part of town.

Upon searching the premises, the police find no evidence of counterfeit activity, but rather a collection of scientific apparatus......and a large trunk filled with what they take to be brass.     

It is not.  Von Kempelen has discovered a process of turning lead into gold.

Another of Poe's hoaxes, or attempted hoax, this one published in The Flag of Our Union as news with no byline.  

Unfortunately, so much of the article is typical Poe flannel that I cannot imagine many of the readers of The Flag of Our Union, a rather low-brow publication by all accounts, would have ploughed on through to the moderately interesting part.

The tale seems to be punting the message, that gold has no intrinsic worth, and it is only it's rarity which confers value upon it.  A hardly original or earth-shattering notion.  Written and published during the peak of the California Gold Rush, Poe may have been offering up a warning to those caught up in the frenzy that the more gold you find, the less valuable it becomes.

The Von Kempelen of the title may or not refer to Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804), an Hungarian author and inventor.  Whilst there is no record of this chap ever indulging in alchemy, Wolfie had been involved in a hoax of his own - a chess playing "machine".  So perhaps Poe chose the name as a clue to his more alert readers, that what they were reading was all fantasy.


X-ING A PARAGRAB

The impressively named Mr. Touch-and-go Bullet-head has headed west to the equally impressively named town of Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis, with the intention of setting up a newspaper (The Tea-Pot) there.

Upon arriving, he is dismayed to discover there is already a well-established publication (The Gazette) in town.

So begins a war, first of words, then of letters between the two respective editors.

Whilst acknowledging this one is probably a vicious stab at one of Poe's literary or publishing rivals, it is written is such a delightful manner it is best enjoyed for what it is: a very funny tale of revenge.

Poe overcooks the X joke in the final few lines, I feel, but I can forgive him that.


LANDOR'S COTTAGE

Out on a walking tour "through one or two of the river counties of New York" along with his dog Ponto, our narrator gets lost.  Heading on up a small track he arrives at beautiful valley wherein he finds a small house.

Entering the dwelling, the narrator is met with by a young woman, Annie, and the owner of the house; one Mr. Landor. 

A Descriptive Essay, I suppose this one would be called.  Or at least that was how we were taught at school.  "Imagine yourself in a certain place anywhere, and just describe what you see", our teacher would say.  Or words to that effect.

So, there is no plot or narrative as such with this one, just Poe carrying on from The Domain of Arnheim flexing his not inconsiderable powers of descriptive prose.  As a consequence I found I enjoyed the story, such as it is, second time around once I realised nothing was going to happen.

I did wonder if the Landor of the title referred to the English poet Walter Savage Landor, but I rather think Poe probably had someone closer to home in mind.  The object of Poe's affections around the time of writing was one Annie Richmond.

This was the final piece of writing Poe had published during his lifetime, it appearing in The Flag of Our Union periodical on June 9th 1849, four months before his death.

  

On October 3rd 1849, Poe was found on a Baltimore street incoherent and greatly distressed.  He was taken to Washington Medical College in the town, where he died four days later, never being lucid enough to explain clearly what had happened to him.  There is a whole Wiki page on his death, outlining myriad theories and possible explanations, so I not going shove in my penny's worth.

He was 49 years old.

Postscript (Poescript?)

Edgar Allan Poe was nothing if not a prolific writer, and there is a significant amount of published work which I have chosen not to include.

Most significantly, of course, is his poetry.  He having published three books of his collected poems: Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) and Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831).  I do enjoy a number of Poe's poems, but my impressions on them just did not seem to sit well here.

There are reviews of other authors' books and essays on various topics (The Philosophy of Furniture (1840), for example) which I also do not really feel belong here.  Another essay I have not reviewed is The Philosophy of Composition (1846), in which Poe deconstructs his writing of The Raven, and is well worth seeking out.

Finally - Poe's one stab as a playwright: the uncompleted Politian.  I did start to read this, but swiftly came to the conclusion Life is Too Short.