Edgar Allan Poe is finally getting the send-off he always deserved - from a city that has spent decades claiming him as one of its own.
True, he's spent more than a century and a half buried in the hallowed grounds surrounding Baltimore's Westminster Hall. It's also true that Baltimore isn't the only city celebrating Poe, in this bicentennial of his birth on Jan. 19, 1809. At least four other East Coast cities - Richmond, Va., Philadelphia, New York and Boston - have legitimate claims to Poe's legacy. The five cities have been squabbling for years and have spent the past year exploiting their connections to the early master of the horror and mystery genres.
But Baltimore has something that none of the rest of them has. And over the coming week, his fans here are going to flaunt it for all its worth - in ways the macabre Mr. Poe would doubtless appreciate.
"We have the body!" says Poe fan Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No one else can say that."
Which explains why Baltimore will be holding a second wake, funeral procession and funeral for the long-dead Poe, 160 years after the first. On an early October day in 1849, Poe was found walking the streets of the city, bedraggled, incoherent, possibly beaten up, dressed in clothes that didn't belong to him. He died four days later at Washington College Hospital (later Church Home & Hospital, closed in 2000) and was buried at Westminster the next day, after a sparsely attended three-minute service. His death warranted a paltry four-sentence obituary in The Sun.
"This is Baltimore's chance," says Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, where a Wednesday afternoon and evening viewing of the famed poet and author's "body" will begin a five-day commemoration of both his mysterious death on Oct. 7, 1849, and the quiet, almost secretive funeral services that followed. "This is what I've been working for, to honor Poe and to say, 'Thanks.' It's the least I could do."
But there's more to the Poe-Baltimore connection than his death. His family was firmly rooted in Baltimore, where his grandfather fought in the Revolution and his grandmother made trousers for Lafayette's troops. He met his cousin (and future wife), Virginia, in Baltimore. He became a paid writer for the first time here, winning a literary prize for one of his early short stories.
