Reach a certain age, and Edgar Allan Poe is there, ominously waiting for your attention in the pages of a textbook.
Hawoon Lee found him. The South Korean sixth grader waved his arms, conjuring the writer as he stood with happy parents at his literary hero’s second grave in Baltimore.
“He joined the Army in 1827,” Lee recited, “and he died in 1849.”
Poe was an American original. An archetype whose face, swollen with a lifetime of beatdowns, grimaces eternally from his famous black-and-white portrait to launch a thousand memes.
The tragic artist. The lovelorn poet. The suffering waif who met his mysterious end in Baltimore on Oct. 7, 176 years ago.
Poe would have loathed and loved what Baltimore has done with him.
“I have great faith in fools,” he wrote in 1844. “My friends call it self-confidence.”
He is the literary uncle of the Ravens’ midnight dreary, and the telltale heart of Poppleton, a neighborhood as beleaguered today as when he lived there with his sickly 10-year-old cousin, soon to be his sickly 13-year-old bride.
In Maryland’s largest city, Poe is the stuff of stage productions and street festivals, wreath layings and end zone dances. He is the rubber duck “Edgar Mallard Poe.”
“Deep into that darkness peering,” he wrote in the NFL team’s namesake poem, “long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
Reach a certain age, and realize — let’s be honest — few people read Poe anymore. Fewer still probably like him.
You have to wonder if all this Poe-ishness is real, or just another thing to sell Baltimore.
“It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular,” he wrote, “to be richest when most superficial.”
Even scholars, the ones who explore the hidden ways that his ideas about brevity and unity of thought instruct this 1,000-word essay, admit Poe is kind of a pill.
“He is hard to read,” said Amy Branam Armiento, an English professor at Frostburg State University who has written three books on Poe.
But his brevity — “The Raven” is a mere 1,177 words stretched across 18 short stanzas, each only six lines long — makes him perfect for modern America.
His ability to say less suits our shrunken imaginations, and journalists, screenwriters and tween aesthetes everywhere know to copy a good idea when they see one.
“So he ends up in pop culture and so many different ways through art,” Armiento said.
Baltimore was important to the living Poe.
It was the place where the Boston-born orphan found a family, however broken, and took his first steps toward becoming the writer forced on middle school students.
“That Poe family is super important to stabilizing his life,” Armiento said. ”When he ends up in Baltimore, and he’s finally in the household with his Aunt Mariah, his cousin, who will later be his wife, Virginia, and his grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, that creates a stability for him to begin his writing career.”
The dead Poe is important to Baltimore.
Art Modell, the late sports impresario who spirited his NFL franchise from Cleveland so would-be fans could pick a new name, wasn’t into reading. But he recognized clever branding.
“The pride and the presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries,” he said.
A good trick is one worth repeating, and the team celebrates “The Raven.” But to Poe nation, the team is absent from their dream within a dream.
“The Ravens are doing nothing for Poe in Baltimore,” said Alex Zavistovich, founder of the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre.
He’ll stage a reading of the writer’s works on Monday, and perform “A Christmas Carol” in December, the ghost story reimagined as if written by Poe instead of Charles Dickens.
The Poe House and Museum has a $10 million plan to expand its sliver of the writer’s life, the truncated duplex where he germinated the idea of being his own greatest creation for three years, into a community and conference center.
Poe Homes, the boarded Southwest Baltimore neighborhood rotting around the museum, is still searching for a new start.
Though the Ravens are losing, far more traffic headed to the game Sunday against the Texans than Poe Fest International at the museum.
“Game day always hurts us,” said Kurt Bragunier, who recently sold his tavern named for Poe’s work, Annabel Lee.
Hundreds of people walked around dressed as Poe or at least in Poe-black, read Poe or at least his words on banners and mooned for Poe or at least his face on t-shirts.
Is this where Poe lives in Baltimore?
“It’s real,” said Bragunier, handing over two hot dogs and an order of duck fat fries.
Long gone are the men who entered Westminster Burying Ground to leave a bottle of Martell and a rose at Poe’s grave. Instead, the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore laid a wreath Sunday after its 103rd lecture.
Jeffrey A. Savoye told the 25 people inside Westminster Hall that building Poe’s gravestone and moving him from an unmarked grave earned his poetry and stories their first widespread public attention.
“How could this not be real if three generations of my family are involved?” said Marcus Alexander Rose, son and grandson of society presidents, as he laid a bouquet on the stones.
Poe was the first American to make a living, however meager, from his writing.
At a certain age, you realize the business of Poe may be the best tribute, squeezing his imagination for just a little more attention and a bit more profit.
“I became insane,” he wrote, “with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
And so, festivities surrounding his death concluded for another year, Poe waits for the next generation of impressionable students ready to learn that the world is a trail of disappointments illuminated by a man who died in Baltimore a long time ago.
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore!’”
At least until the next kickoff.
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