Fleabag’s Ben Freeman ’10 as Poe

It’s official. After two centuries of indifference and occasional irritation, Boston has embraced America’s literary master of the macabre: native son Edgar Allan Poe, born in a house in the city’s theater district in the winter of 1809.

On January 15, a night of tomb-like chill four days shy of Poe’s 200th birthday, more than 160 people crammed into the Devlin 008 lecture hall to hear Boston’s poet laureate, Sam Cornish, deliver Mayor Thomas Menino’s proclamation. “It is time to forgive any little quarrel Edgar Allan Poe may have had with the City of Boston,” Cornish intoned, “and to forget that he ever called us ‘Frogpondians’ [and] said that our hotels were poor and our poetry ‘not so good.’” January 2009 was declared Edgar Allan Poe Appreciation Month, and the intersection of Charles and Boylston streets named Edgar Allan Poe Square.

The city’s tribute owed largely to the efforts of English professor Paul Lewis, who teaches the undergraduate seminar “Poe and the Gothic.” Lewis and English doctoral student Katherine Kim spearheaded a bicentennial committee that, with a dozen Boston College departments, mounted a display of Poe memorabilia in O’Neill Library, screened the biopic The Last Days of the Raven, and assembled the night’s guest lecturers and entertainment.

With the country on the brink of “a pit of economic distress” and menaced by “a pendulum of economic trouble,” said Lewis in his welcoming remarks, who better to turn to than Poe? He knew how to season terror with humor. He was a deft critic of the established literary world and the world at large. And as the father of the psychological thriller and inventor of the modern detective story, he was, said Lewis, a “foundational figure” in popular culture.

Following Lewis, Scott Peeples, a Poe scholar from the College of Charleston, South Carolina, noted that Poe’s associations with Boston were significant, if unhappy. Poe lived in Boston briefly as a baby; his mother was a touring actor, and he traveled with her to Richmond, Virginia, where she died when he was two. In 1827, Poe quarreled with his adoptive family (the Allans), and headed for Boston. He enlisted in the Army and was stationed on nearby Castle Island for seven months, during which time he published his first collection of poems, signed “By a Bostonian.” But as Peebles pointed out, by the 1840s, Poe’s attachment to the area had waned. In lectures and essays, he pilloried the local transcendentalists, and in November 1848, he attempted suicide in a Boston hotel. Had he succeeded, mused Peeples, might New England, rather than Baltimore, have had a football team called the Ravens?

As it was, Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, after being found unconscious at a tavern wearing someone else’s clothes. His death at age 40—variously attributed to heart disease, epilepsy, robbery, even rabies—was the subject of a talk by author Matthew Pearl (The Poe Shadow, 2006). Pearl has made a study of Poe’s numerous obituaries, which were generally erroneous, and he traced the lurid reputation they engendered.

Poetry and doleful music followed, performed by students whose T-shirts featured Poe in a BC T-shirt with a smiling eagle. Madeline McSherry ’11 recited “Annabel Lee” and Jeanne Clifton ’09 declaimed “A Dream within a Dream” (“amid the roar of a surf-tormented
shore . . .”). Megan Grandmont ’10 sang “Ever with Thee,” Virgina Clemm Poe’s 1846 poem to her husband, set to a melancholy tune from the 2007 chamber musical Edgar.

The mood swung as the improv group My Mother’s Fleabag presented “Edgar Allan Poe: Resident Assistant,” written by Dan Esposito ’10 and Michael Wolf ’12. Asked how to handle a messy roommate, “Ed” advised, “three righteous blows” to the head with a candlestick.

The program ended with a cheerfully lugubrious group recitation of the final stanza of “The Raven” (“still is sitting, still is sitting . . .”), led by John Mahoney, English professor emeritus, and a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday,” after which everyone trooped upstairs to share a cake in the shape of a coffin.

Jane Whitehead is a Boston area writer.

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