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Home at Last
Which metropolis may claim the peripatetic Poe?
by Shawn Macomber
9/19/2009 12:01:00 AM, Volume 015, Issue 02
Philadelphia
What would Charles Baudelaire have made of the scene at the Free Library of Philadelphia one frigid evening last winter, the building's lower-level auditorium filled to capacity for a boisterous debate among representatives of three American cities--Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia--over which should lay claim to the legacy, if not the bones, of Edgar Allan Poe?
After all, in an overwrought 1859 essay, the French poet and critic wailed that "Poe and his country were not on the same level." Indeed,
Baudelaire inferred that, for Poe, "the United States was nothing more than a vast prison through which he wandered with the feverish unrest of one who was born to breathe the air of a purer world," a nation filled with "sardonic and superior" ninnies overly obsessed with Poe's "erratic and heteroclite existence" and "the alcohol on his breath that could have been lit with a candle."
Yet here, in Poe's bicentennial year, several hundred Americans passionately joined a tussle over the deceased author as if he were a newly single cheerleader a week before prom--cheering some arguments, serving up catcalls at others, reciting stanzas of "The Raven" en masse with little prompting. There have been tough words of late from living critics: Algis Valiunas, in a recent Commentary essay entitled "No to Poe," wrote that while the "maniacal frivolity" of his work may "take on a cast of deliquescent solemnity," it is "by no means serious." But surely, the Great Poe Debate of 2009, as it was dubbed, would chasten the ...
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