Poe in Norfolk in September

In life, no one claimed him. In death, everyone claims him.

Baltimore claims him. Richmond claims him. The University of Virginia claims him, even though he spent a year there. They claim his letters, his poetry, his prose and his soul. They claim the houses and haunts of his wandering and aimless spirit.

But Edgar Allan Poe's soul isn't to be claimed. Nor is his spirit. Even Poe, a literary and genetic orphan, couldn't claim his soul, and he chased not only his soul and his spirit but also the souls and spirits of women most of his life.

Some say he was mad, as in insane. Others says he was a mad genius. To say mad and genius in the same breath and the same sentence comforts the critics and the Poe partisans.

Yet I doubt if Poe would have cared much for the diagnosis. I say this with hindsight and not foresight, so in hindsight, I could be wrong. But in foresight no one can prove otherwise.

I can't say much about the man, but I can say a lot about his prose and poetry, which followed me through the dark alleys of my mind, into the graveyards of morbidity and a sense of my own mortality and haunted my imagination as a child and a teenager.

Who can forget the beginning of The Raven: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary...”

But I grew up and put Poe aside. But then, as an old man, I saw the dark alleys and the graveyards and the haunting for what they were not to me but what they might have meant to Poe. For Poe wrote of his imagination and his imagination was the touchstone of his poetry and his prose.

“Imagination does not breed insanity,” according to GK Chesterton. “Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do.”

I agree with Chesterton. The poets I know are not mad but they are maddening to deal with sometimes. Chess players, on the other hand, are lost in the logic of reason and hence they lose their sanity because reason and logic are trapped by absolutes within absolutes.

Chesterton said Poe really was morbid, not because he was poetical but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem.

Norfolk can't claim Poe. But Norfolk can claim his presence.

In September, 1849, a month before he died in a hospital in Baltimore, Poe delivered one of his last public readings in Norfolk.

Some documents claim he delivered his essay “The Poetic Principle” Sept 16 of that fateful year. Other documents claim it was Sept. 14. It is said he delivered said lecture at the original site of Norfolk Academy at 420 Bank Street in downtown Norfolk.

But everyone agrees that Poe was in Norfolk in September and that he stayed at the Hygeia Hotel at Fort Monroe and spoke in Norfolk.

Apropos of Poe, he “gave a private reading for a few female admirers on the Hygeia’s veranda” during his stay.