If, until recently, little has been written about Poe and place, we can probably blame Poe himself: he never made it easy to connect the dots between his lived experience and the places he wrote about. Poe fabricated stories of foreign adventure in Greece and Russia in biographical sketches, covering up the less glamorous reality of serving in the US Army in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Virginia. 1 Then there is the sense of placelessness that characterizes his most famous tales; where exactly is the House of Usher? In what “kingdom by what sea” did Annabel Lee perish? What city’s police officers hear the shrieking confession of the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and what kind of accent do we hear when we listen to him calmly tell us the whole story? The three Dupin tales foreground their Parisian setting, but the author of those tales never set foot in France; the same is true of Venice, the setting for “The Assignation,” and Toledo, where “The Pit and the Pendulum” takes place. When Poe sets stories in locations where he did spend time, he exhibits little sensitivity to place beyond what he might just as well have gleaned from other writers. He was many years removed from his boyhood sojourn in suburban London when he wrote “The Man of the Crowd,” and the same can be said of his writing “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and “The Gold-Bug” long after his time in Charlottesville, VA, and Sullivan’s Island, SC. If I were not writing an essay for a volume entitled Poe and Place, I might be tempted to think that “place” didn’t really matter to Poe.
In fact, it was the critical consensus through the mid-twentieth century that Poe’s domain was a land of dreams, with only coincidental resemblance to earthly locales. “There is no place,” wrote W. H. Auden in an introduction to a 1950 edition of Poe, “in any of [his stories] for the human individual as he actually exists in space and time.” 2 In his lecture “The House of Poe,” Richard Wilbur would go one better, arguing that Poe “sees the poetic soul as at war with the mundane physical world; and that warfare is Poe’s fundamental subject.” 3 As late as 1988, Galway Kinnell, in an interview for the Voices and Visions film devoted to Walt Whitman, declared that Poe (in contrast to Whitman) “was absolutely blind…Poe’s poetry was the poetry of a blind man, a man who was imagining some realm somewhere else.” He is followed in the film by Allen Ginsberg, who adds that Poe was “a philosophical dreamer who had phantoms that he described in detail.” 4
The New Historicism of the 1980s and 1990s would largely dismantle the traditional view of Poe the blind dreamer, replacing it with a fully sighted writer enmeshed in American culture and politics. And yet, even as his antebellum “American face” became easier to discern, the Poe of late twentieth-century scholarship remained strangely unattached to the more specific places on the map of his life. There have been exceptions, of course, including essays by Elise Lemire on “Rue Morgue” and “amalgamation discourses” in 1830s Philadelphia, J. Gerald Kennedy on Poe, Frederick Douglass, and Baltimore in the early 1830s, and David Leverenz on Poe and Gentry Virginia. But even these outstanding examples demonstrate how hard it is to pin Poe down to a place: Lemire reads a story set in Paris through what Poe would have experienced in Philadelphia; Kennedy explores Poe’s and Douglass’s Baltimore partly to set up a reading of Pym, which takes place on Nantucket, the high seas, and the mysterious island of Tsalal; and the stories Leverenz discusses in relation to Poe’s Virginia upbringing are not set in Virginia or even in the American South. 5
Yet, as of this writing, interest in Poe and place is clearly on the rise, inspired not only by the “spatial turn” in literary studies but also by the 2009 bicentennial of Poe’s birth, which prompted various cities to stake their claims to Poe’s literary and, at one point, literal remains. In the run-up to the bicentennial, literary historian Edward Pettit jokingly (I think) urged fellow Philadelphians to “hop in our cars, drive down I-95 and appropriate a body from a certain Baltimore cemetery.” 6 “Philadelphia can keep its broken bell and its cheese steak, but Poe’s body isn’t going anywhere,” countered Jeff Jerome, then curator of the Baltimore Poe House. The New York Times article reporting on the controversy observed that “The one city that probably will never claim Poe is Boston.” 7 And yet, on January 13, 2009, Paul Lewis, leading a crusade for Boston to honor Poe publicly, joined Pettit and Jerome in the “Great Poe Debate” over which city was truly Poe’s home. 8 Lewis’s efforts resulted in a mayoral proclamation, a Poe exhibit at the Boston Public Library, a “Poe’s Boston” walking tour, and, finally, Stefanie Rocknak’s life-sized Poe statue at Boylston and Charles Streets. (See Chapter 2 for a full account of the statue selection, installation, and celebration; also see Fig. 2.1 “Poe Returning to Boston,” bronze, by Stefanie Rocknak.) The premise, and much of the rhetoric, of the Great Poe Debate—however good-natured—implied that Poe could have only one home, one place that defined him, whether it was Boston, his birthplace and the city he loved to hate, or Philadelphia, where he reached his creative peak as a short story writer, or Baltimore, where his career really began and his life ended. Richmond and New York, though they stayed on the sidelines of the debate, surely have their own answers to the question, “Where is Poe’s home?”
In fact, the answer given by Richmond Poe Museum Curator Chris Semtner at the time was that “Poe belongs to the world.” 9 He certainly does, but that gracious sentiment has more to do with Poe’s reception than with trying to locate the geographical and biographical place that he would have called home. My answer, developed throughout this essay, is that Poe lived in many places but never found a home. Rather than insist that Poe was rooted in any particular place, we might, should, think of him as itinerant—not because he was “blind” or did not care about place but because he did not put down roots. Many places were important to him, but no place was essential, and his relationships with not only the cities but the neighborhoods, forts, academies, and houses in which he lived were strained by the fact that he knew they were only temporary; each was the latest in a succession of places to move to, and then move from.
A Moving Biography
Most of this book’s readers will have a firm knowledge of Poe’s biography, but I would like to retell the story, briefly, emphasizing the extent to which he stayed on the move. 10 Poe’s parents, Eliza and David Poe, were actors living in Boston when he was born on January 19, 1809; when Poe was about five weeks old, they left him with his paternal grandparents in Baltimore for about six months (PL 6). While it is possible that Edgar spent still more time in Baltimore as an infant, he probably moved with his parents to New York City, where they were hired for a theatrical season in 1809–1810. At that point, David Poe’s days as a professional actor, as well as his days with the family, were numbered, but Eliza joined the Placide and Green Company in 1810, performing in Richmond, Norfolk, Charleston, SC, and possibly other Southeastern cities (PL 10–11). Thus Poe, by age two, would have spent significant time in at least six different cities; one can only guess how many different houses and rented rooms he inhabited. This rootlessness, compounded by the disappearance of his father sometime in early to mid-1811, was the norm for Edgar as an infant and toddler. His mother’s death in December of that year removed what little stability he had known in his first three years. Being fostered by Frances and John Allan would restore some regularity and provide something like a home town: for three and a half years, ages three to six, he lived in the same house at Thirteenth and Main Streets in Richmond. Then, in the summer of 1815, the Allans brought Edgar with them to England, settling in London after a short time in Scotland. Enrolled in London boarding schools, Poe probably saw his foster parents only on weekends for most of the five years they spent abroad.
The family returned to Richmond in 1820 after John Allan’s London business failed. While the Allans were hardly destitute—thanks mainly to the support of John’s wealthy uncle William Galt—the family was less financially secure than before and lived in at least three different houses in Richmond over the next five years. When they first returned, they lived with the family of Charles Ellis, Allan’s business partner, then moved before the end of 1820 to a house on Shockoe Hill, where they stayed for about a year and a half, at which point th...