Hero's: Edgar

Michael Easterling

10/08/20

Edgar’s death at 40 was as shrouded as his life—

found in the street in the rain, 

delirious, wearing shabby clothes 

outside a polling booth in Baltimore.

Had he been beaten and robbed? 

Was he just grossly drunk?

Five days prior he boarded a steamship in Brooklyn

heading for Philadelphia to edit poems

“Do not fear for Eddy.”

No one saw or heard from him

until he was found  in Baltimore 

soaked and crumpled in the gutter.

Doctors were puzzled by their hallucinating patient,

testing him for cholera, syphilis and rabies,

for encephalitis and meningitis.

They scratched their heads 

deciding he had phrenitis. 

Years before attending West Point he was a mystery.

The Academy was  the epitome of

tradition and conformity, of order and uniformity.

Edgar was a bohemian.

His MO was radical individualism and non-conformity.

He was always late and constantly missed classes and formations.

One day he came to Parade wearing

his coat and cross-belts, his boots and a black and gold cadet hat…..but no pants or undershorts.

He was expelled immediately.

He was a Sisyphus,

his life  a constant of frustration,failures and losses.

Born in !809, his father abandoned the family in 1810—

his mother died in 1811. 

Orphaned, John Allan a slave trader, became his foster father.

He was often estranged from Edgar who finally disowned him.

He failed at the University of Virginia.  

His foster mother died in1827.

His brother died of alcoholism in 1831.

His wife Virginia died when she was only 24.

His engagement to Sarah Elmira Royster failed.

His engagement to Sarah Whitman failed. 

He could never hold on to a job.

His dream journal was never published.

He sold ‘The Raven’ for only $9,

and other writings for as little or less. 

He lived much of his adult life in poverty.

But from out of the wasteland, 

the seeming futility of his life, came

forth poems of incomparable beauty- 

brilliant, romantic, etherial, haunting dreamlike rhymes.

Poems like ‘Annabel Lee’

“It was many and many a year a kingdom by the sea,

that a maiden there lived whom you may know

by the name of Annabel Lee;  and this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me;”

“For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

of my beautiful Annabel Lee,

And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes of my beautiful Annabel Lee”

Poems like ‘A Dream within a Dream’

“I stand amidst the roar of a surf tormented shore,

and I hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few, 

yet how they creep through my fingers into the deep, 

While I weep, while I weep.

Is all that we see or seem a dream within a dream?”

Poems like ‘The Raven’

Ghastly grim an ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore  “Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore.”

Quoth the Raven  “Nevermore”

“Take thy beak from out my heart,

take thy form from off my door,

quoth the Raven  “Nevermore.”

And from his life of failure and heartbreak there came 

unforgettable twisting stories, sometimes funny, sometimes macabre.

Stories like: 

‘The Balloon Hoax’—an adventure story of two men crossing the Atlantic in a hot air balloon;

‘Murders in The Rue Morgue’—maybe the first American mystery story;

‘Eleonora’—a beautiful love story;

‘Spectacles’—love at first sight;

‘Silence, A Fable’—a dreamy psychedelic story;

‘The Pit and the Pendulum’—about a torture chamber, but not a horror story;

“The Cask of Amantillado’—a story of revenge and Fortunato.

‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’—a comedy.

In life Edgar often crafted himself as a detective, an adventurer and world traveler, a warrior in the Greek Wars, a prisoner in Russia and in other heroic and fanciful ways.  

All questionable.

But there is no question about this. 

He was brilliant.

An brilliant wordsmith.

A brilliant poet.

A brilliant author.

And it must be said that few have ever captured the romantic as he did.

And it must be said that few have ever captured melancholy and broken-heartedness as he did.

And it must be said that few have ever captured fear, mystery

and horror as he did. 

This writer believes that after he died,

he awakened finding himself in the old Brennan farmhouse his beautiful wife Virginia by his side.

After timeless talk of dreams and life and love,

and of poems and stories constantly published,

he strolled alone down West 84th Street 

to his ‘hidden woodland shrine’ overlooking the Hudson.

And with tablet and pen in hand sitting on a great smooth rock, he wrote words that few could ever write or even imagine. 

Evermore.