Beauty and a Poet's Death

The US Postal Service has issued a new stamp com-memorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. "For more than a century and a half, Poe and his works have been praised by admirers around the world, including English poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who dubbed Poe 'the literary glory of America.' British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called him 'the supreme original short story writer of all time.'" The tender and somewhat idealized stamp portrait (click to enlarge) was painted by the highly accomplished American artist Micheal J. Deas.

Deas' book, The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe, contains this more troubling image of the master, taken the year before his untimely death (click HERE to enlarge).

Here Poe's oddly bifurcated face appears simultaneously arrogant and afraid, giving hint to the deep divisions of his soul. Poe was a famously haunted writer, obsessed with the paradox of beauty and death.

He married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, and for six years watched her slowly die of consumption. Peter Ackroyd, in Poe, A Life Cut Short, writes that "All his life he liked to wander through cemeteries. Death and beauty were, in his imagination, inextricably and perpetually associated. 'No more' was his favorite phrase. The secret chambers and the mouldering mansions, in which his fictions loved to dwell, are to be construed as those of the mind or of the grave."

His own strange death is worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe story. Here's how his demise is described in Wikipedia:

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore delirious, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition, and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own. Poe is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. Some sources say Poe's final words were "Lord help my poor soul." All medical records, including his death certificate, have been lost. Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation", common euphemisms for deaths from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. However, the actual cause of death remains a mystery...

We may be com-memorating his birth this year, but Poe might have preferred that we commemorate his death--the moment when the poet was, finally, 'no more.'