Setting Record Straight About E.A. Poe

Despite the popular notion that Edgar Allan Poe was an opium addict, rangers at America’s memorial to the author-poet are vigorously campaigning to restore his reputation.

“The myth continues to this day that Poe was a drug addict, a despicable character. It’s a reputation undeserved,” said National Park Service ranger-researcher Christopher Eckard.

Eckard said he and Ranger David Blackburn had produced a traveling exhibit “to prove there is no hard evidence that Poe used drugs, how the myth originated and why it persists.” Since October, the exhibit has been on display in schools and libraries, as well as at the park service’s regional headquarters in Philadelphia.

“The myth was perpetrated by Rufus W. Griswold,” explained Eckard, 26. “Poe criticized the anthology ‘The Poets and Poetry of America,’ authored by Griswold, who was furious with Poe and never forgave him. Griswold was Poe’s literary executor and first biographer and took advantage of that position to ruin Poe’s reputation after his death.”

He added: “Griswold has been a prime source of information about Poe the man, even to this day. Schoolteachers in English literature classes all over America leave the impression with students that Poe was a drug addict.”

Thus, said Blackburn, 27, “young kids get the idea from schools that this guy was on drugs. . . . We’re trying to break that cycle. We say, ‘No, Poe did not use drugs to become inspired to write his tales. He used his creativity and imagination. You can do the same.’ ”

The rangers concede that a number of Poe’s stories, including “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Tale of Ragged Mountains” do refer to opium--but they maintain that readers should not confuse the author’s work with the author’s life.

Eckard said that in researching Poe’s letters and other documents, he found no mention of any drug habit. Other contemporaries of Poe, such as Dr. Thomas Dunn English, denied the author used narcotics. English, a Philadelphia physician and poet who knew Poe well but disliked him personally, wrote several years after Poe’s death:

“Had Poe a drug habit, I should, both as a physician and man of observation, have discovered it during our frequent visits to each other’s home and our meetings elsewhere. I saw no signs of it and believe the charge to be a baseless slander.”

The Edgar Allan Poe Historic Site, created in 1980, is one of the newest units in the national park system. It consists of three 19th-Century brick row houses, including a building rented by Poe from 1842 to 1844.

Richard Gimbel, a scion of the Gimbel’s department store family and a fan of Poe, operated the complex as a private museum from the 1930s until his death in 1971. He willed the museum to the city of Philadelphia, and the city later turned it over to the National Park Service.

Outside the museum, a statue of a raven perched on a high pole reminds visitors of Poe’s most famous poem. One room in one of the row houses is furnished identically to the room described in Poe’s essay “Philosophy of Furniture”--silver wallpaper, a painting of the Great Dismal Swamp, a window painted red, crimson carpet, hexagonal marble table, rosewood sofa.

But it is the house where Poe, wife Virginia, mother-in-law Maria Clemm and their cat, Catterina, lived that adds another layer of mystery to the author.

Since the Park Service took it over, the narrow three-story home has stood empty--bare walls, bare floors, no furniture.

Blackburn explained: “We have no idea what Poe had in the house,” which is where the author was living when his masterpieces “The Gold Bug,” “The Black Cat” and “Tell-Tale Heart” were published. But, he added: “We think he would like what we have done with this place.”

Rangers use the eerie setting to help bolster their pro-Poe campaign. They lead visitors down the house’s narrow, steep steps into a musty basement filled with cobwebs. Red mineral stains streak the walls.

Standing before a bricked-over fireplace, the rangers read excerpts from “The Black Cat,” a macabre story in which a man trips over his one-eyed black cat as he descends into his basement. In a rage, he kills his wife instead of the cat and then seals his wife’s body behind a bricked-over fireplace--unknowingly entombing the live cat, too.

When detectives searched the basement, Poe wrote, they heard “a voice within the tomb--a cry at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud and continuous scream, a howl, a wailing shriek, such as might have arisen only out of hell from the throats of the damned. . . .”

It was the sound of the cat--and it revealed the body of the murdered woman.

“We believe the basement, the stairs, the red stains on the wall, the bricked-over fireplace, the cobwebs, not drugs, were the inspiration for ‘The Black Cat,’ ” Eckard declared. “We believe a creative mind, not a mind crazed with drugs, was the source of inspiration for all of the writings of . . . the father of the literature of mystery.”