g in place a series of events of which no one, to this very day, knows the full detail. Some experts say Poe drunk himself into a stupor and passed out; while others claim he was kidnaped by a group of political thugs, force-fed alcohol, and drug around to election booths. Perhaps the most likely of events, as facts have come to light in recent years, is that Poe contracted the disease rabies and did not receive proper medical attention. The only thing know for sure is this: Poe was found unconscious in a gutter outside a bar. He was taken to a Baltimore hospital, but was never to regain consciousness again. He died on October 7, 1849, and in an instant, one of the literary world's brightest stars was extinguished.The most contradictory analyses have been placed on the literary merit of Edgar Alan Poe:The Reverend Rufus Griswold . . . branded him a perverse neurotic, a drunkard and drug addict ‘who walked the streets, and madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses.' For Baudelaire, on the contrary, he was a ‘fallen angel, who remembered heaven,' a ‘Byron gone astray in a bad world.' Whereas Emerson looked down upon that ‘jingle man' who shook his bells and called their sound poetry, Tennyson admired him as an equal and Yeats (on an official occasion, it is true) proclaimed that he was, ‘so certainly the greatest of American poets, and always, and for all lands, a great lyric poet.' For James Russell Lowell, he was ‘three-fifths . . . genius and two-fifths fudge,' while Mallarm piously raised the monument of a sonnet over his grave and Paul Valry acclaimed the author . . . as one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, Writers as dissimilar as Mark twain and Henry James rejected him, the former because he found him ‘unreadable,' and the latter because it seems to him that ‘an enthusiasm for Poe [was] the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.' But William Car...
