Source: Law & Liberty
by Allen Mendenhall
“Death came to Edgar Allan Poe much as it had to the doomed characters who haunted his tales of the grotesque: strangely, symbolically, and shrouded in ambiguity. It is fitting that we should begin there, in that Baltimore setting where the mystery still clings like fog to the facts. ‘The subject [of Poe’s death] is famously fraught,’ writes Richard Kopley. Within that careful academic phrase lies the whole terrible admission of our inability to grasp the ultimate meaning of a man who lived always at the edge of meaning itself.” (07/18/25)