Staff Blog
NYT on “We’re Taking Poe Back”
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It's sort of fitting, given that it revolves around Edgar Allan Poe, that this story will not die.
Last year, CP ran a cover piece called "We're Taking Poe Back," in which Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar, argued that Poe, based on the fact that he did much of his noteworthy work here, should be buried in Philadelphia and not in Baltimore.
It created a flap at the time, and the flap endures with a piece in Friday's Grey Lady by Ian Urbina which fittingly excavates our now 11-month-old story, (well) in advance of a scheduled Jan. 13 debate between Pettit and Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House in Baltimore. (January 19 will mark the bicentennial of Poe's birth.)
In the NYT piece, according to Liliane Weissberg, a professor of comparative literature at Penn (and the Joe Lieberman of this debate? Nah, she's not being intellectually dishonest.), “Poe belongs to Baltimore because he is fully a part of that city’s lore," and "Philadelphia already has Ben Franklin, and that is enough.”
Pettit's counter:
“ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ and ‘The Gold-Bug,’ ” Mr. Pettit said breathlessly, listing the works written by Poe while he lived in Philadelphia. “That’s why we deserve him.”
So what say you? Philly or Baltimore?
NEVER SAY NEVERMORE
NEWSWIRE–A scholar of Edgar Allen Poe says that because the author wrote most of his works in Philadelphia, his burial place should be moved to there from Baltimore.
As they do in Philly often, folks will dream of how the coffin
Of the hometown author Edgar might escape the Harbor Shore:
Pennsylvania, he should be in; they’re prepared for his debris, in
Hopes his casket might be stolen, stolen as it holds his gore.
‘Til that town with love of brothers gets some shovels on the chore,
Poe remains in Baltimore.
http://www.newsandverse.com
Light verse, ripped from the headlines