Afterword: Loss of Breath: Writing Poe's Last Days

Summary

HAVING BEGUN THIS study with a newspaper notice of Poe's death, I would like to return to the events leading up to that moment, the week before the beginning of Poe's afterlife. On September 27, 1849, Poe boarded a steamer in Richmond bound for Baltimore, the first leg of his journey home to New York. On October 3 in Baltimore, Joseph Walker wrote to Joseph E. Snodgrass that Poe was at Ryan's 4th Ward polls, “rather worse for the wear … in great distress,” and “in need of immediate assistance.” Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he was attended by Dr. John J. Moran and died on October 7. Other than this information gleaned from the memoirs of Snodgrass, Moran, and Neilson Poe, almost nothing else is known about the last ten days of Poe's life. Had Poe known that his life, writing, and image would generate so much interest — over three dozen biographies, thousands of pages of literary criticism, over seventy films, countless middle-school projects, a Montblanc pen — he might well have planned just this sort of disappearance, a gaping hole in his life narrative, an unreadable conclusion.

Poe's cause of death is a perfect mystery: we know enough to invite speculation, and Poe's cult status has inspired a series of passionate theorists, but the body of evidence remains too slender for a definitive solution. Poe was almost certainly debilitated by alcohol when Walker found him on October 3.