The Enemy Who Wrote the Obituary

A Poetry Tale about Edgar Allan Poe, told by Hello Doggo.

“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.”

That was Poe’s obituary, in the New York Tribune, in October eighteen forty-nine. It went on to say that he had few or no friends. It was signed, simply, Ludwig.

Ludwig was Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Anthologist, editor, and Poe’s rival. Poe had mocked Griswold’s big anthology of American poets in public. Griswold had taken over Poe’s old job at Graham’s Magazine, reportedly on a better salary. And gossip had them both rather sweet on the same poet, Frances Osgood. How much of that was real, nobody can quite say.

Then it got worse. Poe’s aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, signed his literary affairs over to Griswold. Griswold edited the collected works, and added a memoir. Poe the drunk. Poe the madman. Poe the man without a friend. Later scholars showed he’d doctored some of Poe’s letters to make the case.

For the best part of a generation, that was the Poe most readers knew. Some still do.

Poe once asked, in A Dream within a Dream: “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

Not all of it, Edgar. Some of it was Griswold.