(waves crashing) - [Poet] Take this kiss upon the brow.

And, in parting from you now, thus much let me avow.

You are not wrong who deem, that my days have been a dream.

Yet if hope has flown away, in a night, or in a day, in a vision, or in none.

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] One evening, in mid-January 1842, Edgar is relaxing with Mariah, listening to his wife sing and play the piano when suddenly Virginia coughs up blood.

It is a sure sign she has the dreaded disease, tuberculosis.

She is just 19 years old.

One could only imagine the horror Edgar must have felt.

- Then, one night, everything changed.

It was early 1842 and the Poes were sitting together playing music.

Edgar on his flute, Virginia was playing the piano, and she started coughing up blood.

So much blood, in fact, that Edgar thought that she had burst a blood vessel.

And he despaired for her health.

He knew that she'd be dead soon, that this really was a death sentence.

She had consumption.

Now we thought, tuberculosis, that, over time, she'd waste away, struggling to breathe, coughing up blood and bits of lung.

So, at once, she was alive and dead.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Tuberculosis or consumption, as it was commonly called, was the cause of more deaths in the industrialized world than any other disease at the time.

It was consumption that had taken Edgar's mother and brother.

- [Edgar] February 3rd, 1842.

Philadelphia.

My dear friend, my dear little wife has been dangerously ill. About a fortnight since, in singing, she ruptured a blood vessel, and it was only on yesterday that the physicians gave me any hope of her recovery.

You might imagine the agony I have suffered, for you know how devotedly I love her.

- [Narrator] Poe's magazine boss, George Graham, recalled.

- [George] I rode out one summer evening with them, and the remembrance of his watchful eyes eagerly bent upon the slightest change of hue in that loved face haunts me yet as the memory of a sad strain.

It was the hourly anticipation of her loss that made him a sad and thoughtful man, and lent a mournful melody to his undying song.

- [Witness] She was not a healthy woman.

At irregular intervals, even while we were talking, she was attacked with a terrible paroxysm of coughing.

This was so severe at times as to threaten her with strangulation.

- [Narrator] Consumption accounted for up to one-fourth of all deaths in 19th century America, often afflicting the young.

This ordeal undoubtedly influence Poe's tale, "The Masque of the Red Death" published in Graham's Magazine just four months later.

- [Voiceover] The Red Death had long devastated the country.

No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.

Blood was its Avatar and its seal, the redness and the horror of blood.

There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution.

And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

- [Narrator] Prince Prospero summons a thousand of his courtiers to take refuge in his castle.

They locked down the castle's gates to keep the plague out.

- [Voiceover] The external world could take care of itself.

In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.

The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.

There were buffoons, there were Improvisatori, there were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.

All these and security were within.

Without was the Red Death.

It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

- [Narrator] The ball is staged in seven rooms, each painted a different color.

In the seventh room is a large ebony clock that chimes on the hour.

When the clock chimes midnight, a mysterious figure enters the room, dressed as a victim of the Red Death, instantly striking fear and awe.

- [Voiceover] His vesture was dabbled in blood, and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

- [Narrator] Horrified and insulted, Prince Prospero attacks him with a dagger when the figure turns to him.

- [Voiceover] There was a sharp cry, and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death.

He had come like a thief in the night.

And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.

And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay.

And the flames of the tripods expired.

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

- Yeah, I think "The Masque of the Red Death" is a great example of a way in which he's referring to something very concrete and historically specific, but opening that up onto a totally existential register.

So it's kind of supernatural and also very, very grounded in the particulars of what's going on at the time.

(calm music) - [Narrator] On the 6th of March, 1842, the acclaimed British author, Charles Dickens, visits Philadelphia as part of his wildly popular American tour.

The two authors meet at the United States Hotel and discuss the state of American poetry.

It would be the beginning of a warm friendship.

Charles Dickens was one of the only major writers Poe met in person, and they had something in common, the need for an international copyright law.

Under existing law, American works could be copyrighted but not English, or European ones.

This meant that American publishers paid American writers very little because they could publish writers like Charles Dickens and many others for free.

Poe wrote.

- [Edgar] Without an international copyright law, American authors may as well cut their throats.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, thanks to Poe's superb editing, original stories and insightful reviews, "Graham's Magazine" skyrockets, from 5,000 subscribers to 40,000, making the owner, George Graham, a very wealthy man with a $25,000 profit.

Poe's salary, however, remained at a paltry $800, which was not enough to support his family.

Tired of working so hard for low wages and what he considered a middlebrow magazine, Poe quits in the spring of 1842.

He renews his dream of starting his own magazine, one that would raise the standards of American letters.

He writes to a friend.

- [Edgar] The project of the new magazine still, you may be sure, occupies my thoughts.

If I live, I will accomplish it, and in triumph.

- [Narrator] His new magazine would be called the "Stylus" and he soon issues a prospectus, but nothing comes of it.

Still, Poe would keep trying for the rest of his life.

It was at this time that he pens one of his most terrifying stories, "The Pit and the Pendulum," which describes the narrator's experience of torture as a victim of the Spanish Inquisition.

The story studies the effect of terror on the mind, which this black and white French film brilliantly evokes through its skilled use of led and shadows.

- [Voiceover] I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony.

And when they at length unbounded me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.

The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.

- [Narrator] Unlike other Poe tales that rely on the supernatural, this story inspires fear in the reader by focusing on the senses.

- [Voiceover] I thrust my arms wildly above and around me in all directions.

I felt nothing.

Yet dreaded to move a step, lest I should be impeded by the walls of a tomb.

Perspiration burst from every pore, and stood in cold big beads upon my forehead.

The agony of suspense grew, at length, intolerable, and I cautiously moved forward, with my arms extended, and my eyes straining from their sockets, in the hope of catching some faint ray of light.

I proceeded for many paces, but still all was blackness and vacancy.

In the confusion attending my fall, I did not immediately apprehend a somewhat startling circumstance.

I put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pit.

Groping about the masonry just below the margin, I succeeded in dislodging a small fragment, and let it fall into the abyss.

For many seconds I hearkened to its reverberations as it dashed against the sides of the chasm in its descent.

At length there was a sullen plunge into water, succeeded by loud echoes.

At the same moment there came a sound resembling the quick opening, and as rapid closing of a door overhead, while a faint gleam of light flashed suddenly through the gloom, and as suddenly faded away.

I saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me, and congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which I had escaped.

Another step before my fall, and the world had seen me no more.

- [Narrator] His torturers subject him to a sharp pendulum that descends ever closer and swarms of rats.

- [Voiceover] The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length.

I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart.

It would return and repeat its operations, again, and again.

Down, still unceasingly, still inevitably down!

I gasped and struggled at each vibration.

I shrunk convulsively at its every sweep.

My eyes followed its outward or upward whirls with the eagerness of the most unmeaning despair.

Oh, how unspeakable!

This is a Poe's story after all.

This is the guy, who the previous year, had invented the detective story.

So this is a guy, Poe, whose character is going to overcome the horrors, the psychological torture with reason, analysis.

He actually walks around the room, measuring the diameter of the room, trying to find out, well, how much space do I have to look at?

When he finds himself strapped down the table, about to be chopped in half by that giant pendulum blade, what does he do?

He starts to use his reason.

How can I escape this?

So this is a mixture, maybe of science fiction, the horror story, and the detective story.

That's one of Poe's specialties.

I think Poe was a master at taking one fictional conceit, kind of setting up a little fictional world with certain parameters and then taking it to the logical extreme, in fact, so realistically that it becomes almost fantastic or supernatural.

So "The Pit and the Pendulum" would be one example of that.

We see that same strategy in short story writers of the 20th century, like Kafka, for example, where things start to get really weird and supernatural precisely because they're so realistic.

So it's this kind of mix of realism and supernatural together, and I think Poe really achieves that in "The Pit and the Pendulum."

[Narrator] In spring 1843, the family moves into this home, in the Spring Garden neighborhood in Philadelphia.

It is here where he may have begun his tale, "The Premature Burial," that speaks to the fear of being buried alive, that was rooted in 19th century culture.

Poe was working in the Magazine Newspaper Business, so he was constantly exposed to what's going on in the news and he had to be abreast of everything that's going around him and something that made headlines pretty frequently was "Premature Burial."

It didn't have to happen that often, could be just one in a million cases, but when it did happen, it made the newspaper.

So if you look back through newspapers of the 1840s, you'll see these accounts of people in a cemetery.

They're at a funeral and they hear moaning coming from a nearby grave.

They dig it up and say, "Oops, we buried somebody alive there."

Or they place a body in a crypt, then years later, they go back to place another coffin in the crypt and find out, "Oh, that first coffin's moved."

And they find out there's scratch marks on the inside of the coffin as if that person has struggled to escape.

- Being buried alive is one of the most horrific ways of dying, I think, and it did happen.

Poe read about it.

He wrote "Berenice" where he incorporated the theme of being buried alive, and it seemed like everybody knew someone who lived next door to someone who was related to someone who heard about someone that was buried alive.

Everybody had a story to tell.

It's fair to say that people were, you know, worried about it, and it happened to such a degree that coffin makers designed what they called life preserving coffins.

And after all these years of talking about this, I still have to smile when you think about building a coffin, not for a corpse but for a living person.

- [Narrator] The story is about a man who suffers from catalepsy, that occasionally paralyzes him.

He lives in fear of being mistaken dead, and buried alive.

- [Voiceover] I hesitated to ride, or to walk, or to indulge in any exercise that would carry me from home.

Among other things, I had the family vault so remodeled as to admit of being readily opened from within.

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.

Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

- [Narrator] It is in this house where Edgar takes care of Virginia, who would sometimes improve but only to slip back.

He later revealed to a friend.

- [Edgar] I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much.

My enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.

- [Narrator] Poe's devotion to Virginia, in spite of their trying circumstances, is conveyed in this melodramatic silent film directed by D.W. Griffith in 1909.

When this short was released, it was before there were any films made in Hollywood.

From this home, Poe makes one of his only trips to the nation's capital to directly petition President John Tyler for a patronage job at the Philadelphia Customs House.

In hopes of gaining greater financial security as there was no civil service exam in those days, job seekers needed to petition the president himself.

The United States did not adopt a civil service exam until 1883, after a failed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, two years before.

But Poe's trip to Washington was a disaster.

As his "Imp of the Perverse" reemerged.

Perhaps sensing there was more opportunity in New York.

Poe and his family soon set their sights on returning to the bustling city up North.

He did not realize he was about to become the most famous poet in America.

(soft music) Soon after Edgar and Virginia arrive in New York, Poe writes his mother-in-law Maria affectionately called Muddy who would remain back in Philadelphia with Catterina their tortoise shell cat just after breakfast.

- [Poe] "My dear Muddy, we have just this minute done breakfast and I now sit down to write you about everything I feel in excellent spirits and haven't drank a drop.

You can't imagine how much we both do miss you.

Sissy had a hearty cry last night, because you and Catterina weren't here.

We are resolved to get two rooms the first moment we can.

In the meantime, it is impossible we could be more comfortable or more at home than we are.

Give our best loves to Catterina."

- [Narrator] In summer 1844, the Poes rent two rooms on the second floor of the Brennan Farmhouse.

It is surrounded by a 200 acre working farm that stretches from what is now Central Park to the Hudson River.

It was an isolated existence.

He later told a friend that he had been living like a hermit in rural Manhattan and had not seen anyone, but his family .

Around this time, Poe writes a letter to the prominent Poet James Russell Lowell, revealing something procrastinators everywhere can relate to.

[Poe] "My dear Mr. Lowell.

I can feel for the constitutional Indolence of which you complain ,for it is one of my own besetting sins.

I am excessively slothful and wonderfully industrious by fits.

There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture and when nothing yields me pleasure but solitary communion with the mountains in the woods.

I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months and awake at last to a sort of mania for composition.

Then I scribble all day and read all night so long as the disease endures.

- [Narrator] In the fall, Poe joins the editorial staff of the "New York Evening Mirror", a daily newspaper.

He works there five months as an Assistant Editor.

- Poe while he worked at the evening mirror, did what he did at most of the magazine, the newspapers he worked for.

He was an editor.

He wrote copy.

He wrote stories.

He wrote reviews and he's only there for a short time.

He hated working for editors.

He thought most of them were mediocre and he hated having to subordinate himself to someone else's judgment, particularly about literature which he cared the most about and he had fallen out with the editor and wanted to pursue other opportunities.

- [Narrator] Where the farmhouse once stood is now this residential building on 84th and Broadway, the heart of the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

It is at this farmhouse that he is to write his most beloved work that would establish him as one of the most famous poets in America.

"The Raven" is about a scholar who is left desolate by the death of his beloved Lenore.

He tries to put the memory of Lenore out of his mind by reading "Forgotten Lore" but is unable to do so.

He vows not to repeat her name but does so often.

One dreary December night, he is visited by an ominous bird.

- [Voiceover] Once upon a midnight dreary while I pounded weak and weary over many acquaintance curious volume of "Forgotten Lore" while I nodded nearly napping.

Suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently wrapping, wrapping at my chamber door to some visitor I muttered tapping at my chamber door.

Only this and nothing more.

Distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December and each separate dying ember brought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wish the morrow vainly I had sought to borrow from my books, "Surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore" for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore.

Nameless here forevermore.

Presently my soul grew stronger, hesitating then no longer, "Sir" said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore.

But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, and so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door that I scarce was sure I heard you."

Here I opened wide the door darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams.

No mortal ever dared to dream before, but the silence was unbroken and the stillness gave no token and the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"

This I whispered and an echo murmured back the word "Lenore!"

Merely this and nothing more.

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.

Not the least obeisance made he, not a minute stopped or stayed he, but with mien of Lord or lady perched above my chamber door.

Purged upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door perched and sat and nothing more.

- [Narrator] Poe leader explained that "The Raven" symbolized a mournful and never ending remembrance.

The poem dramatizes the conflict between remembrance and forgetting.

If the raven symbolizes never ending grief, the bust of Pallas Athena signifies intellectual wisdom and scholarship.

The raven perched on Athena's marble bust conveys grief over hope.

The scholar's rationality eclipsed by the raven's dark message of never more that only deepens the scholar's melancholy and even overtakes his soul.

How much did Virginia's progressive illness and pose anticipation of her death figure into the poem?

- The Raven is very clearly an attempt to do some kind of proactive processing.

I think we would call it now, anticipating the loss of Virginia and trying to understand how it would prey upon him and change his life.

How he could come to terms with it.

And so he conceived difference extraordinary poem that it one senses theatrical and gimmicky and very easy to parody.

There were dozens of parodies that popped up in the newspapers right away, but the thing is that the poem captures something powerful and it lies in the torment of the poet.

His desire to forget, but his compulsion to remember.

- [Narrator] Desperate to learn if he will reunite with his beloved Lenore after death.

This scholar receives no relief from the raven.

But the raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling.

Straight I wield a cushion seat in front of bird and bust and door.

Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking fancy unto fancy thinking what this ominous bird of yore?

What this grim ungainly, ghastly gaunt an ominous bird of yore meant in croaking?

Nevermore.

"Prophets!"

said I, "thing of evil!

- prophets still, if bird or devil!

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore.

Desolate yet all undaunted on this desert land enchanted, on this home by horror haunted tell me truly I implore, is there, is there balm in Gilead?

Tell me, tell me I implore.

Quote the Raven "Nevermore."

Be that word Our sign in parting bird or fiend I shrieked.

Upstarting get the back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian Shore, leave no black plume.

As a token of that lie, thy soul has spoken.

Leave my loneliness unbroken.

Quit the bust above my door.

Take thy beak from out my heart and take thy form from off my door.

Quote the Raven "Nevermore."

And the Raven never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting on the pallet bust of palace just above my chamber door and his eyes have all the seeming of a demons that is dreaming and the lamplight or him streaming throws his shadow on the floor and my soul from out, that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted.

"Nevermore" - At the heart of grief is a lot of anger and I think when the speaker explodes and shouts at the raven and tells it to leave what he's trying to banish there is his own grief.

Poe had that problem throughout his career, how to get rid of the grief that won't go away.

- [Narrator] Interestingly in his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition."

Poe viewed the scholar's hopeless inability to forget as pleasurable.

He is impelled in part to continually question the raven by that species of despair which delights in self torture, he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected nevermore the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow.

- The poem is widely praised for its haunting imagery, supernatural atmosphere and mesmerizing musicality.

Sadly, despite having pinned the most popular poem in American history for the "Evening Mirror", the newspaper where Poe works, he only receives $9.

- People knew who he was, his nickname became the Raven and it wasn't uncommon for him to be walking down the streets of New York and children would come up running behind him with sticks and be hitting his heels and you know what he did?

He would turn around and go "Nevermore" and the kids would be permanently damaged, you know, by the scream they would be running down the street yelling and screaming.

Poe had a sense of humor, I'm sure he thought that was funny and maybe even the kids at one point laughed.

Maybe they knew that they were doing that just to get a reaction from him.

- [Narrator] "The raven" was reprinted throughout the country.

It made him instantly famous, a popular public speaker and sought after literary figure in New York's fashionable salons.

(soft music) One fascinating but often overlooked aspect of Edgar Allan Poe is his role as a pioneer of the science fiction genre.

One critic extolled Poe as the source, the first genuine science fiction writer, famed French author Jules Verne called Poe "The creator of the scientific novel".

So how did Poe influence the genre and what exactly is science fiction?

Although there are varying definitions of science fiction, a useful one is applying the scientific thinking and knowledge of the time to a work of fiction.

Poe accomplished this in many of his stories.

He also influenced the two fathers of science fiction, Jules Verne and H.G.Wells, who along with Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein", helped establish the genre - Not the only one and arguably not the first, but he was at the very beginning of the flourishing of a genre that in some ways was inevitable with the rise of science.

So many discoveries were taking place in the 19th century vis-a-vis what we know about the world, what we know about the natural order, what we know about human physiology.

- [Narrator] Back in Baltimore in 1833, he penned a hoax titled "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Phall" that uses scientific thinking of the day to lend authenticity to the tale.

The story tells of a poor bellows repairman from Rotterdam Holland who, to escape his persistent creditors, travels for 19 days to the moon via a revolutionary design balloon.

It is equipped with a special device to compress the vacuum of outer space into breathable air.

Five years later a lunar inhabitant is sent back with a message from Phall.

- [Poe] I have much to say of the climate of the planet, of its wonderful alternations of heat and cold of unmitigated and burning sunshine for one fortnight and more than polar rigidity for the next.

- [Narrator] Indeed the cold lunar night does last two weeks as does the hot lunar day.

Poe's story later inspired Jules Vern's space travel novel, "From the Earth to the Moon."

In another science fiction story, "The Balloon-Hoax," Poe describes a three day transatlantic flake newly completed by the hot air balloon Victoria with eight aeronaut men aboard.

Poe uses extraordinary detail describing their flake as they cross the Atlantic Ocean to arrive near Charleston, South Carolina.

Printed in an extra edition of the New York Sun, the account was accompanied by a detailed draw of the balloon along with exact specs.

The story was so convincing with its scientific knowledge and technical details.

Many readers completely believed the hoax and swarm the New York Sun building to urgently learn more.

The first transatlantic crossing by hot air balloon would not actually occur until 1978 when three Americans crossed from Maine to France over five days aboard Double Eagle II.

Poe's story partly inspired Jules Verne to write his first novel, "Five Weeks in a Balloon."

- Poe had a huge impact on the science fiction genre because what he did was he took fantastic stories about trips to the moon or balloon trips across the ocean and tried to make 'them seem as if they could actually happen.

What he did since he knew the leading scientist and engineers of his day was he tried to find out everything he could about the latest technology and used those details in his fiction.

So if he's gonna write a story about traveling across the ocean in a hot air balloon, he's gonna research who's the leading balloonist of the day Monck Mason.

Poe actually made Monck Mason a character in his story and he went into great detail describing the altitude after to fly, what it's like being up in the air and how the technology would even make it possible to cross the ocean in just three days.

- [Narrator] In the apocalyptic short story, "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion," two spirits renamed Eiros and Charmion after death discuss how the world ended.

Eiros who died in the apocalypse explains how an incoming comet poison the atmosphere causing life on earth to end.

In "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket," Poe infuses his novel with input drawn from nonfiction written by scientists and explores of the day.

Unhappy with the ending, Jules Verne published a sequel called "An Antarctic Mystery."

Poe's novel also influenced H. G. Wells.

He learned from Poe how to best craft a story including what elements are most needed.

Verne's super successful novel, "Around the World in 80 Days" was influenced by Poe's clever short story, "Three Sundays in a Week" in which a young man must somehow find a week with three Sundays in it to receive his uncle's blessing to get married.

Poe's "Mellonta Tauta" set a thousand years in the future, describes a time when mile high balloons transport up to 400 passengers at 150 miles per hour and looks back satirically on the past.

The main character contrasts contemporary science and philosophy to that of 1848, but she misunderstands ideas in outlandish ways - And it's about someone in the future looking at our society today and saying how ridiculous it is.

So Poe is very influential in that regard in kind of having centering this interest in time travel and futuristic themes that become very popular in Jules Verne and other writers.

But I also see in Poe in that tale kind of, he's kind of the progenitor of a lot of the dystopian science fiction that he's writing kind of with at least in that story with a kind of political bent where he is satirizing democracy, views as a race to the bottom where mediocrity reigns.

- [Narrator] In 1845 in this house near Washington Square Park, Poe wrote the science fiction story, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" about a mesmerist who wants to learn if he can use the mesmeric trance to extend the life of his dying friend Monsieur Valdemar.

[Voiceover] It was evident that so far death or what is usually termed death had been arrested by the mesmeric process.

It seemed clear to us all that to awaken M. Valdemar would be merely to ensure his instant or at least his speedy dissolution.

From this period until the close of last week, an interval of nearly seven months, the sleepwalker remained exactly as I have last described him.

[Narrator] Hugo Gemsback who coined the term science fiction and for whom the annual Hugo Science Fiction Awards are named, featured this story in the very first science fiction magazine in 1926.

[Narrator] In 1845, Poe begins work at the "Broadway Journal" in Lower Manhattan.

This was a more serious journal, one that emphasized literary reviews, art and poetry, but had a smaller circulation.

By October, Edgar very briefly achieves his longtime dream of becoming an owner and editor of a literary journal, but does so mainly through loans.

It was during this short time he meets a young poet named Walt Whitman who stops by the Broadway Journal, which had recently published his poem.

Walt Whitman was one of the only major American writers that Poe met in person.

While Poe had dramatically increased subscribers for journals owned by others, he could not replicate the success for his own magazine.

He also started drinking again and unable to cover his debts.

He loses the magazine in just two months.

- Unfortunately, Poe gains proprietorship of the Broadway Journal because the other editors kind of knew and the other owners knew that it was losing money and that they wanted to cut their losses and run.

So Poe is left alone with this and he's editing, he's writing copy and he doesn't really have any business acumen and he's worked to the bone so he loses it very quickly.

- [Narrator] Losing the Broadway Journal was an especially sad event in his life.

It would be his last regular position.

One former employer remarked that Poe now wondered.

- [Witness] From publisher to publisher with his fine print like manuscript, but finding no market for his brain.

He was troubled by those morbid feelings, which a life of poverty and disappointment is so apt to engender in the heart of a man.

The sense of having been ill, used, misunderstood, and put aside by men of far less ability.

- [Narrator] Back home, Virginia's health takes a turn for the worse.

For Valentine's Day 1846, she writes a romantic acrostic for Edgar about her desire to lead a tranquil life with him in the country, with the first letter of each line spelling out his full name.

This is the only verse she is known to have written.

- [Virginia] Ever with thee, I wish to roam, dearest my life is chime.

Give me a cottage for my home and a ritual cypress vine removed from the world with its sin and care and the tattling of many tongues, love alone shall guide us when we are there.

Love shall heal my weakened lungs, and oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend never wishing that others may see perfect ease we'll enjoy without thinking to lend ourselves to the world and its glee ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

- [Narrator] Virginia's wish comes true.

Poe moves his family to a snug cottage in the rural village of Fordham where they will live out their final days together.

Located 14 miles North of the city, this modest two story frame building, which today exists as a museum would be Poe's final home, a kitchen, sitting room, and small bedroom where on the first floor Poe'S study and the bedroom he shared with Virginia were on the second.

Muddy leader recalled that Edgar spent the warnings writing at his desk, then worked in the flower garden or recited poetry to her and sissy.

- [Muddy] Oh how supremely happy we were in our dear cottage home we three lived only for each other.

- [Narrator] Poe kept songbirds on a small front porch surrounded by lilacs and cherry trees, the peaceful setting and a countryside where he loved to take walks inspired his writing.

One visitor recalled that Poe composed his works with his beloved cat, Catterina wrapped around his shoulders.

- I'm smiling because this is such a human aspect of Poe that many people either don't want to imagine or to see, but apparently they were playing in the backyard and playing hotfrog or leapfrog rather and Poe would jump over Virginia and then she would jump over him.

Well apparently he split his pants doing that and Virginia couldn't stop laughing to see, you know, Eddy with his split pants and again, how many people can see Edgar playing leapfrog?

Again, this is just getting back to did they love each other?

They were playful.

They weren't ashamed to be doing something that children would be doing and I just think that it's so sweet.

- [Narrator] In the fall, Poe is enmeshed in a bitter literary quarrel, a common occurrence for him with the writer Thomas Dunn English.

Poe felt English had wronged him and accused him and the owners of the Evening Mirror of libel.

This bitter dispute influenced one of Poe's finest stories.

That is a meditation on the art and passion of revenge.

[Voiceover] The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had born as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

You, who so well know the nature of my soul will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat.

At length, I would be avenged.

I must not only punish but punish with impunity.

[Narrator] On a carnival night in an unnamed Italian city, the narrator lures his inebriated enemy Fortunato deep into his family's wine cellar to evaluate if a cask of rare sherry is genuine.

[Voiceover] It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my goodwill.

I continued as was my want to smile in his face and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his emulation.

[Narrator] The two noble men walk through the extensive family catacombs to locate the casket of sherry.

Before the inebriated Fortunato realizes what is happening, the narrator manages to chain his victim to the wall and entomb him alive.

- [Voiceover] I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar with these materials and with the aid of my trial, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.

I had scarcely laid the first tear of the masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in great measure worn off.

My heart grew sick on a count of the dampness of the catacombs, I hastened it to make an end of my labor.

I forced the last stone into its position, I plastered it up.

Against the new masonry, I re-erected the old rampart of bones for the half of a century, no mortal has disturbed him in pace requiescat.

- [Narrator] Poe later claims revenge of his own when he wins his lawsuit and is awarded $225 in damages.

In the only surviving letter written to Virginia, Poe writes about his great disappointment in losing the Broadway Journal and his dependence on her.

[Edgar] My dear heart, my dear Virginia, our mother will explain to you why I stay away from you this night.

I trust the interview I am promised will result in some substantial good for me, for your dear sake and hers, keep up your heart in all hopefulness and trust yet a little longer.

In my last great disappointment, I should have lost my courage.

But for you, my darling little wife, you are my greatest and only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory and ungrateful live.

I shall be with you tomorrow PM and be assured until I see you, I will keep in loving remembrance.

Your last words and your fervent prayer.

Sleep well and may God grant you a peaceful summer with your devoted Edgar.

[Narrator] By moving to the country, Poe hoped this would improve Virginia's health, but it was not to be.

By years end, she increasingly found it hard to breathe.

One visitor Mary Gove Nichols observed - [Mary Gove] Mrs. Poe looked very young.

She had large black eyes and a pearly whiteness of complexion, which was a perfect palor.

Her pale face, her brilliant eyes and her raven hair gave her an unearthly look.

One felt that she was almost a disrobed spirit and when she coughed, it was made certain that she was rapidly passing away.

Then fall came and Mrs. Poe sank rapidly in consumption and I saw her in her bed chamber.

Everything here was so neat, so purely clean, so scanned and so poverty stricken that I saw the sufferer with such a heartache as the poor feel for the poor.

The weather was cold and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompanied the hectic fever of consumption.

She lay on the straw bed wrapped in her husband's great coat with a large tortoise shell cat on her bosom.

The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness.

The coat and the cat were the sufferers only means of warmth except as her husband held her hands and her mother, her feet.

- [Narrator] On her deathbed, she thought only of her husband's wellbeing, - [Virginia] Darling, darling Muddy.

You will console and take care of my poor Eddy.

You'll never, never leave him.

Promise me my dear, Muddy and then I can die in peace.

- [Narrator] In January, 1847, five years after she ruptured a blood vessel while singing, Virginia dies at 24 the same age as Edgar's mother and brother.

In the months following his wife's death, Poe falls into a deep depression.

One friend recalled.

- [Poe's Friend] The loss of his wife was a sad blow to him.

He did not seem to care after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year, she was his all.

- [Narrator] Edgar would sometimes visit Virginia's burial vault late at night, even in snow.

He later composed a poem "Annabelle Lee" in which the love between a young couple is so great.

It evokes the envy of the angels in heaven and the demons under the sea who put an early end to it, but their love extends beyond the grave.

- [Voiceover] It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea that a maiden there lived whom you may know by the name of Annabel Lee.

And this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea.

But we loved with a love that was more than love.

I and my Annabel Lee with a love that the winged sheriffs of heaven coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that long ago in this kingdom by the sea, a wind blew out of a cloud chilling my beautiful Annabel Lee so that her high born Kingsman came and bore her away from me to shut her up in a separate in this kingdom by the sea.

The angels not half so happy in hell went envying her and me.

Yes, that was the reason as all men know in this kingdom by the sea, that the wind came out of the cloud by now killing and kill my Annabel Lee.

But our love, it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we of many far wiser than we and neither the angels in heaven above nor the demons down under the sea can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee and the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

And so all the night-tide I lie down by the side of my dark, my dark, my life and my bride in her sepulchre earth there by the sea in her tomb by the sounding sea.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] In his well-known essay, "The Poetic Principle," Poe argues that poetry's true purpose is to elevate the soul.

- [Poe] I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only in as much as it excites by elevating the soul.

The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

- [Narrator] It was not poetry's role to offer a moral as was commonly believed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and others in his day.

Poe wrote that poetry could enable humanity to attain at least temporarily what he called "Supernal Beauty," which hints at the glories beyond the grave.

- For Poe, this was at least in the realm of poetry, the highest calling to to create this beauty that he had seen a few times in his life.

And I think that beauty he clearly connected with the idea of immortality.

I think he believed that beauty would last.

Whatever else happens.

- [Poe] There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain.

We have still a thirst unquenchable.

This thirst belongs to the immortality of man.

It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave.

We struggle by multi-form combinations among the things and thoughts of time to attain a portion of that loveliness whose very elements perhaps a pertain to eternity alone.

And thus, when by poetry or when by music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods we find ourselves melted into tears.

We weep them through a sorrow at our inability to grasp now wholly here on earth at once and forever.

Those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses, I would define in brief the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.

- He really thinks that the function of the poetic or the musical is to get us in touch to glimpse these, rare glimpses of joy or of beauty and to also feel the loss of that possibility in everyday life.

So he says that we glimpse in poetry what we cannot really ever fully grasp in everyday society.

So poetry and music for him very closely aligned in terms of offering that glimpse that is possible only in art of the beautiful.

- [Narrator] Edgar began working on something very different from anything he had ever created.

It was a prose poem titled "Eureka," an essay on the material and spiritual universe in which he writes.

- [Poe] I designed to speak of the material and spiritual universe of its essence, its origin, its creation, its present condition, and its destiny.

I shall be so rash moreover as to challenge the conclusions and thus in effect, to question the sagacity of many of the greatest and most justly reverenced of men.

- [Narrator] Some critics today believe the work anticipated modern science and cosmology, presciently describing the Big Bang and the expanding universe.

One article from Scientific American notes that "Eureka" contains more than 20 ideas that were revolutionary in 1848 but are now part of everyday science, including the Big Bang, an expanding universe, ideas about the velocity of light and black holes as the final phase of stars.

In Poe's time through the early 20th century, scientists believed in a static and clockwork universe.

In this view, the cosmos is eternal and changeless, but "Eureka" was prescient in describing a universe that had a beginning and is continually expanding.

- But his theory was different.

He didn't see a static universe where all the stars and planets all just sat in one place.

He imagined an expanding universe.

If is expanding, it must have all come from somewhere from one really dense point, a very dense primordial particle.

- [Narrator] The first scientist who may have used Poe's ideas was the Russian mathematician, Alexander Friedmann, who is a fan of Poe and likely read "Eureka," reflecting on the work may have inspired Friedman to perceive the true meaning of Einstein's field equations that the universe is expanding, whereas other scientists including Einstein, missed this.

In 1922, Friedman published his pioneering theory and equations for an expanding universe which set into motion a radical new understanding of how the universe works.

Five years later, the Belgian physicist and priest, Georges Lemaitre first suggested the Big Bang when he theorized that the universe began from a single extraordinarily dense primordial atom that diversified as it expanded.

Given Poe's popularity in Europe at the time, could Lemaitre have been inspired by Poe who wrote in "Eureka," [Poe] "The assumption of absolute unity in the primordial particle includes that of infinite divisibility from the one particle as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically in all directions to immeasurable, but still definite distances in the previously vacant space, a certain inexpressively great yet limited number of unimaginably, yet not infinitely minute atoms."

- I think that Poe has been located as a really important touchstone in the history of science for the way in which he identified intuition with scientific insight.

So he was kind of trying to go beyond a kind of binary opposition between rational judgment and scientific discovery on the one hand and a more intuitive relationship to the truth on the other.

And I think for him, poetry is a really great example of the two coming together.

- [Narrator] However, "Eureka" barely sold and was largely ignored by the press.

Few attended Poe's public lectures on the subject, which many found confusing.

Yet time would prove many of his ideas correct.

After Virginia's death, Poe grew more emotionally unstable, orphaned at such a young age and the victim of so much loss, he desperately needed an anchor, a woman who would care for him, save himself from drinking, and who would have the means to finance the Stylus, his lifelong dream of owning an influential literary journal.

One woman, Paul Poe courts, is 45-year-old fellow poet, Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence, Rhode Island, who is exactly six years older than Poe.

She was a widow with no children who lived with her mother and sister in this house.

Helen was a spiritualist who attempted to communicate with the spirits of the dead and later in life was said to have conducted seances at her home, an admirer of Poe's work.

She and Edgar exchanged letters and poems for some time before Poe visits her in Providence in September, 1848.

They enjoy spending time together at the Providence Athenaeum.

- I think she represented like Virginia, someone that was devoted that could have been devoted to him and that would've taken care of him.

And this is what he's most looking for in the period after Virginia's death.

- [Narrator] Just two days after meeting, as they are strolling in a cemetery which were popular places for romantic couples of the period.

Edgar proposes marriage.

Helen is unsure and tells him she must think about it.

The two have a stormy and intense courtship in which Helen rejects numerous marriage proposals from Poe spiraling him into depression and hopelessness.

Her mother is staunchly against the marriage believing that Poe is only after her money and Helen is concerned about Edgar's drinking and potential infidelity.

Her rejections even drive him to attempt suicide with Laudanum.

When he visits Providence a second time in November, Helen realizes his desperate condition and has a change of heart.

She agrees to marry him.

They plan a Christmas wedding, but on one condition, Poe must abstain from alcohol.

On December 20th, Poe returns to Providence to speak on the poetic principle before a sold out crowd of 1800 people.

With Helen sitting in the front, the lecture impresses her profoundly, but on December 23rd, just two days before their wedding, the couple is in the Providence Athenaeum.

When Helen receives an anonymous note that Poe had been seen intoxicated the night before, his pension for self-sabotage had reemerged and he had broken his pledge.

Poe made his final plea to her, but to no avail.

The relationship was over.

They would never see each other again.

Another woman, Poe pursues is 28-year-old Nancy Richmond of Lowell, Massachusetts, whom Edgar calls Annie, a kind and simple lady.

Annie is married to a wealthy paper manufacturer and mother to a three-year-old girl.

Annie becomes a kind of emotional anchor for Poe as they develop a platonic romance.

Edgar saw Annie as a caretaking angelic sibling.

One of his finest poems for Annie describes his suicide attempt and Annie's promise to come to his deathbed, "Thank Heaven!

The crisis."

The danger is past, and the lingering illness is over at last and the fever called "Living" is conquered at last.

The sickness, the nausea, the pitiless pain have ceased with the fever that maddened my brain with the fever called living that burned in my brain.

In the final stanza, Poe credits, his recovery to the devoted love expressed in the eyes of the kind Annie.

[Poet] But my heart, it is brighter than all of the many stars in the sky for it sparkles with Annie, it glows with the light of the love of my Annie with the thought of the light of the eyes of my Annie.

(bright music) [Narrator] In January, 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California.

The following year some 90,000 prospective gold miners rushed to California to seek their fortune.

These 49ers, as they were called, ventured from all over the United States and abroad, half traveling by land, half by sea.

(bright music) The gold rush changed San Francisco from a tiny settlement of 200 residents in 1846 to a boom town of 25,000 residents only four years later.

Before 1848, the estimated non-Indian population of California was less than a thousand.

By the end of 1849, it topped 100,000.

This sudden population surge allowed California to become a state the following year as part of the compromise of 1850.

Poe's reaction to the gold rush is expressed in his poem "El Dorado," which describes the failed journey of a gallant knight who has spent his life in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

When an old man, he meets a pilgrim shadow who points the way through the valley of the shadow, perhaps hinting that the real El Dorado lies in wisdom and spiritual understanding.

"Gaily bedight.

A gallant knight in sunshine and in shadow had journeyed long singing a song in search of El Dorado, but he grew old this knight, so bold and o'er his heart, a shadow fell as he found no spot of ground that looked like El Dorado.

And, as his strength failed him at length, he met a pilgrim shadow.

"Shadow."

said he, "where can it be?

This land of El Dorado over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of the shadow, ride boldly, ride, the shade replied, "If you seek for El Dorado!"

- There's a way in which Poe is wonderfully un-American.

You know that may be precisely his importance to the American cannon is he refused to embrace a lot of the values that were taken for granted in the time, and that's also part of why it's been so hard to kind of make him fit into American literary history.

And it really took outside figures like Baudelaire or later figures in the 20th century like Tony Morrison, to really clarify ways in which Poe precisely by not fitting the mold of American literature, really, really became the centerpiece for innovation in the coming centuries.

- [Narrator] That same year, Poe composes one of his most famous poems, "The Bells" that focuses purely on sound and the transformative nature of bells.

This highly onomatopoeia poem transforms from the tinkling sound of slay bells to the chiming sound of wedding bells to the clamoring sound of fire alarm bells to the tolling sound of funeral bells.

The poem begins.

"Here, the sledges with the bells, silver bells.

What a world of merriment, their melody foretells, how they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy air of night.

While the stars that oversprinkle all the heavens, seem to twinkle with a crystalline delight keeping time, time, time in a sort of Runic rhyme to the tintinabulation that so musically, wells from the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells from the jingling and the tingling of the bells."

In the spring of 1849, Poe's luck finally turns, a wealthy printer from Illinois, Edward Patterson offers to publish the stylists with Poe as half owner and sole editor.

His lifelong dream is now firmly in reach.

As part of the agreement, Poe sets out on a speaking tour in Virginia to raise funds and find subscribers, but he also feels a sense of foreboding he cannot shake revealing to his Massachusetts confidant, Annie.

"My sadness is unaccountable and this makes me the more sad.

I am full of dark forebodings.

Nothing cheers or comforts me.

My life seems wasted.

The future looks a dreary blank."

- [Narrator] According to Muddy, Edgar feared that this trip might be his last, that he quote, "Might be called suddenly from the world."

Poe delays the trip several times.

Finally, on the 29th of June, Poe bids a tearful farewell to Muddy and departs New York for Richmond.

After a harrowing journey, he arrives where he soon gives a series of well-received readings to raise money and generate interest for the "Stylus."

Back in his boyhood city, he visits old haunts and acquaintances.

The place soon brings back memories of his youthful love, Elmira Royster, who is now a wealthy widow and mother of two children, he decides to drop by unannounced.

One Sunday afternoon, Elmira later recalled.

- [Elmira] I was ready to go to church and a servant told me that a gentleman in the parlor wanted to see me.

I went down and was amazed to see him, but knew him instantly.

He came up to me in the most enthusiastic manner and said, "Oh, Elmira, is this you?"

That very morning I told him I was going to church that he must call again.

And when he did call again, he renewed his addresses.

I laughed at it.

He looked very serious and said he was in earnest and had been thinking about it for a long time.

And I found out that he was very serious and I became serious.

- [Narrator] After a brief courtship, Edgar proposes to Elmira, but she postpones her response to show his good faith.

He joins the Richmond chapter of the Sons of Temperance.

In the final letter, Poe would ever write, he tells Annie about Elmira and his success in Richmond.

[Poe]"Elmira has just got home from the country.

I spent last evening with her.

I think she loves me more devotedly than anyone I ever knew, and I cannot help loving her in return, nothing is as yet.

Definitely settled and it will not do to hurry matters.

On Tuesday, I start for Philadelphia to attend to Mrs. Laud's Poems and possibly on Thursday I may start for New York.

If I do, I will go straight over to Mrs. Lewis' and send for you.

If possible, I will get married before I start.

But there is no telling.

My poor, poor Muddy, I am still unable to send you even $1, but keep up heart.

I hope that our troubles are nearly over.

I showed your letter to Elmira and she says, it is such a darling precious letter that she loves you for it already.

The papers here are praising me to death, and I have been received everywhere with enthusiasm.

Your own Eddy."

As Poe begins his journey on the 27th of September, his plan is to stop in Philadelphia for a lucrative editing job.

Then pick up Muddy in New York before returning to Richmond.

The poet is in high spirits.

The last few weeks in the society of old and new friends bring him much happiness.

He is soon to marry a wealthy woman who loves him and whom he loves, who could finally give him the financial and emotional support.

He so desperately needs and escape a life of deprivation.

And he is on the verge of realizing his lifelong dream of publishing the "Stylus."

When Poe arrives by steamship in Baltimore the next day, all he must do is take the train North for a new life that is awaiting him.

If he had simply made the train connection, who knows what poems and tales he may have penned, what literary genres he may have invented and what personal happiness he may have found.

But he does not continue to Philadelphia.

Instead, he vanishes into Baltimore's crowded and dangerous streets.

What happens to Poe during the next six days is a mystery.

His cousin, Neilson Poe, a Baltimore resident later wrote Mariah Clemm.

- [Nielson] At what time he arrived in the city where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances I have been unable to ascertain.

- [Narrator] On the afternoon of October 3rd, a printer named Joseph Walker discovers Poe at Gunner's Hall, which once stood here.

It was an Irish tavern that was serving as a polling place on election day.

Poe is in a semi-conscious state wearing somebody else's clothes.

Could Poe have been a victim of cooping?

- His theory has a few holes in it was that he was a victim of cooping, political kidnapping.

When Poe came to Baltimore, it was election time and it was a popular practice, not only in Baltimore, but Philadelphia, New York.

If you're running for office, you would hire thugs and they would go out and kidnap people, usually drunken sailors, soldiers, and there were plenty of those to go around, strangers that were passing through like Poe, but they would never go after someone who was local for obvious reasons.

They would be recognized.

So the way it would work is you would kidnap this person and you would coop them up in the basement of a building and use them as a repeat voter.

Now, in order for this to work, that person had to be applied with alcohol so they couldn't fight back.

And so what they would do is they would take these people around in a wagon and they would vote for the same person over and over again.

So the second time this person would go to vote, they would change the clothing, shave off a mustache, and that way the election judge could say, I never saw that guy before.

He can vote, knowing that he was already voted 20, 30 times when that person got so drunk or out of it that he couldn't even put an x or he started fighting, they would dump you out on the street.

So that would explain Poe's clothing, soiled, ripped, and being found at a polling place at Tavern.

But that's a theory.

- [Narrator] Recognizing Poe's urgent condition, walker scribbles a note and dispatches it to Poe's longtime friend Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, who rushes to the tavern to assist realizing Poe's life is immortal danger.

Snodgrass sends him by carriage to Washington Medical College, whose building still exists today.

He is cared for by Dr. John Moran, the young resident physician who later recounted in a letter.

[Dr. Moran] "When brought to the hospital, he was unconscious of his condition, who brought him or with whom he'd been associating.

He remained in this condition from five o'clock in the afternoon, the hour of his admission until three next morning.

This was on the 3rd October, to this state, succeeded tremor of the limbs and at first a busy but not violent or active delirium, constant talking and vacant converse with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls.

His face was pale and his whole person drenched in perspiration.

We were unable to induce tranquility before the second day after his admission, wishing to rally and sustain his now fast sinking hopes.

I told him I hoped that in a few days he would be able to enjoy the society of his friends here.

At this, he broke out with much energy and said the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol.

That when he beheld his degradation, he was ready to sink in the earth.

Mr. Poe seemed to doze and I left him for a short time.

When I returned, I found him in a violent delirium, resisting the efforts of two nurses to keep him in bed.

This state continued until Saturday evening when he commenced calling for one Reynolds, which he did through the night up to three on Sunday morning.

At this time, a very decided change began to affect him having become enfeeble from exertion.

He became quiet and seemed to rest for a short time.

Then gently moving his head, he said, 'Lord helped my poor soul' and expired.

[Narrator] Poe died at the Washington Medical College on Sunday, October 7th at 5:00 AM age 40.

He was buried the next afternoon in Baltimore's Presbyterian Cemetery.

Only seven people attended his funeral with the ceremony lasting a mere three minutes.

One observer described it as cold-blooded and un-Christian-like.

Poe coffin lacked a name plate, a cloth lining, or even a cushion for his head.

He was buried in the family plot that for many years had no headstone to identify him.

Even in death, things only got worse for Poe, one of his biggest mistakes while alive was apparently appointing Rufus Griswold as his literary executor to oversee the posthumous publication of his works.

It was a tragic misjudgment.

Yet it's also possible Poe did not appoint anybody to be his literary executor, and that Griswold essentially appointed himself.

Griswold secretly despised Poe and took his revenge two days after the poet's death in an extremely damaging obituary in the "New York Tribune" that was widely reprinted.

Poe had his defenders, but they were largely ignored whereas Griswold, a respected anthologist who was allegedly his literary executor, was seen as authoritative.

The following year, Griswold was merciless.

He falsely claimed, Poe had been expelled from the University of Virginia, deserted the US Army, and had been addicted to drugs.

The last charge still sticks today, Poe was a vilified in the press.

His supporters, including Sarah Helen Whitman, began the long journey of restoring his literary and personal reputation.

26 years later, in 1875, a memorial ceremony was organized in Baltimore as Poe was reinterred beneath a tombstone befitting one of America's greatest writers, and this is where Edgar Allen Poe lies today.

He was later joined by his wife, Virginia and his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, eminent writers from the world offered words of praise.

Biographers at last began to write far truer accounts of Poe's life.

Thanks to the translations of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, Poe became extremely popular in France and there was yet another mystery.

It happened every year since 1949, for 60 years.

In the early hours of January 19th on Poe's birthday - The man was dressed in all black with a white scarf and black hat.

Not a top hat, but just a regular hat.

He would come into the graveyard and sometimes he would go to the Poe's original grave in the back, sometimes up front.

Usually in the early years of us watching, he would go to the monument at the corner.

He would come in and he would place the flowers, place the cognac, and sometimes he would just stand there, maybe saying a prayer.

Sometimes he would put his hand on Poe's face that's on the monument, and then he would remove it.

Sometimes he would kneel and then he would leave and that was it.

And when he would go into the back of the graveyard, he would come up to Poe's stone representing where Poe's original grave was.

He would put his hand on it, put the roses in cognac, and then do the same thing.

Maybe just stand there for a moment.

Then he would leave, and that would be the routine year after year.

And it never lost its magic for me because I thought, here I am being privileged to watch this tribute that we think has been going on since 1949.

- [Narrator] To this day, his identity remains a mystery.

It took decades, but eventually Poe is recognized for his genius having pioneered three literary genres, the horror tale, the detective story, and science fiction.

His critical essays helped establish the modern short story.

He popularized cryptography and may have even contributed to our understanding of the universe.

In time, Poe ranked among the most admired and beloved American literary figures.

He has influenced writers and artists throughout the ages, even long after his troubled yet remarkable life.

(upbeat music) (bright music)