Edgar Allen Poe Finally Gets Funeral
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Edgar Allan Poe’s funeral Sunday may be really late but the American author will get his proper funeral this weekend. 160 years after his death, the celebrated American writer will be given a proper send off.
Poe’s death was quite mysterious as he was discovered in Baltimore stricken both physically and mentally and too incoherent to explain what had happened to him. He was wearing another person’s clothes and would never be able to explain what happened to him or how he came to be in such poor condition.
He would be taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. According to Wiki, Some sources say Poe’s final words were “Lord help my poor soul.” Some believe he never received the proper send off and now he will get one. He died when he was forty years old.
Poe was a strange duck with a dark side reflected in his sometimes bizarre, macabre writing. Some think his father’s abandonment; parents death while he was young; life with foster parents; marriage to his 13-year old cousin when he was himself 26, and who soon died of TB contributed to what some see as mental degeneration and psychotic behavior. His death has been attributed to a brain disease, alcohol, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, or tuberculosis. Newspapers at the time reported Poe’s death as “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation”, common euphemisms for deaths from disreputable causes. But, no one really knows.
The UK Telegraph reports on the funeral this weekend, “At 11.30am on Sunday, a life-size recreation of his body will be carried in a horse-drawn carriage from his Baltimore home in Amity Street, to the Westminster Burying Ground where not one, but two full-length ceremonies will be held in front of up to 700 admirers.
Poe was and remains am=n intriguing character to this very day. Every January 19, in the early hours of the morning, a mysterious person called trhe Poe Toaster, makes a toast of cognac to Poe’s original grave marker and leaves three roses.