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Edgar Allan Poe would have struggled today to recognise the rural calm he sought when renting a modest home outside New York in 1846 for the last four years of his brief, turbulent but productive life.
By all accounts he kept a tidy house, but his lurid imagination would have appreciated the gritty urban Bronx development that has since enveloped the once isolated cottage in the then separate village of Fordham.
The literary critic, poet and author of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Murders in the Rue Morgue was a pioneer of short stories, Gothic horror, detective novels and science fiction alike. He lived a restless, dissolute and peripatetic existence, praised by some friends but alienating many more.
He achieved critical acclaim but scant financial success — notably with his narrative poem The Raven, published in 1845. He sought healthier accommodation north of the city for his youthful wife Virginia (she was just 13 at the time of their marriage) who was suffering from consumption and would die from the disease in 1847.
Their final lodging was away from the literary salons further south in the city and from the writers he had criticised in a series of articles that led to a bitter exchange known as the War of the Literati. It provided the space to produce his later works including The Bells, Annabel Lee and Eureka.
“Oh how supremely happy we were in our dear cottage home!” wrote Maria Clemm, his mother-in-law, who lived with — and outlived — the couple, as she described how after his morning writing sessions, Poe would work in the flower garden, and read and recite poetry.
Today, an apartment building occupies the original location of the cottage, built in 1812 for farm labourers, while the cottage itself was shifted into a small park in 1913 to preserve it and honour the writer’s memory.
It retains a cosy historic character, clad in white clapboard with a veranda in front that leads into three small, dark and low-ceilinged rooms on the main floor, with two more in the attic. The interiors are spartan, with modest furnishings, a reproduction of Poe’s writing desk and a few (potentially) authentic items: a mirror, a bed and a rocking chair. Literary sources of inspiration, including a copy of Captain Cook’s Voyages, sit on a shelf.
There are drawings and photographs on the walls, and a copy of his advertisement seeking backers for The Stylus, his planned literary journal. It was never realised, since Poe died soon after being found delirious in Baltimore in 1849, felled by a suitably mysterious fate — a beating, alcoholism and rabies are among the theories still contested today.
Just to the south in Poe Park sits the striking, airy, brick and glass modern visitor centre designed by Toshiko Mori which opened in 2011. It contains a few artefacts of the author but is primarily an exhibition space and venue for local community activities.
The cottage itself — one of four US houses dedicated to Poe (the others are in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Richmond, Virginia) — needs some physical repair and a refresh of some tired displays. Yet the minimalism is compensated by an audio tour and lively guides. Plus the visitor’s own imagination, just as the author would have wanted.
bronxhistoricalsociety.org/poe-cottage
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