In the late 19th century, “Richmond was in the business of monument-making,” says Poe Museum curator Chris Semtner, detailing the history of the writer’s memorial. The Lee monument had been erected in 1890, and other Civil War statues rose up in 1906 that would collectively give the wide avenue to the west of the city its name.
At that time, James Whitty, an amateur Poe scholar and collector, moved from Baltimore to Richmond. He did so to spearhead an effort to build a statue of Poe, forming the Poe Memorial Association in 1906. But some opinion leaders in the capital dismissed the idea. In the spring of 1906, an editorial appeared in the News Leader, which read, in part, “This newspaper has taken no part in the movement for a monument to Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond. We find it impossible to develop any internal enthusiasm on the subject. While admiring earnestly and enjoying thoroughly the music and beauty of Poe’s poems, we never have been able to divorce the poet from the man or to feel that Poe’s character was such to entitle him to perpetual honor in this community.” There was not to be a Poe statue.
Poe was a complicated man. His associations with various women had fueled gossip for years. There was also the issue of his unusual reaction to alcohol, a hereditary problem his father and sister shared: One drink of wine made Poe noticeably woozy. There was speculation that he was diabetic, but unfortunately, in that era, any problem with alcohol was considered a moral failing.
Also, Poe’s acerbic satire and frank literary criticism had made him some enemies, including writer Rufus Griswold. Poe had criticized Griswold’s anthology of American writers, saying he had allotted too much space to unimportant people and not enough to important ones. Also, in a Poe short story titled “The Angel of the Odd,” a character gets progressively less intelligent as he reads one of Griswold’s books.
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