LETTER TO THE EDITOR
If Only Poe Had Succeeded When He Said Nevermore to Drink
from The New York Times, September 23, 1996
To the Editor:
Dr. R. Michael Benitez, an assistant professor of medicine at Maryland University Medical Center, is wrong to ascribe the death of Edgar Allan Poe to rabies through animal infection rather than to the traditionally maintained cause of alcoholism (news article, September 15).
Poe was found outside a Baltimore saloon in an alcoholic stupor on October 3, 1849, and died four days later. Dr. John J. Moran’s account of his final days is given in a letter to Poe’s aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, a New York Herald article in 1875, and a book by Moran in 1885. Supplementary accounts of Poe’s alcoholic condition came from Joseph Walker, a Baltimore printer who first found him; Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, an editor well known to Poe; and two of Poe’s relatives. None of these confirm Dr. Benitez’s statement that “Poe was not drunk.” Evidence of Poe’s chronic binges is strewn through his letters, in periodic admissions of “recoveries” and promises to his wife, Virginia, and her mother to “reform.”
Dr. Benitez admits the primary weakness of his theory—lack of evidence of a bite or scratch. In those days, rabies was well known as to causes and symptoms, including itching and other sensations that could affect an entire limb or side of the body. How could Moran and his staff ignore such symptoms in a patient?
And what of Poe’s cat, dearly loved but left behind in the Bronx over three months earlier? Guiltless was the pet Caterina, who, uninfected and showing no sign of rabies, died of starvation when deserted by Clemm after Poe’s death.
In short, there is no need to whitewash° the self-destructive behavior of this literary genius and major American poet, critic, and teller of tales.
Burton R. Pollin
Robert E. Benedetto
Bronxville, New York
September 20, 1996
The writers are, respectively, professor emeritus of English, City University of New York, and an associate film professor at the University of South Carolina.
“If Only Poe Had Succeeded When He Said Nevermore to Drink” by Burton R. Pollin from The New York Times, Editorial Desk, September 23, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Burton R. Pollin. Reproduced by permission of the author.
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