| Edgar Allan Poe is buried in the
Westminster Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Monument to Edgar Allan Poe
In September 1849 Poe left Richmond and headed for New York to
help a lady friend with her manuscripts. For reasons unknown he stopped at
Baltimore on the way and on the 3rd October he was discovered in the street
outside a polling station in a delirious and semi-conscious state. It is not known
whether he was suffering from excessive alcohol, heart failure or epilepsy - or
possibly a combination of all three.
Poe was taken to hospital but died four
days later. His last words were: "Lord help my poor soul." He was buried
the next day in the Baltimore Presbyterian Cemetery in an unmarked grave.
In 1875 a new monument to Poe was erected. Walt Whitman was present
at the dedication
ceremony and letters from Longfellow, Whittier and
Tennyson were read out. Several years later the remains of Virginia Poe (Poe's wife)
were exhumed and brought from New York and added to those of Poe.
Poe's poetry was a major influence on the French
symbolist poets.
He was also admired in England by the likes of W.B.
Yeats, Wilde, Swinburne and
D.G. Rossetti.
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