As the movie’s opening helpfully informs us, Edgar Allan Poe was found in a bad state in October, 1849, in Baltimore, and died not long thereafter. “In a bad state”, for Poe, was very likely code for “falling down drunk”, but no one’s absolutely sure of that, or even exactly what he died of, though it certainly might have been liver failure. The movie has him found on a park bench, though some sources claim he was found in the gutter, while others say it was in a pub, but hey, I don’t think anyone’s shocked at the idea that a Hollywood movie dramatized the facts a little too much.
The Raven
