While researching a story about a (fictional) 1910 poetry class at the Bronx branch of the Henry Street Settlement, I remembered the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage that I used to pass when, as a child in the 1950s, I rode the bus to Fordham Road. The simple, white house had a raven painted outside one window. As I looked into the background of the cottage for the short story, I discovered that Poe did not actually write “The Raven” while living there. He wrote that poem earlier, when he lived in Manhattan. However, during the years (1846-1849) that he, his wife Virginia, and her mother Maria, lived at the house, Poe wrote “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume.” They loved the small, rustic place, of which a friend wrote, “The cottage had an air of taste and gentility… So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw.” The Bronx was still quite rural at the time and the family is said to have kept songbirds in cages on the porch. Virginia died there of tuberculosis in 1847 in her first-floor bedroom, and Poe died in 1849 while visiting Baltimore. Maria moved out shortly thereafter. Poe Cottage was recognized as a landmark in the 1960s. Presumably (I have not been back to look), fact checkers at the Bronx Historical Society have removed the raven, nevermore to be seen at the cottage window. Read more about my SHORT STORIES and interesting background details in BEHIND THE STORY.
