Poe

Up and down the East Coast this month, in Baltimore and Richmond and Philadelphia and Charleston, Boston's forgotten native son was toasted. Enthusiasts celebrated the 198th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe by eating cake and listening to "The Raven " and admiring a lock of the long-dead author's hair.

But Boston, the city where Poe was born, was deathly quiet.

It should come as no surprise; it is hard to uncover any tribute to Poe in Boston, or even a mention. His name is not routinely uttered on tours of the city, nor does it appear among the 1,000-plus attractions on the city's tourism website. Boston has neither a Poe statue nor a Poe museum -- only a small plaque commemorating his birthplace on the outside wall of a luggage store. The Poe Studies Association , a group of scholars and fans, rejected Boston for its 2009 celebration of the bicentennial of his birth partly because this city offers little for Poe aficionados.

"There's one question of why Poe abandoned Boston," says Matthew Pearl , Cambridge author of a mystery novel, "The Poe Shadow ." "But there's another question of why Boston still abandons Poe. Being a place that appreciates our literary history, we just ignore Poe."

Part of the chasm between Poe and Boston is physical -- the house where most scholars think he was born no longer stands; the plaque commemorating his birth on Carver Street, outside Green's Luggage Shop at the fringe of the Theater District, suggests his birthplace is now an alley full of trucks servicing the state Transportation Building. (On Poe's birthday in 1989, that section of Carver Street was renamed Poe Way, but it appears even this gesture was ephemeral. The Carver Street signage remains today, and we could find no sign of Poe Way.)

The relationship between the poet and his hometown has been tormented for nearly two centuries. Poe sometimes lied about his birthplace, suggesting he entered the world in Richmond or Baltimore, even though one of his more famous short stories was reputedly based on his military service on Castle Island here in Boston. He grew deeply scornful of the literary elite in Boston and its environs, deriding the writers as "Frogpondian" and incapable of recognizing a decent poem if it fell onto their precious Common. He radiated special enmity for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- appointed to a professorship at Harvard while Poe struggled to pay his bills -- and accused the poet of plagiarism.

"Poe had said so many unkind things about Boston," said Kent P. Ljungquist , an English professor and Poe scholar at Worcester Polytechnic Institute .

After a disastrous reading by Poe at the Boston Lyceum in 1845, the city's journalists and other writers reciprocated. Poe was instructed to read a new poem before the group but apparently could not produce something suitable on demand. Instead, he dusted off a poem he published when he was just 20, "Al Aaraaf, " an obtuse and lengthy tome.

The reading bombed, and much of the audience left mid-poem. The Boston Daily Star later called the piece "rich in intense twaddle." The Yankee Blade noted that Poe "delivered what he asserted to be a poem," and described the author as "very pompous, very assuming."

Poe, trying to save face, soon claimed his reading was a hoax on the Bostonians. "We were born there -- and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact," he wrote not long after the calamitous reading.

He was born on Jan. 19, 1809, to Eliza and David Poe, traveling actors who were performing in Boston. The house where many scholars believe he was born, at 62 Carver St., was torn down in the 1960s to make way for the state Transportation Building, said Larry Meehan, vice president of tourism and media for the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau . (Meehan likens Poe's Boston legacy to that of Benjamin Franklin, another native son more closely associated with Philadelphia, where he absconded when he was 17.)

Within a year of Poe's birth, scholars believe, his family left town. By the time Poe was 3, both of his parents had died and he was living in Richmond with a foster family, the Allans.

Later, Poe would struggle with his own sense of place. His first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems, " was self-published here in 1827, when Poe was 18. In a style not usual for the time, the book listed the author simply as "A Bostonian."

Some scholars see Poe's choice for the author's name as an opportunistic attempt to sell books in the country's literary hub. But Pearl thinks Poe, who hopped from city to city on the East Coast -- it's all but impossible to pin down how much time he spent as an adult here -- was sincerely searching for a place to call home.

The same year, Poe enlisted in the Army and was stationed on Castle Island for five months. According to legend, Poe heard a tale about the fort's former prison that inspired his later story, "The Cask of Amontillado ."

It seems as if every other city where Poe stayed, no matter how briefly, celebrates him. Baltimore, the Bronx and Philadelphia all host Poe museums, as did Salem until recently . So does Richmond, where demolished houses were no impediment for the Poe Museum , which is home to $10 Poe action figures with detachable ravens, and boasts it is "only blocks away from Poe's first Richmond house."

Even at the University of Virginia, where Poe spent just 10 months before he left without paying $2,000 in gambling debt s , a group called the Raven Society maintains the room where Poe lived in his student days.

But in Boston, Longfellow and Hawthorne still reign supreme. Poe would be chagrined.

Pearl, who set out to learn everything he could about Poe through a six-state odyssey as he researched his novel, has long been baffled by the scant attention paid here to Poe. When Pearl gives public readings of his novel, he often quizzes the audience on where Poe was born. "Almost nobody knows the answer, even in Boston," he said.

Poe's final Boston chapter almost ended tragically. In 1848, a year before his death, a lovelorn and tortured Poe tried to commit suicide in Boston by swallowing large quantities of an opiate, laudanum. A friend saved him, however, and he vomited up the drug.

"That's one of the Boston moments that certainly Poe wouldn't have looked at fondly, and that we might not want to point out on a Duck Tour," Pearl said. "But why not? Poe is such an intriguing figure to people. People would be very intrigued by this."

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com