Poe is a fabulous subject for PBS’s American Masters series, because while he loomed large over American letters in his own lifetime and continues to do so today, most people don’t actually know much about him. You’ve never heard of Griswold, have you? In reality, our image of Poe was largely formed by an excoriating obituary penned by a vengeful rival named Rufus Griswold? To the extent we think of him today, we might recall his masterful horror stories or a couple of poems, probably “The Raven.” If we have an image of him to conjure, it’s probably that of a drug-addled madman, and you might think it’s because of the freaky horror stories or the writ-large Romanticism in his poems. He has exerted a permanent and profound influence on American literature, but you might not be especially aware of that. In a way, though, Poe’s legacy is a bit of a buried one. I have no data on whether these apparatus ever resulted in someone being rescued from accidental burial.) (And a chronic preoccupation in 19th century America: Apparently it occasionally happened, evoking enough horror that coffin makers rigged alarm bells that could be sounded on the surface in the event someone came to and found himself six feet under.
He was not “buried alive,” though it’s an image that crops up in many of his famously creepy stories. On the eve of his second marriage, he disappeared in Baltimore for almost a week, was found delirious and deathly ill, wearing clothes that didn’t look like his own, and died in a hospital a matter of hours later. To this day, no one knows what happened to Edgar Allan Poe.