Text: Anonymous, “After the Poe Celebration,” New York Times (New York, NY), January 31, 1909, p. 42, cols. 3-5

[page 42, column 3, continued:]

After the Poe Celebration

Lesson of the Tight-Shut Gates in a Certain Graveyard in the City of Baltimore.

IT was the policeman on the corner of Greene and Fayette Streets in Baltimore who spoke, waving his club at the grim railings at his back. No, Sir, there cain’t nobody get in, less they have written orders.” Behind him, in the lowest corner of Westminster churchyard, was the Edgar Allan Poe gravestone. Its base was smothered in wreaths, but in order to see them you must needs be coming down the hill from above, or else, like the couple of dozen curious schoolchildren, you must climb the wall in which the railings are set, and peer through.

“The janitor he come here and let in them as had orders, and they left those wreaths; then he locked all up again.”

It was the late afternoon of Poe's hundredth birthday. The little: official procession had come and gone; the wreaths had been dropped, the schoolchildren had composed their little says, and that corner of Baltimore, two blocks from its shopping centre, once again entered on an imprisonment of perhaps another hundred years. In the newspapers the Baltimoreans resented mightily the accusation of indifference; but, as far as the individuals went, that indifference remained. There was not, that afternoon, one single curious visitor [column 4:] to see Poe's grave. Delegations came, and the gates were shut behind them; in the evening mass meetings were held, resolutions passed, speeches made, tracts recited, but the churchyard where he lies is locked and barred, and before long the average inhabitant will again relapse into consideration of the name of Poe as, first, that of youth who played great football, and, secondly, that of the present City Solicitor of Baltimore.

One thought of the grave of Keats, and the opportunities for visiting it. There you may come and go as the mood seizes you; in Baltimore you must be a member of an official delegation. What are the authorities afraid of? Not, one thinks, of too frenzied an interest, of too large a horde of the curious or the worshipful who might trample down the grave of chip segments from the monument.

It will be interesting to watch, as the tumult and the shouting from our late celebrative mood more real things will spring. The occasion gave opportunity for the thrashing out of many moot points in the man's life, for the exchange of many opinions as to his art and as to his fame's being greater or less than it ought to be, but the really valuable result will be — as was hinted in the first of THE TIMES'S articles [column 5:] on the subject — it American literature at large, and the American public's appreciation of literature, gain some thing of that unprejudiced and unprovincial attitude which long has marked the European acclaim for Poe. Universities have made polite motions, in New York and Baltimore, and Virginia; and there have been medals struck and distributed to Prof. This and Monsieur That; but the test will be revealed only in the poetry, the prose, and the criticism to be published in these coining years in America. It we continue in complacent belief that the idols of commercialism and quantity are the most high gods for our literature, then will all the late storm and stress about Poe have availed nothing.

The gates will be as tight upon our literature as upon the churchyard where Poe lies. It they were opened once — that official rites might take place, which after all had but very little to do with any general popular sentiment — they are now closed again; the old order rules again; we may look through the railings, but we cannot enter.

“No,” as the policeman said, the other afternoon, in Baltimore, “there cain’t nobody come in less’n he's got written orders for the janitor to open up for him.”