While many shutter at the recent activities of certain NFL players and how they behave themselves in elevators with their spouses, danger and even horror is not unknown to the city of Baltimore. In fact, the very team that Ray Rice belongs to attained its name from a poem by an icon of American literature. The Raven, a poem by the famous Edgar Allan Poe, was the inspiration for the NFL franchise located on the Chesapeake.
Poe’s life was marked by tragedy. Many of the women in Poe’s life died in the same way of tuberculosis. First his mother, then his foster mother, and even his wife contracted this terrible disease. Poe’s relationship between the women he loved and more specifically his wife can be seen in his poem Annabel Lee. During Poe’s last poem, he explains in painful detail the amount of sorrow he will feel after his wife passes (Annabel Lee was written after his wife had contracted tuberculosis but before she had died). While many see only morbid prose and poetry at their first glance of Poe, a second look can often reveal a deeper meaning to his stories. For example, in Annabel Lee, Poe reveals a character that cares so deeply for his beloved one he cannot bare to part with her. His love was so deep that he would weep daily at her tomb. This love is a reason Poe should be viewed as more than just the founder of the modern horror and detective genres: he is an icon. He personifies the American life in a realistic way that many authors before him would rather ignore by revert to an unrealistic happy ending. Even though his work is revered now, Poe struggled throughout his life as a writer financially and eventually died in Baltimore.
His death was shrouded in mystery; furthermore, some historians believe his death to be a homicide. Perhaps a correlation can be draw between the negative media attention Ray Rice brought to the Baltimore Ravens and the sad life of the author of the team’s namesake. Perhaps Poe’s sad life was never meant to be magnified by his modern success as an author. Perhaps any association with Poe will bring about the misfortune that plagued the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Fortunately, the Baltimore Raven’s Super Bowl championships in 2000 and 2012 disprove any curse-like association to the team. Fortunately, Edgar Allan Poe’s status as an icon of American prose and poetry almost atones for the misfortunes he endured during his own life.
American Cultural Icons 