Photography by Steve Parke
We wanted to include a special shout out to Edgar Allan Poe and the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum in Baltimore, where Enchanted Living is based and where Poe lived from 1833 to 1835 in a little brick house on North Amity Street (along with his aunt, grandmother, and two cousins!). Poe worked more in a darkly romantic vein, populating his poems and stories with all manner of gorgeous, sorrowful, and terrifying subjects, not to mention the occasional raven, and we can’t help but admit that our beloved Baltimore seems a fitting residence for him. Of course the city’s main claim to Poe fame is that Poe died there at the age of forty (under somewhat mysterious circumstances), and you can still visit his grave at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground.
Photo editor Steve Parke and our cover model Michael Arden visited Poe’s former residence—a narrow, tiny, unassuming rowhouse—and created this ghostly image on the top floor, the lofted area where Poe did most of his writing. Upon Poe’s death in 1849, his enemy Rufus Griswold wrote an infamous obituary that included this description:
Thin, and pale even to ghastliness, his whole appearance indicated sickness and the utmost destitution … He walked the streets in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayer … with his glance introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched arms beating the winds and rains, would speak as if to spirits that at such times could only be evoked by him.
We like to imagine him haunting our city, just like this.
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
—Edgar Allan Poe