Odd...................
On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond,
Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs.
St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time.
When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling
place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his
departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to
his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he
had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending
wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career
in the early 19th- century, again—and in the four days between Walker
finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he
never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be
found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets.
Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium,
gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according
to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out
for "Reynolds"—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.
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