Arrive Magazine - January/February, 2009

The Baltimore Poe House
and Museum
Baltimore

Though Edgar Allan Poe also called Richmond, Va., home during his lifetime, it was in this modest brick duplex that he crafted some of his earliest

e orts, between 1832 and 1835. While sharing the five rooms with his grandmother, aunt and two cousins (one of whom, Virginia, he would later marry), he penned such shocking tales as Berenice and MS. Found in a Bottle . Visitors can explore the garret where he may have inked these works; as curator Je Jerome notes, it has been surmised that the cramped space may have influenced the themes of premature burial in his work. The author’s belongings, as well as such appropriately macabre relics as a lock of his hair and a fragment of his co n, also are on display. Poe aficionados will have to wait until spring to visit the house as part of the yearlong festivities celebrating the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth—it’s closed for the season through early March.

203 N. Amity St., Baltimore

410-396-7932

The Walt Whitman House
Camden, N.J.

The success of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1882 allowed the poet to purchase this two-story house on Mickle Boulevard, which was the first and only property he owned during his lifetime. Visitors to the Whitman House will find it much as it was during his time there, says curator Leo D. Blake. “The rustic wooden structure evokes the spirit and atmosphere of the poet as he worked to complete his final edition of Leaves of Grass,” Blake says. Many of Whitman’s belongings are on display in the house, including personal e ects, letters and a collection of daguerreotypes that contains the earliest photograph of Whitman in existence. The bed in which Whitman died while residing in the house in 1892, as well as the death notice that was nailed to the front door of the house, have both been preserved.