Edgar Allan Poe Cooping Essay

Edgar Allan Poe once said “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.” On September 28, 1849 Poe arrived in Baltimore but had disappeared and no one knew where he was for a couple of days. He was given money by John R. Thompson before his trip over to Baltimore from Richmond but when he was found sitting outside of Ryan’s Tavern, a saloon that at the time was also a polling place for the elections, he was found by Joseph Walker with no money on him and had seemed to be intoxicated and weak. Due to the fact that Poe was found outside of the saloon/polling center seemingly drunk and delirious, with no money, weak, and strange clothes, “cooping” can be viewed as the most plausible cause for his death. In the mid nineteenth century gang members performed an illegal act known as “cooping,” it was a method for

With him being an alcoholic for a majority of his life people like to think that it was a simple possibility for him to fall back into that lifestyle even though he had claimed to be apart of the temperance movement. But when Poe stated that he was becoming a part of that movement he was very adamant about his decision. No one had seen him pick up a drink since he had stated that. Before he had stopped drinking, after about two drinks, Poe began to feel sick and not be able to handle heavy drinking. With that being said there would be no logical reason for Poe to continue drinking if it made him sick. The gangs were known for getting the voter drunk to be delirious during the voting so they were not sure of what was going on. So when someone committed that much to stop drinking there is no way that they would continue to drink. Gangs got voters extremely drunk, sent them to election places to vote for one candidate, and left them alone not knowing what was going on when they sobered