Monday is the bicentennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe–and today I have an article in the Wall Street Journal on the guy whose poetry gave Baltimore the name of its football team:

In the popular imagination, Poe is the dreary, unsmiling, black-clad bard of diabolism. This is the guy, after all, who reveled in themes of torture (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), pestilence (“The Masque of the Red Death”), and premature burial (“Berenice”). Two of his best-known stories are told from the perspective of murderers — one a cold-blooded killer (“The Cask of Amontillado”), the other a madman who dismembers his victim (“The Tell-Tale Heart”). Poe seemed to relish the deaths of beautiful women, especially when he could also describe their morbid resurrections (“Ligeia” and “Morella”). Sometimes it’s impossible to know whether he’s portraying supernatural events or the ravings of lunatics. His corpse-filled corpus is both engrossing and grotesque.