Celebrate Poe George Bartley

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to Celebrate Poe - This is episode 250 Whitman and the Civil War.Walt Whitman was forty-two years old when the Civil War started. Some critics would charge that he should have joined the Union Army, but anyone who knew him, like his friend and biographer John Burroughs, could hardly conceive of the mild and empathic poet as a soldier. "Could there be anything more shocking and incongruous than Whitman killing people?" Burroughs would write. "One would as ...

Send us a Text Message.This is episode 249 - America’s First Gay BarWhile the word gay certainly wasn’t used to connote same sex attraction during Walt Whitman’s lifetime, Whitman DID patronize an establishment at 647 Broadway that today might be considered a gay bar. And that drinking establishment was known as Pfaff’s - spelled PFAFFs. I have even heard a Whitman scholar compare Pfaff’s to the disco bar Studio 54.In fact, Whitman even wrote a brief poem about the bar in his 186...

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to Celebrate Poe - This is episode 248 - America’s Poet - This is the first full episode of Pride Month dealing with Walt Whitman.This episode emphasizes that Whitman continually revised and added new poems to his masterpiece "Leaves of Grass" over his lifetime to symbolize the organic, ever-changing nature of the work itself. This allowed the work to grow and evolve much like living grass. The different editions from 1855 to 1892 were almost entirely re-w...

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to Celebrate Poe - My name is George Bartley, and this is Episode 247 - Same Sex Attraction in the 19th CenturyAs I write the script for this podcast episode, tomorrow is the first day of LGBTQ month - and similar to previous years, I decided to devote the entire month to individuals who are viewed as gay heroes. The month of June is an appropriate time to look at some of the voices and narratives - some hidden and some not so hidden - that challenged soci...

Send us a Text Message.Today I’d like to take a slight change of pace with a look at an area that is not often associated with Edgar Allan Poe, but an area in which the Allan family vacationed - White Sulphur Springs during the summers of 1812, 1813, and 1814. Prior to the Civil War, the White Sulphur Springs area was called western Virginia, but all that changed when West Virginia became a state in 1863.Now it would have taken roughly three days for the Allans to travel from Richmond ...

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to Celebrate Poe - My name is George Bartley, and this is Episode 245 - Byron’s Influences on Poe. This episode is the third - and final - for now - episode about Lord Byron, and does not deal as much with Byron’s escapades in Europe, but how he influenced Edgar Poe. The episode delves into the young Edgar Poe as an imitator of Byron, and introduces the important concept of how Poe gradually developed his own voice.This episode begins with a promo de...