“‘My whole existence has been the merest Romance,’ Poe wrote, the year before his death, ‘in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.’ This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. {…] ‘I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth,’ Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.)”