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Topic: Poe Toaster & poetaster

Today we mark the bicentennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. The life of that literary critic, poet, and father of the detective fiction genre was brief, sad, and marred by tragedy and failure. His death itself was (and still is) a mystery: among other things, his death at age 41 was blamed on alcohol, cholera, tuberculosis, rabies, and sexually transmitted diseases.

60 years ago, on Poe's death centennial, the first Poe Toaster visited the Baltimore grave of Edgar Allan Poe. Who (or what) is a Poe Toaster? The Poe Toaster is a person dressed in black and carrying a cane, cognac, and roses. Each year on January 19th, he or she visits Poe's grave, raises a cognac toast, lays down three roses and half a bottle of cognac, before hurrying off into the shadows. The identity of the Poe Toaster has remained a mystery, although some watchers have their suspicions.

The secretive Poe Toaster is a classic Baltimore character, and the term Poe toaster is one character—one O—away from poetaster. What's a poetaster? "A versifier"; "a writer of worthless or inferior verses." Playwright Ben Jonson borrowed the term poetaster from Latin at the turn of the 17th century. That term, originally used by Erasmus, combines the Latin poeta meaning "poet," plus –aster, the suffix that in Latin denotes partial resemblance and in English means "one that is inferior or not genuine." Although poetaster is hardly common, it wouldn't be fair to say we expect to hear it nevermore.

Questions or comments? Write us at wftw@aol.com Production and research support for Word for the Wise comes from Merriam-Webster, publisher of language reference books and Web sites including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

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