You can’t take it with you.
One thing you can’t with you is your reputation, the reputation you want. Other forces take it over.
I’m told that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have hated the posthumous honors showered on him by his native city, St.Paul, Minnesota. And now an irritated Edgar Allan Poe is turning over in his grave with all the attention from Boston and the newly dedicated statue near Boston Common.
Katharine Seelye in the NY Times reviews the history. She reminds us that Poe was born in Boston “in 1809 and published some of his most famous works here. But he considered Boston writers self-important and preachy, and he said so. And Boston returned the sentiment. Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed Poe as a “jingle man” for his simplistic style, as if the author of ‘The Raven’ were writing television ads for toothpaste. …
“Other cities have long claimed a piece of the itinerant Poe. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Richmond, Va., all have Poe monuments or museums of one sort or another.
“Boston never bothered. Not without reason. Poe sneered at the city’s luminaries. Riffing off the Frog Pond in the Boston Common, Poe called the local swells Frogpondians,’ their moralistic works sounding like the croaking of so many frogs. As for residents here, they ‘have no soul,’ he said. ‘Bostonians are well bred — as very dull persons very generally are.’
“Now the city is burying the hatchet,” More here.
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