In 1966, the greatest Poe scholar to have ever lived, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, retired from his teaching post at Hunter College, elated to finally possess the leisure to pursue in earnest his long-held dream of compiling a definitive edition of Poe’s complete works. Two years later, at age 69, he had all but finished the first volume, an impossibly thorough treatment of Poe’s poems, but before it went to print, he died, owing to a tumor in his brain.

I discovered Mabbott while consulting the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore to determine whether my then recent Barnes & Noble purchase of “The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe” represented a win for false advertising. With dismay, I found it had. In retrospect, I should have known that the garishly decorated book, sold as a single volume in a venue tailored to the general reading public, would fail to live up to the promise of its title.

In any case, irrespective of one’s interest in Poe, I encourage anyone curious about English scholarship to seek out Mabbott’s works, for they truly are awe-inspiring paragons of accomplishment. Praise like the following, from the Southern Literary Journal, is typical: “Mabbott was recognized as unquestionably the dean of all Poe authorities, in the sweep and depth of his scholarly expertise in a class by himself.”

Despite the foregoing, any veteran reader of this blog should suspect that praising Mabbott is not the aim of this post. Indeed, it isn’t. Rather, the intent is to convey a simple sentiment: the timing and cause of Mabbott’s death is Poetic. It’s tragic that he died just as he was making real progress on what he had aspired to do since his youth, but the grisly cause of death is fitting, considering that the subject of his efforts is popularly regarded as the preeminent author of macabre short fiction. It makes me wonder whether Mabbott’s endeavor somehow caused his death, as if through his intimate dealings with Poe’s writings he became a character in a Poe tale never written. Perhaps if in retirement he had instead pursued anything else he would have lived ten years more.