I was always taught that he was equal parts fascinated and repulsed by death, a truly "morbid curiosity". So he was freaked out by the bird but couldn't get it off his mind and wrote a strange, twisted horror-poem about it.

I can see Poe being sufficiently freaked out by the stuffed bird of his British equivalent that he wrote a whole creepy ass poem about it.

Oh yes, because Merry Old England never did anything like that at all.

Not in every part of the US. They're tearing down over half of the 200 year old main street in a town near me. It's near collapse because no one took care of it, and now it's too expensive to repair so the town has to tear it down. People tried for years to get historic recognition for the individual properties but because the buildings were originally built as a complex and not as single structures they wouldn't grant it because parts of the complex of structures had been modified and modernized.

NPR plays it every year, some other commercial radio stations do too. But mostly it's an NPR listener thing.

He was kind of a legend in Stockbridge. Like the real life Barney Fife.

It's more like the sheer amount of food to put away/divvy up, and dishes to wash. Even if you keep up on the washing, it's still a lot after the meal. It would take a 4 or so people a couple hours in my family most of the time.

I wasn't gonna give it away, but yeah

But wouldn't revolutionizing the understanding of history kinda make them relevant again, you know like when the Valley of The Kings was first discovered???

I personally preferred the cat mummies

Well in 2000+ years the pronunciation of this particular word stayed the same, the only thing that changed was the actual spelling.

It sounds like there were very few literate speakers until the language was fully codified recently. Meaning that it was free in that perhaps different families or communities had slightly different pronunciation of various words but could understand each other easily despite that fact.