“In October 1845—while still enjoying the popularity of “The Raven,” his Tales and his numerous public lectures—Poe was invited to read an original poem before the Boston Lyceum for a fee of fifty dollars. James Russell Lowell had secured this invitation, despite Poe’s recent attack on him. Poe had mixed feelings about Boston, which had played a significant role in his life. He had been born in poverty in Boston while his parents had been on tour; had fled there from Richmond after quarreling with John Allan; had enlisted and served his first months in the army there; had published his first volume, “By a Bostonian,” there; he had criticized the integrity of one of their most prominent authors in the “Longfellow War”; and had for many years conducted a running battle in the literary reviews with the puritanical and provincial New England Transcendentalists. Boston, for Poe, was enemy territory. But he entered it with reckless audacity.”