Fernando Valverde's "Edgar Allan Poe Is Reached at the Baltimore Harbor by the Shadows That Pursue Him"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 4 minutes

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Summary

Fernando Valverde (Granada, 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM and the Sorbonne).

His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. He has received some of the most prestigious awards for poetry in Spanish, including the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias and the Antonio Machado. His last book, The Insistence of Harm, received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute of the City University of New York.

For ten years he has worked as a journalist for the Spanish newspaper El País. He directs the International Festival of Poetry in Granada and is a professor at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, EEUU).

His last bilingual book, America, has been published by Copper Canyon Press with translation by Carolyn Forché.

In 2022, Fernando Valverde published the first biography of the poet Percy B. Shelley in Spanish and in 2024 he published a monumental biography of Lord Byron. Valverde is considered one of the greatest specialists in Romanticism today.

-bio via FernandoValverde.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.5	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, May 14th, 2025.
0:13.4	Today's poem is by Fernando Valverde, translated by Carolyn Forsy.
0:18.2	And it has one of the best poem titles ever, is called Edgar Allan Poe is
0:25.8	reached at the Baltimore Harbor by the shadows that pursue him. There are a number of
0:32.7	brilliant and tragic literary figures for whom it's easy to feel great pity or sympathy
0:39.7	after you have studied their works closely and learned their stories.
0:45.3	And I think Edgar Allan Poe is one of those.
0:47.9	And that seems to be the connection that Valverde feels for Poe, at least if this poem is any indication,
0:57.0	Valverde's own personal history may also support that thesis, as he now lives and teaches
1:04.4	in the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia. He is a professor at UVA there in Charlottesville.
1:13.2	He gives us here what is almost an inverted companion to the hound of heaven.
1:21.4	Even the reference to dogs in the opening line seems to make the illusion or the connection intentional. But here, in Poe's case,
1:31.7	whatever was hounding him seems diabolical, seems infernal. Valverde even opens the poem with an
1:40.1	epigraph from a Poe's own work in which he describes a vision of a demon. So here we have a
1:46.9	sympathetic and imaginative look at what would end up being a very mysterious end to Poe's life.
1:54.8	Here is Edgar Allan Poe is reached at the Baltimore Harbor by the shadows that pursue him.
2:02.1	Epigraph by Edgar Allan Poe in the cloud that took the form when the rest of heaven was blue of a demon in my view.
2:13.7	They always followed you.
2:17.1	Disdainful dogs, they made you lose your balance.
2:20.6	You had to shout blasphemies into shadows, trying to put out the din of their barking.
2:26.5	Other times it was advisable to talk and try to calm them.
	...

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