I’m going to start this journey with a confession that has nothing to do with football. I did not know that Edgar Allan Poe was American. To all of my teachers through my 18 years of education: I’m sorry.
Details of how or why I did not know this information aren’t important. His name just has big Sir Arthur Conan Doyle energy so I assumed he was English, and there was never a point in my life where it mattered enough that I’d bother to confirm that misinformation.
Anyway, I learned this while watching the movie The Pale Blue Eye on Netflix. It’s a somewhat slow-paced, historical-fiction, mystery thriller starring Batman Christian Bale and Dudley Dursley Harry Melling. The latter plays a young Edgar Allan Poe during his time at West Point. It was just an okay movie, FYI.
Poe’s inclusion in the film led me to do a quick Wikipedia search where I learned he was born in Boston and died in Baltimore. (Here’s where we get to the football bit of the story).
I tweeted my discovery, acknowledging in the process that I was perhaps the last person on Earth to learn this information. Among the most popular responses on Twitter was the disbelief that I’d never tied the Baltimore Ravens being named the Ravens because of the famous poem by Poe.
First of all, he could’ve been British and immigrated to Baltimore. Second, and most importantly, I had literally never given it a second of thought. Ravens is a cool name. The Orioles were already in Baltimore. I probably would’ve figured they just went with another bird to keep the theme had I ever even given it a millisecond of my brain space.
Alas, this is ultimately my fault for having such a significant gap in my knowledge of America’s most famous poets. Shoutout to Geoffrey Chaucer, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.
Instead of lashing out at the jerks lames people who clowned me for not connecting the Ravens to Poe being apparently the most famous Baltimoreon of all-time, I decided to do some preventative research and dove into why each NFL team has its name (fingers crossed Bill Seahawk isn’t a famous poet from the Pacific Northwest!)