Oh no you don't! You people can't get away with having a little clique birthday thread about my hero, the man with that rouge genius mind, Edgar Poe, who would, in great disappointment, roll over in his cold, grey, grave, if I didn't contribute to this slight celebration of his unequaled contribution to this repository of english (the language) poetry. So I will do so with this story and this poem...

The story.

A HOAX

The New York Sun in 1835, published a series of stories that reported that astronomer John Herschel, using a new super telescope had observed exotic creatures on the moon -- among them "horned bears", and a "a strange amphibious creature of spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across a pebbly beach."
Readership soared. Two Yale professors were dispatched to New York to examine the scientific papers but evenso, the hoax was not exposed until the Sun's editor confessed to a colleague that he had made up the whole thing.

The moon hoax originated from a concatenation of literary imagination and scientific enthusiasm in the darkly fertile mind of Edgar Allan Poe -- who, characteristically, never made a penny from it.

Poe had been fascinated by astronomy from the age of sixteen, when he studied the moon with a telescope that he had set up on the second-story of his stepfather's house during a rare interlude of happiness in his notoriously doom-laden life. Poe got only nine dollars for "The Raven" and only one hundred for the "Gold Bug". The famous "Moon Hoax" netted him none.

The Poem.

ELDORADO

- Edgar Allan Poe (1849)

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old-
This knight so bold-
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow-
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be-
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied-
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

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