Boston, You're My Home Virtual Cache

Poets, Authors, Actors, Historians, Sports Legends, Politicians - so many people have strong opinions about Boston, a.k.a. The Hub of the Universe!

Boston can be hard for newcomers to navigate.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist, poet, transcendentalist leader put it: "We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors."

Author Bill Bryson was more blunt, but then he never lived here: “Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains."

Some say Bostonians are too proud.

According to President John Adams, a native son, there are reasons for that: "The morals of our people are much better; their manners are more polite and agreeable, they are purer English; our language is better; our taste is better; our persons are handsomer; our spirit is greater, our laws are wiser; our religion is superior."

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., another native son and Supreme Court Justice agreed: “That’s all I claim for Boston – that it is the thinking center of the continent, and therefore of the planet.”

Others, like Pulitzer Prize winning historian Van Wyck Brooks, offer more backhanded compliments, but Brooks is not from here either: "The Boston people were willing to learn, but only if one recognized how much they knew already.”

And we can be hard to get to know.

As Dr. John Collins Bossidy famously quipped:

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.

But perhaps no famous son of Boston offered so public and so inflammatory a critique as Edgar Allan Poe, who was born in Boston, but had a lifelong feud with some of its residents. After a poorly received reading at the Boston Lyceum on October 16, 1845, Poe wrote about his feelings for Boston in The Broadway Journal on Nov. 1:

We like Boston. We were born there–and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact. The Bostonians are very well in their way. Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good. Their common is no common thing–and the duck-pond might answer–if its answer could be heard for the frogs.

Nor was Poe content to leave it there. Three weeks later, Poe again wrote in The Broadway Journal, decrying the “Frog-Pondians” of literary Boston:

Never was a “bobbery” more delightful than that which we have just succeeded in “kicking up” all around about Boston Common. We never saw the Frog-Pondians so lively in our lives. They seem absolutely to be upon the point of waking up. In about nine days the puppies may ... open their eyes.

… The Frogpondians may as well spare us their abuse. If we cared a fig for their wrath we should not first have insulted them to their teeth, and then subjected to their tender mercies a volume of our Poems—that, we think, is sufficiently clear. The fact is, we despise them and defy them (the transcendental vagabonds!) and they may all go to the devil together.

Well! Transendental Vagabonds, indeed! Tell us how you really feel, Edgar.

But you can't say that Boston holds a grudge forever!

Less than 170 years later, the city installed this statue honoring the cantankerous author and some of his most notable works, including The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven.

Logging Requirements:

In order to log this Virtual cache, you must visit GZ AND take a photo with the Edgar Allan Poe Statue.

Please include one of the following attached to your log:

• A photo of yourself and/or group with the Edgar Allan Poe statue
• Or a photo of a personal item with your geocaching name with the Poe statue

Optional - share your favorite quote about Boston - keeping in mind that this is a family-friendly forum, please!

Every Found log MUST include a photo WITH THE CORRECT STATUE.  Photos of the Common, other spots in Boston, or that do not include you and/or your personal item, do not count. If yours is a group photo, please attach a copy of it to each Found log posted by members of the group. You do not need to message me with your photo, please attach it to your log.

Any logs that do not include a photo of you with the statue run the risk of being deleted.

Further Reading:

• https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/us/edgar-allan-poes-feud-with-boston-nevermore.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe_Returning_to_Boston
• https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2014/10/06/edgar-allan-poe-comes-back-boston
• https://www.boston.com/culture/history/2017/10/30/edgar-allan-poe-born-in-boston-was-a-19th-century-hater-of-bostonian
• https://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/english/poebostonexhibit/poeslife/51.html