Both Poe and Kierkegaard were preoccupied with death, denial and fear - worries never more prescient than during the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike the philosopher, the poet projected his obsessions into a world of stories filled with agnosticism and uncertainty. 

In 1832, five months before an Asiatic cholera pandemic reached the United States, Edgar Allan Poe started publishing magazine tales. That summer, the disease killed 3,700 people in Baltimore, where Poe was living, and in two early tales, “Shadow” and “King Pest,” he projected that crisis onto remote, Old World settings. Not until 1842, however, did he fully capture its horror in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Set in Europe, the tale depicts an arrogant ruler’s response to contagion. After his realm has been “half depopulated,” Prince Prospero belatedly invites a thousand “hale and light-hearted friends” to a Gothic abbey and then bolts shut the gates. Five or six months into the quarantine, “while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad,” Prospero defiantly stages a masked ball. But the soirée ends badly. Poe concludes: “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” He implies that while we may temporarily escape a certain kind of death, we cannot avoid dying.