Can you please help me with a Poe Question (intellectual and creative people PLEASE!)?

Poe was a darkly creative individual. He was drunk and drugged for most of his adult life. The way he viewed life was tortured and tormented. The things he wrote about were the extreme macabre versions of the world as he saw it. Plague was handled by the rich and prestigious by locking themselves away or by running from the illness as in the Masque of the Red Death. Poe felt that money and influence doesn't get preferential treatment from illness. It spoke volumes of the times as well as his other stories.