E.A. Poe stamp on sale Friday

"Ill-fated and mysterious man! Bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own imagination," wrote Edgar Alan Poe in "The Assignation." The melancholy poet, master of merriment and terror, could have been writing about himself.

Best known for his haunting short stories and ringing poems, the familiar yet enigmatic writer is being honored Friday on a new commemorative postage stamp.

"While we may continue to take pleasure in Poe's poetry and prose, he might be most pleased if we would take inspiration from his application of imagination to the problems of our own time as we encourage the young people of our nation and the world to build the future," Harry Lee Poe, a distant cousin of the poet and a professor at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., suggested in remarks prepared for ceremonies in Richmond, Va.

Ceremonies marking issuance of the 42-cent stamp were scheduled at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, the city where the poet was raised following the death of his parents.

He was born 200 years ago.

"It is ironic that a man who faced loneliness, poverty and despair throughout much of his life, should be so richly loved by so many so long after his death," Katherine C. Tobin, a member of the post office's board of governors, said in prepared remarks. "He invented the detective story and elevated literary criticism to an art form. Poetry, however, was his self-declared passion."

In addition to his fame as a writer, Poe also may have pioneered the idea of the Big Bang theory for the birth of the universe.

In an 1848 essay titled Eureka, he proposed the idea that time and space are a single unity and that the universe expanded from a tiny primordial spec, Harry Lee Poe noted.

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