After a brief period when Poe absconded from the journal, White was charitable enough to take him back, but as he did so he gave him some good advice which is also startling evidence of the scale of Poe's drinking: 

No man is safe who drinks before breakfast. No man can do so, and attend to business properly.

Good advice — but also advice Poe found it impossible to follow. At the beginning of 1837 Poe was "let go" by the Southern Literary Messenger when periods of incapacity brought on by drinking bouts had made his unreliability as a contributor no longer tolerable.

It was the same story a few years later, when Poe was living in Philadelphia and contributing to the Gentleman's Magazine. A friend, Thomas English, saw one evening "someone struggling in a vain attempt to raise himself from the gutter. Supposing the person had tripped and fallen, I bent forward and assisted him to arise. I found it was Poe." Poe had been drinking on an epic scale, and needed several days at home in bed to recover. The debacle was not long in coming, and in May 1840 Poe was sacked from the magazine, the publisher William Burton noting euphemistically that Poe's "infirmities" had caused much annoyance. During the final illness of his wife Poe had written that:

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank — God only knows how often or how much.

By now Poe's drinking was becoming notorious outside the circles of his immediate family and acquaintance. In 1841 Thomas English would lampoon Poe in his novel The Drunkard's Doom. A New York magazine would publish a spoof list of forthcoming books, which included "A treatise on ‘Aqua Pura', its uses and abuses, by Edgar A. Poe".