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Happy it was for him that he was not present to hear those he had thus honored set up their throats in unanimous expressions of disgust when the dedication leaf turned they were confronted by a reprint of "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf," with the shorter poems, "To Helen," "A Pæan," "Israfel," "Fairy-Land," and other "rubbish," as they promptly pronounced the entire contents of the book.
As to Poe, you probably will never have a chance. Outside of the British Museum, where they have the "Tamerlane" of 1827, I have only seen one early example of Poe's poems. It is "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe. Baltimore: Hatch and Dunning, 1829, 8vo, pp. 71." The book "came to Mr. R. H. Stoddard, the American poet." So says Mr. Locker-Lampson's Catalogue.
For the first time, his work appeared under his own signature: "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems. By Edgar A. Poe." The new poem was unintelligible to the critics but what of that? he asked himself. One of his optimistic moods was upon him.
The result of this flight of fancy to a magical world was the poem, "Al Aaraaf." He spent the interim between his honorable discharge from the army and his entrance at West Point in a happy visit to Baltimore, where he made the acquaintance of his father's kindred and succeeded in publishing the new poem, with a revised edition of the old ones.
He questioned "Ligeia" of it and she told him that it was none other than Al Aaraaf, the great star discovered by Tycho Brahe, which after suddenly appearing and shining for a few nights with a brilliancy surpassing that of Jupiter, disappeared never to be seen again; never except by him The Dreamer to whom it was given not only to gaze upon it from the far earth, but, with her as his guide, to visit it and to explore its fairy landscape where the spirits of lost sculptures enjoyed immortality.
"He is entirely a stranger to me," wrote the Boston editor, of the twenty-year-old poet, "but with all his faults, if the remainder of Al Aaraaf and Tamerlane are as good as the body of the extracts here given, he will deserve to stand high very high in the estimation of the shining brotherhood." In a burst of gratitude the happy poet wrote to Mr.
It was entitled "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, by Edgar A. Poe." "Al Aaraaf" was a poem about a star that a great astronomer had seen blaze forth and then disappear. When he left West Point in April, 1831, nearly two years after the publication of his Baltimore volume, Poe was short of money; and to supply his needs his fellow-students subscribed for a new edition of his poems.
Born in 1809, died in 1849; his father and mother actors; adopted by John Allan of Richmond after his mother's death; educated in Richmond, in England, at the University of Virginia, and at West Point; published "Tamerlane" in 1827; settled in Baltimore and devoted himself to literature; editor of several magazines 1835-44; published "The Raven" in 1845, "Al Aaraaf" in 1829, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" in 1840.
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