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EARLIEST POEMS
1820-1827

We know that Poe wrote verses as a schoolboy, but the exact date when he began the practice is uncertain. George Edward Woodberry in his Edgar Allan Poe (1885, p. 19), and in The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1909), I, 23, wrote as if he believed that Poe “made his first trials at verse and kept the manuscripts” before he left England in June 1820, but no document supports this conjecture. The surviving verses of his boyhood are collected here, together with descriptions of early pieces no longer preserved about which we have definite information.