[page 89:]

POEMS FIRST COLLECTED IN 1829

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. By Edgar A. Poe (Baltimore: Hatch and Dunning, 1829), came out late in the year. The negotiations for its production are discussed in my introduction to the title poem, “Al Aaraaf,” and at p. 540, below. The publishers were two young men from New York; the printers, Matchett and Woods, named on the verso of the title page, brought out the Baltimore City Directory for fifty years. My reproduction of Poe's volume was published for the Facsimile Text Society by Columbia University Press, New York, in 1933.

The book has no preface but includes three playful introductory quotations:

Following the major poems there is a half-title, MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, and on its verso there are two mottoes:

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 89:]

1  Lame Spanish from an unidentified play, meaning: “Fabio, do you understand what I tell you?” — “Yes, Thomas, I understand it” — “Fabio, you lie.”

2  Line 22 of Milton's masque.

3  Line 36 of “A Song of Sack” in The Works of John Cleveland (1687). Poe probably saw it in an anthology, and would have cared little that its ascription is now doubted.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 89, running to the bottom of page 90:]

4  From an epigram beginning “Four things not in thy treasury I bring before [page 90:] thee, / Lord, with my petition,” contributed by Robert Southey to The Bijou for 1828, as “Imitation from the Persian.” The original of the famous distich by the poet Souzeni may be seen with French translation in Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale (1697), page 830. The epigram is referred to by Voltaire in his Poème sur le destruction de Lisbonne, where Southey, deeply interested in Portugal, probably found it. The second motto, credited to Milton, is deliberately altered from “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester,” line 57, “And some flowers and some bays.”