Text: Edgar Allan Poe (ed. James H. Whitty), “Elizabeth,” The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911, p. 140


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[page 140, unnumbered:]

ELIZABETH

ELIZABETH — it surely is most fit

[Logic and common usage so commanding]

In thy own book that first thy name be writ,

Zeno(1) and other sages notwithstanding:

And I have other reasons for so doing

Besides my innate love of contradiction:

Each poet — if a poet — in pursuing

The muses thro’ their bowers of Truth or Fiction,

Has studied very little of his part,

Read nothing, written less — in short's a fool

Endued with neither soul, nor sense, nor art,

Being ignorant of one important rule,

Employed in even the theses of the school —

Called —— I forget the heathenish Greek name —

[Called any thing, its meaning is the same]

“Always write first things uppermost in the heart.”

 


[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 140:]

1 It was a saying of this philosopher “that one's own name should never appear in one's own book.”

 


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Notes:

None.

 

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[S:0 - JHW11, 1911] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Elizabeth (ed. J. H. Whitty, 1911)