Edgar Allan Poe — “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!”

Reading copy:

• “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!” — reading copy

Manuscripts and Authorized Printings:

• Text-01 — “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” — about 1825?, no original manuscript or fragments are known to exist (but this version is presumably recorded in the reprints in Southern Opinion and the No Name Magazine, below) — (Mabbott text A)

Reprints:

• “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” — about 1868 — transcript — (Mabbott text B)  (Mabbott notes this as “possibly existing, but now inaccessible.” This transcript was used for the printing in Southern Opinon.)
• “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” — March 7, 1868 — Southern Opinion — (Mabbott text C) (The text was provided by John R. Thompson.)
• “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!” — October 1889 — No Name Magazine — (Mabbott text D)  (This is Mabbott’s copy-text) (Although it claims to be the first printing, it is apparently based on the earlier printing in Southern Opinion, possibly from a transcript. There are minor differences in spelling, and this version accidentally omits two words.)

Scholarly and Noteworthy Reprints:

• “Oh Tempora! Oh Mores!” — 1911, The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. H. Whitty, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, pp. 161-165  (reprinted from No Name Magazine)
• “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” — October 1945 — Jay B. Hubbell, “ ‘O, Tempora! O, Mores!’ A Juvenile Poem by Edgar Allan Poe,” Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George F. Reynolds, University of Colorado Studies, Series B, Studies in the Humanities, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 314-321. (reprints the full article from Southern Opinion)
• “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” — 1965 — The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Floyd Stovall, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia (0p. 137-140, and pp. 294-296) (reprints the text from Southern Opinion, 1868, with variants noted)
• “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!” — 1969 — The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1: Poems, ed. T. O. Mabbott, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1:9-13) (uses the No Name Magazine text as the copytext, with variants noted)
• “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” — 1984 — Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America) (pp. 21-23) (reprints the text from Southern Opinion, 1868)

Instream Comparative and Study Texts:

• None

Plain Text Files for Juxta:

• None

Miscellaneous Texts and Related Items:

• Campbell, Killis, “Introduction — II. The Canon of Poe’s Poems,” The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Boston: Ginn and Co, 1917, pp. xxvii (especially footnote 3)
• Heartman, Charles F. and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943.
• Hubbell, Jay B., “ ‘O, Tempora! O, Mores!’ A Juvenile Poem by Edgar Allan Poe,” Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George F. Reynolds, University of Colorado Studies, Series B, Studies in the Humanities (Boulder, CO), vol. 2, no. 4, October 1945, pp. 314-321.
• Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Vol 1 Poems), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969.
• Savoye, Jeffrey A., “Oh, Tempora!, Oh, Mores!, Oh, Dider!,” Edgar Allan Poe Review, Spring 2013, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 110-112 (This article details the early print history of the poem, and establishes the version given by E. L. Didier in the No Name Magazine is, as was the printing in the Southern Opinion, derrived from John R. Thompson, and therefore not an independent verification of Poe’s likely authorship.)

• None.