Edgar Allan Poe — “To — (Sleep On)”

Reading copy:

• “To — (Sleep On)” — reading copy

Manuscripts and Authorized Printings:

• Text-01 — “To ——” — 1833, no original manuscript or fragments are known to exist (but this version is presumably recorded in Text-02)
• Text-02 — “To ——” — May 11, 1833 — Baltimore Saturday Visiter — (Mabbott text A)  (This is Mabbott’s copy-text)

Reprints:

• “To ——” — May 1918 — in John C. French, “Poe and the Baltimore Saturday Visiter,” Modern Language Notes, 33:266. (J. C. French discovered the poem in 1917, after examining a newly-surfaced file of the Visiter for 1833, which is now in the Maryland Historical Society. Although the 1917 edition of Poe’s Poems edited by Killis Campbell includes “Serenade,” another of the poems discovered by French, it does not include this poem. This omission is presumably because the discovery of “Serenade,” which was signed by Poe and thus immediately apparent to French, was printed in both the Johns Hopkins News-Letter and the Dial in January of 1918, and some preliminary form of the article was available to Campbell early enough to be included, while the other poems, signed as by “Tamerlane,” were first printed in the later article in Modern Language Notes. Rather confusingly, Campbell’s notes, p. 298, mention this later article, but clearly only in anticipation. Although, no date appears on the title page of Campbell’s edition, the copyright for is 1917, and a copy was deposited in the Library of Congress on September 13, 1917. In his article on “The Poe Canon,” Campbell acknowledges these other poems as “perhaps by Poe.”)
• “To ——” — December 1918 — in J. H. Whitty, “Three Poems by Edgar Allan Poe,” The Nation, 107:700. (The text of the three poems is reprinted from the earlier articles by J. C. French. Whitty subsequently included all three poems in a revised edition of his collection of Poe’s poems.)

Scholarly and Noteworthy Reprints:

• “To ——” — 1918 — The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. H. Whitty, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co (second edition, p. 168)
• “To ——” — 1965 — The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Floyd Stovall, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia (p. 142, and p. 297)  (Stovall notes: “Though there is a strong probability that the poems were written by Poe, it seems wise, in the absence of proof, to place them in the category of poems attributed to his authorship,” p. 297.)
• “To —— [’sleep on‘]” — 1969 — The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1: Poems, ed. T. O. Mabbott, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1:223-225)

Instream Comparative Texts:

• None

Plain Text Files for Juxta:

• None

Miscellaneous Texts and Related Items:

• None.

• 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.
• Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Vol 1 Poems), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969.