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Notes:
Miss Hunter was a youthful admirer of Poe's friend, Frances S.
Osgood.
In 1845, Poe agreed to judge, along with Henry Tuckerman, literary
compositions
written by a number of female college students. The winner was Miss
Hunter,
whose poem Poe read aloud at the commencement services on July 11,
1845.
This little poem appears to have been written by Poe for Miss Hunter as
part of one of Anne C. Lynch's annual Valentine's Day parties. That
nothing
truly romantic is intended is evidenced by the poem's rather impersonal
tone. If the date of 1847 is correct, the sadness of the final line may
partly be ascribed to the death of Poe's wife Virginia on January 30,
1847.
The year portion of the date at the bottom of the manuscript has
been
disputed and even noted as being in a hand other than Poe's. The date
of
1847, however, has generally been accepted as correct, though Joseph
Moldenhauer
assigns the tentative date of 1846 in A Descriptive Catalog
of
Edgar Allan Poe Manuscripts in the Humanities Research Center Library,
Austin: The University of Texas at Austin, 1973, p. 8. In this
attribution,
Moldenhauer follows the article by Syndey R. McLean, "Poeana: A
Valentine," Colophon, ns I, no. 2, Autumn 1835, pp.
183-187. The McLean
article
includes a facsimile of the poem on page 185.
This poem was first collected by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, with a few
minor punctuation and indentation modifications, in The Collected
Works
of Edgar Allan Poe: Volume I - Poems, Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1969,
pp. 398-399. The punctuation and indentation of the original manuscript
have been retained here, with the punctuation including details noted
by Moldenhauer, and the indentation agreeing with that given by
Mabbott. (For some reason, Moldenhauer incorrectly states that there is
a comma after "Thus" in the first line of the second stanza, and
erroneously insists that Mabbott
has altered the indentation slightly for lines 6 and 7.) The original
is
on a single sheet of ornately bordered paper, measuring 7 15/16 inches
wide by 9 13/16 inches high. The paper is watermarked "J WHATMAN 1845."
It is mostly white, although there is blue in the background of the
ornate border, which imitates lace-work. (The McLean facsimile includes
the border, but renders it as black and white.) On the original, the
date of 1847 appears to have been written in pencil, perhaps by another
hand. The McLean facsimile, thus, is somewhat unreliable, by
misrepresenting the 1847 as being part of the original ink dating. The
manuscript was displayed as part of a special Bicentennial Exhibit at
the University of Virginia, Harrison Institute/Small Special
Collections Library: "From Out That Shadow: the Life and Legacy of
Edgar Allan Poe" (March 7-August 1, 2009).
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[S:1 - MS, 1847 (fac)]
- Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Poems - To Miss Louise
Olivia Hunter
(A) |
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