Text: Charles W. Kent (notes) Robert A. Stewart (variants) (ed. J. A. Harrison), “Notes to Ulalume,” The Complete Works of Edgar Allan PoeVol. VII: Poems (1902), 7:213-214


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[page 213:]

ULALUME.

Page 102.

AMERICAN WHIG REVIEW (SUB-TITLE, “To ——”), DECEMBER, 1847; HOME JOURNAL, JANUARY 1, 1848; GRISWOLD, 1850.

Text, Griswold, 1850.

The poem as now printed contains 9 stanzas; but the American Whig Review and the Home Journal versions contained a tenth stanza, as follows:

Said we, then — the two, then — “Ah, can it

Have been that the woodlandish ghouls,

The pitiful, the merciless ghouls —

To bar up our way and to ban it

From the secret that lies in these wolds —

From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds —

Had drawn up the spectre of a planet

From the limbo of lunary souls,

This sinfully scintillant planet

From the Hell of the planetary souls?”

American Whig Review and Home Journal. Variations from the Griswold text.

III. 9 We remembered.

VIII. 5 And (But).

IX. 13 In the (This).

From Fordham Poe wrote to Willis, Editor of the Home Journal, Dec. 8, 1847, as follows:

... “I send you an American Review — the number just issued — in which is a ballad by myself, but published anonymously. It is called ‘Ulalume ‘ — the page is turned down. I do not care to be known as its author just now; but would take it as a great favor if you [page 214:] would copy it in the Home Journal, with a word of inquiry as to who wrote it: — provided always that you think the poem worth the room it would occupy in your paper — a matter about which I am by no means sure.”

Willis printed the poem with the following comment: “We do not know how many readers we have who will enjoy, as we do, the following exquisitely piquant and skilful exercise of variety and niceness of language. It is a poem which we find in the American Review, full of beauty and oddity in sentiment and versification, but a curiosity (and a delicious one, we think) in philologic flavor. Who is the author?”

EDITORS NOTE.

In artistic marks this poem is well worth a close study. Its effects of rime, repetition, parallelism, assonance, etc., are interesting.


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Notes:

None.


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[S:0 - JAH07, 1902] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Editions - The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (J. A. Harrison) (Notes to Ulalume)