Of Note: The Earliest Surviving Poem by Edgar Allan Poe

Of Note is an occasional series in which we share items that have caught our eye. This guest post is by Manuscript Division reference librarian Loretta Deaver.

The Ellis & Allan Company Records, 1795-1889, in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division mostly consist of documents related to the general merchant and tobacco trading business. However, the collection also includes a number of items related to the poet Edgar Allan Poe, including the earliest surviving poem in his own hand.

Born in Scotland in 1780, John Allan came to Richmond, Virginia, around the age of fourteen to live and work with his uncle, a successful merchant. Business apparently suited him, and in 1800 Allan and fellow clerk Charles Ellis started their own business, thus forming the Ellis & Allan Company.

By 1811, Ellis and Allan were reaping the benefits of their successful enterprise, which likely put John Allan and his wife Frances in a good position to take in two-year-old orphan Edgar Poe after his mother died. Though they never formally adopted the child, they gave him the name Edgar Allan Poe, and supported him until he was a young adult.

In 1826, when he was just seventeen, Edgar enrolled at the University of Virginia, but he spent only a year at the college. Difficulties arose between Edgar and his foster father when Allan refused to pay some of the debts Edgar quickly racked up at school, which may have included more than two thousand dollars in gambling debts attributed to him. Edgar attempted to explain his debts in an 1831 letter to Allan, grumbling that in addition to having insufficient funds to pay for basic expenses, “I received a packet of books consisting of . . . the Cambridge Mathematics in 2 vols: books for which I had no earthly use since I had no means of attending the mathematical lectures.”

Before his time at university, Poe must have been exploring his creative and intellectual talents. Among John Allan’s 1824 business papers in the Ellis & Allan Company Records, written upside down on the back of a list of accounts, is the earliest extant poem in Edgar Allan Poe’s hand.

Poetry by Edgar A. Poe

Last night, with many cares & toils oppress’d

Weary.. I laid me on a couch to rest—

The poem seems fitting for a fifteen-year-old, but also brings together on one page Allan’s careful financial calculations and Poe’s creative prose, a juxtaposition that perhaps reflects the underlying tensions between a business-oriented father and a talented literary-leaning son.

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“gambling debts attributed to him. . .” Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1941; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 109.

“I received a packet of books consisting of . . .” Edgar Allan Poe to John Allen, January 3, 1831, in Mary Newton Stanard, ed., Edgar Allan Poe Letters till Now Unpublished in the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1973), 253-262.