In the following pages, you’ll find three of Edgar Allan Poe’s early poems in their entirety, printed with the wording of their first published editions.
In 1827, at age eighteen, Poe published “The Lake” and “To — —” (later renamed “Song”) in Tamerlane and Other Poems. The book also included eight other poems he wrote during his teenage years.
In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, he published “To Helen”—his ode to Mrs. Jane Stanard—in his third collection of poetry, Poems. In an 1848 letter to the poet Sarah Helen Whitman (the subject of a later, second poem that he titled “To Helen”), Poe referred to his original “To Helen” as “lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul.”