The Uncanny Survival and Printing of Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane
Poet involved
What happened
A penniless, 18-year-old Edgar Allan Poe arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, and convinced a young, completely inexperienced printer to publish a tiny pamphlet of his verses titled 'Tamerlane and Other Poems'. Only around 50 copies were printed, credited anonymously to 'A Bostonian,' and the book was completely ignored by the public. Through decades of war, fires, and paper drives, a few copies miraculously survived in dusty attics, eventually becoming the rarest and most expensive treasures in American literature.
Literary impact
The narrow survival of these early poems marked the quiet, anonymous birth of the dark romantic and gothic poetic movements in America. It established Poe's early obsession with cosmic isolation and doomed love, themes that would later revolutionize the structure of modern macabre poetry and short fiction.
Source: Wikipedia
