Page:Tamerlane and other poems (1884).djvu/24

 8, probably quite as much as the fact that it was "suppressed through circumstances of a private nature," accounts for its almost entire disappearance. The motto on the title-page purports to be from Cowper: that from Martial, which closes the Preface (Nos hæc novimus esse nihil), was, by a curious coincidence, the very same that figured on the title-page of Alfred and Charles Tennyson's Louth volume.

In 1827, when the little "Tamerlane" booklet was thus modestly ushered into the world, Poe had not yet attained his nineteenth year. Both in promise and in actual performance, it may claim to rank as the most remarkable production that any English-speaking and English-writing poet of this century has published in his teens.

In this earliest form of it the poem which gives its chief title to the little volume is divided into seventeen sections, of irregular length, containing a total of 406 lines. "Tamerlane" was afterwards remodelled and rewritten, from beginning to end, and in its final form, as it appeared in the author's

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