Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems

Two years after an anonymous pamphlet debut that attracted virtually no notice, Poe issued this second collection in Baltimore in 1829, credited on the title page as "E. A. Poe," through the press of Hatch & Dunning. The contrast with 1827 is pointed: a named author, a real publisher, a more ambitious book. It brought its author little profit (one early account records it as "a great advance upon his previous collection" that earned no public praise), but it was work of a different order.

The collection takes its name and its scale from the long central poem "Al Aaraaf," composed in two parts while Poe served in the U.S. Army. The title comes from the Islamic concept in Surah 7 of the Quran: a barrier realm between heaven and hell, where souls perceive both Paradise and Hell but belong to neither. Poe builds this into a cosmic star-world, distant from earth, where Beauty is the governing principle. Its presiding figure is Nesace, a spirit of Beauty and God's messenger. When two spirits, Angelo and Ianthe, choose earthly love over the laws of this realm, they fall — the poem's central tragedy.

Opening the collection, before the title poem, is "Sonnet — To Science": fourteen lines of protest against a rationalism that has driven Diana, wood-nymphs, and elves from the landscape. The pairing is deliberate: the sonnet states the problem, the long poem proposes the alternative. The shorter poems gathered alongside them (a substantially revised Tamerlane, Spirits of the Dead, Fairyland, and several brief lyrics) carry the collection's range from the philosophical to the quietly elegiac, enough to draw a favorable notice from critic John Neal.