Beschreibung:

Lady Irene.
Richmond: ca. March, 1830]. 68 line holograph manuscript poem signed "E A Poe" written on 2 1/2 pages within a friendship album for 14 year-old Richmond belle Sally Chevallie. 4to (250 x 200 mm). Wove paper watermarked "Amies" and "Philadelphia." The album decorated with numerous illustrations and poetic quotations in a variety of hands. Original ornately gilt red straight grain morocco, spine in six compartments, raised bands, all edges gilt. Condition: album worn at spine ends and joints, few leaves loosening or becoming disbound. Provenance: Edgar Allan Poe for Sallie Chevallie, by gift to her granddaughter Elise Warwick Barksdale Wickham then by collateral descent to the present owner, the property of a Southern lady. a remarkable literary discovery, a previously unknown and unpublished early draft of poe's "irene" - later "the sleeper" - with significant textual variants from all published versions including an entire previously unknown stanza The most significant poe manuscript to come to auction in at least half a century with important relevance to his social circle. "Poe was going to get the ecstasy and the heightening, cost what it might." (D.H. Lawrence) Often in the midst of emotional and financial hardship, Edgar Allan Poe nevertheless persevered to produce the most distinctive and influential body of work of any American author. Inventor of the detective story, professional man of letters and according to Yeats, "so certainly the greatest of American poets" he started his work early, even as he sought to find his calling in the unusual and tragic circumstances of his life. His time at West Point, though seemimgly incongruous for the Poe of popular imagination, was pivotal, a key time in his development into the writer as we know him today. His dismissal from the Academy represented not only a break from any endeavor besides the pen, but a final severing of his ties to his foster father, John Allan The present work dates from this tumultuous period and is a rare manuscript of some of his first mature work, a key piece to the romantic puzzle that is Poe. As was the custom at the time, Poe as a young poet occasionally contributed to ladies keepsake books from 1827 to 1835. Mabbott records five examples of Poe writing in ladies albums, but none of the length or importantance of "Lady Irene," found in the keepsake album of a prominent young Richmond lady, Sallie Chevallie. His brother William Henry Poe also wrote in several keepseakes in Baltimore at the time. The theme of the poem, the premature death of a beautiful young woman, was one that Poe would return to often. (Understandably so, given the early death of his mother which orphaned him, his foster mother's death in 1829 which effectively did so again and the death of his wife at only 25). Poe was fond of the poem, and revising it in 1836, 1837 and 1841; he continued to make minor changes as late as 1849, by which time it had been reworked and retitled "The Sleeper." Mabbott found 10 versions with differing text, though none earlier than the present form. The young Poe was preparing to become a cadet at the time he wrote "The Lady Irene". The dated contributions in the Chevallie album range from February, 1830 on the early leaves to March 1831 on the final. A vernacular poem following Poe's contribution by a few leaves is dated March, 1830, so one may assume that Poe added his work in the first three months of 1830, a time during which biographers place him in Richmond for one of his last visits. By June he was attending the Academy. While recent Poe biographies contain no mention of the Chevallie family, Allen's Isafel records, citing Valentine Museum letter 23, that Poe was visited at West Point shortly after his enrollment in June or July by a "Mr. Chevalier" (corrected to Chevallee in the 1934 edition). This was undoubtedly Sally's father, Peter Joseph Chevallie, a prominent mill owner who might have influenced on Poe's acceptance to West Point. In any eve