Book May Contain Poe’s Handwritten Poem

Once upon a midnight dreary, Don Stine pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And there he discovered a literary treasure that might otherwise have been seen nevermore: a lost verse possibly composed by Edgar Allan Poe. Stine, a rare-book dealer from Ocean Township, discovered the eight-line, handwritten verse on a blank page at the front of a rare copy of Poe’s “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.”

“I wonder if it went from Poe’s pencil right to my eyes. That’s what I find bizarre: that nobody may have ever seen this poem before,” Stine said last week.

Charles Hamilton, an expert on Poe’s handwriting, concluded the lines were written in Poe’s hand. His verdict was accepted by Christie’s auction house in New York, where Stine bought the book for a client for $63,000 before discovering the verse.

But that’s still not proof Poe created the verse, other experts said.

“Some poems may have been written by Poe’s hand, but he may not have composed them. They may have been copied out by him,” said David Kresh, a reference specialist with the Library of Congress. He said the library’s directory shows Stine’s discovery does not match any of the author’s known works.

Kresh said the clumsy rhythm of one line makes him doubtful.

“Poe was really a supreme craftsman. That line makes me a little suspicious,” Kresh said. “But who knows?”

James Furqueron, director of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Va., said he, too, is somewhat skeptical. But he said Poe was known to write poems to his young female cousins and to write in books.

“It may very well have been a poem Poe jotted down in the book. If that is the case, this individual has quite a treasure,” he said.

Stine’s discovery was made on Oct. 7, the 149th anniversary of Poe’s death.

Stine had spent the evening packing steamer trunks with books for an exhibit in Boston. At about midnight, he sat at the desk in his bedroom with the two-volume, leather-bound set of Poe’s works that he had bought at auction that day.

Under the glow of a reading lamp, Stine perused the fragile first volume, which had a handwritten presentation note on the flyleaf from Poe to a cousin, Emily Virginia Chapman. On the fourth of five subsequent blank pages was the poem, written in pencil.”I was astounded no one had looked at those pages before. It had been through two auction houses and a collector,” he said. “If you bought a $63,000 car, wouldn’t you kick the tires a little?”