Also, Edgar became involved in a romance with Elmira Royster, but after he went to the University of Virginia in February 1826, her father intercepted his letters, and she eventually married someone else. Poe fared well academically at the university, excelling in languages, and he continued to write and revealed a talent for drawing. But he considered himself hampered by John Allan’s inadequate financial support. He gambled at cards and lost, incurring great debts. And he began to drink, as well. In December 1826, John Allan removed Edgar from the university, refusing to pay some of his debts. In March 1827, after living with the Allans in Richmond and working in his foster father’s business, Edgar had a final argument with John Allan and left the house for good. The impoverished young man voyaged north along the coast to Boston to try to begin his literary career.

Young Poe struggled in poverty, working as a low-level clerk and then a reporter, and eventually joining the army. But before his battery traveled south to Charleston, South Carolina, he arranged for the publication of his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, at his own expense. This volume of Byronic longing and conflict—now one of the most highly valued rarities in American book collecting—was printed by Calvin F. S. Thomas in June or July 1827 and met with little response.

Poe’s two-year career in the army was reasonably successful but evidently unsatisfying. In 1829 he left to live with his aunt Maria Clemm (his father’s sister), his brother, Henry, and his cousin Virginia, in Baltimore. His foster mother, Frances Allan, soon died, and Henry, a minor writer, was “given up to drink.” Poe asserted in a letter to novelist John Neal, who had praised his poem “Heaven” (later “Fairyland”) in The Yankee, “I am young—not yet twenty—am a poet—if deep worship of all beauty can make me one. . . .” He then went on to intimate his devotion to Henry and its cause: “. . . there can be no tie more strong than that of brother for brother—it is not so much that they love one another as that they both love the same parent. . . .” Here we have a critical insight into Poe’s family life, one that may help to illuminate some of the less immediately accessible elements of Pym.

In December 1829, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published by Hatch & Dunning; it elicited a small but appreciative critical response. Among the remarkable poems in this collection was the elegant “Sonnet—To Science,” Poe’s early critique of science as an enemy of the imagination. Then, in 1830, with support from his foster father and others, Poe won an appointment to West Point. But while he did well in his classes in languages and mathematics, he came to dislike the military regimen. And his relationship with the newly remarried John Allan was growing more problematic—very likely, in part, because of a letter that Poe had written offering criticisms of his foster father, including an indiscreet allegation about Allan’s drinking. Responding to a rejecting John Allan in January 1831, Poe wrote an angry and defensive letter, which closed with a resolve to abandon his work at West Point. He followed through on this resolve, deliberately provoking a court-martial.

Returning to Baltimore in 1831, Poe published Poems with Elam Bliss, winning only a few notices and great resentment from the cadets who had subscribed to the book with the expectation that it would offer Poe’s familiar clever satire. Still, this book, like all of Poe’s works, offered compelling writing—it featured, among other poems, such now recognized classics as “Israfel,” “The City in the Sea,” and “To Helen” (his tribute to Mrs.