Poetry Xtras » "Ulalume" by Edgar Allan Poe

This poem was first published in Colton's 'American Review' for December 1847, as "To——Ulalume: a Ballad." Being reprinted immediately in the 'Home Journal', it was copied into various publications with the name of the editor, N. P. Willis, appended, and was ascribed to him. When first published, it contained the following additional stanza which Poe subsequently, at the suggestion of Mrs. Whitman wisely suppressed:

  Said we then—the two, then—"Ah, can it
      Have been that the woodlandish ghouls—
      The pitiful, the merciful ghouls—
  To bar up our path and to ban it
      From the secret that lies in these wolds—
  Had drawn up the spectre of a planet
      From the limbo of lunary souls—
  This sinfully scintillant planet
      From the Hell of the planetary souls?"