I understand that the brilliant poem "Ulalume" originally included a tenth stanza, though the version in my copy of his Works contains only nine. Could anyone who has access to this lost section of the poem be kind enough to share it with me?

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2000

Answers

a quick hunt around the net will unearth it. there are many sites that contain the poem and one (at least) that has the tenth stanza.

-- Anonymous, August 30, 2000

Joe,

At http://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/index.htm, scroll down to the "Ulalume" listings to see the version(s) with the tenth stanza. There are several copies of printings from which to select. Omitting the final stanza was a suggestion of Sarah Helen Whitman. Poe restored it in later printings.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, August 30, 2000

I've found that a good way to find missing stanzas of poems is to type a line of the missing stanza into a search engine between "". This is how I found a copy of the lost stanza in one of Dickinson's Poems when I realized my hastily copied version of it from when I took notes in my American Lit. course was miscopied.

So, for the tenth stanza of Ulalume, search for these two lines and you should get results:

Said we then--the two then--"Ah, can it Have been that the woodlandish gouls--"

Just remove the punctuation and put quotation marks before and after the two lines, and paste it into a reliable search engine, you should find the stanza you seek. I also posted it in response to another question here.

Anyway, this stanza, I feel, is VERY important--it seems to offer a possible theme to the poem, I think. It also terrifies me---it deals with a concept I find very frightening, and I also find it almost naturalistic of Poe, but... I will not spoil it for you. Go find the stanza, and enjoy.

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2003