Willis, however, was more considerate and far more intelligent than others, giving Poe no new ground for the "resentments against society and mankind" which he cherished against all too many with whom he had differed. On the whole he was a victim not of friends or foes or "circumstances over which he had no control" but of the erratic temperament with which fate had endowed him. He was like Byron and Shelley in his youthful enjoyment of privilege and good fortune, in his violent rejection of conventional ease and comfort, in his unhappy life and his early death. It is impossible to conceive that any devisable set of conditions would in the end have served Poe better. He was one of the very few who have been truly burdened with "the eccentricities of genius." The first milestone in his literary career was in 1827. Mr. Allan's refusal to honor his gambling debts resulted in withdrawal from the university and the first clear-cut break with his patron. Shortly after appeared "Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. Boston: Calvin F. S. Thomas ... Printer, 1827, pp. 40." It was a little book in which the passion and the pathos of his whole life were foreshadowed in the early couplet, Know thou the secret of a spirit Bowed from its wild pride into shame. "Tamerlane," the title poem, was a Byronic effusion without either structure or a rational theme, but with a kind of fire glowing through in occasional gleams of poetry and flashes of power. It was the sort of thing that had already been done by the youthful Drake in "Leon" and that Timrod was to attempt in "A Vision of Poesy," but though all three were boyishly imitative, Poe's was the most genuine as a piece of self-revelation. This volume was followed by "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems" in 1829, shortly before his admission to West Point, and by the "Poems" of 1831 just after his dismissal, each largely inclusive of what had appeared before, with omissions, changes, and some new poems but no distinctively new promise. Then for a while he settled in Richmond, receiving an allowance from Mr. Allan, with whom he had experienced two estrangements and two reconciliations. In 1832 five of his prose tales were printed in the _Philadelphia Saturday Courier_. The fruits of his unwearying devotion to authorship began to mature in 1833, when he was awarded a hundred-dollar prize for a short story in the Baltimore _Saturday Visiter_, and when the first prize for a poem in the same competition was withheld from him only because of his success with the "MS. Found in a Bottle." From then on his literary activities were interwoven with the development of American journalism. His poems, tales, and critical articles appeared in no less than forty-seven American periodicals, from dailies to annuals, and he served in the editorial offices of five.