After Edgar Allan Poe left John Allan's Richmond home in 1827, he made his way to Boston, enlisted in the US Army under the alias Edgar A. Perry, and published his first book of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems, under the pseudonym, “A Bostonian.” The first act, returning to Boston, appears motivated by Poe's wish to put some distance between himself and John Allan. His enlistment in the army seems less motivated by any patriotic desire to serve his country and more by basic human needs for food, shelter and clothing, the alias a way to mask his embarrassment. Poe's reasons for publishing a pseudonymous collection of verse are more complex. At the simplest level, his pseudonym, “A Bostonian,” verifies his desire to distance himself from Allan and from Virginia. Never again would Poe so strongly identify with the city of his birth as he does on Tamerlane's title page. Later, he derisively called Boston “Frogpondium” and once wrote, “We were born there – and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact.” The act of publishing a collection of verse – especially a jejune collection scarcely long enough for a book, published by an obscure publisher with little or no reputation and in so few copies that, aside from a notice or two in the Boston periodicals, it would completely escape the public's attention – suggests Poe's need to prove himself, to show Allan that he could accomplish something, that he was not a good-for-nothing who idled his time reading picaresque romances and stale jestbooks.