Introduction

I first stumbled upon The Murderer as a kid, buried deep in one of those massive, all-purpose “family encyclopedias” published in 1900. Somewhere in its oversized pages was a poem which has stayed with me the rest of my life. It was dark, psychological, and haunting. And it was attributed to Edgar Allan Poe.

It made sense. The themes of guilt, madness, and isolation felt unmistakably Poe-like. But as I grew older and started exploring Poe’s complete works, I noticed something strange: The Murderer was nowhere to be found. No mention in his collected poems, no footnote in the scholarly editions. It was as if the poem had vanished.

Eventually, I learned the truth. The Murderer wasn’t written by Poe at all. It was penned by Hiram Peck McKnight. It was first published in Conklin’s Handy Manual of Useful Information in 1887 and was falsely attributed to Poe as the author of an unpublished poem (38 years after his death). The misattribution likely came from the poem’s gothic tone.

The confusion didn’t end there. In 1890, The Murderer was reprinted, slightly edited, in The Shaftesbury Recitations, a performance anthology that again credited the poem to Poe. The gothic tone and dramatic structure made the attribution plausible to casual readers and performers. No known correspondence or editorial notes from Poe’s lifetime show it was something he was working on, and the mislabeling seems to have spread simply because it “felt” like Poe — and because no one corrected it.

McKnight later revised the poem into a longer, more overtly religious version titled The Murderer's Dream, and published it in his 1896 collection, Prison Poetry. The revision strips away the raw psychological horror and replaces it with moral redemption and theological reflection. It’s a completely different experience, and a far less compelling one.

McKnight didn’t publicly claim authorship of The Murderer when it was first published in 1887. The strongest evidence comes from McKnight’s own 1896 publication, Prison Poetry. The poem retains many of the original lines, sometimes verbatim. While he doesn’t explicitly say “I wrote The Murderer,” the continuity of language, structure, and themes between the two versions makes it clear The Murderer’s Dream is a direct reworking of the earlier poem. That’s how scholars, including the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, have traced the authorship back to him. It’s a strange case of literary identity: a poem misattributed from the start, and an author who never openly disputed it, but left behind just enough breadcrumbs to be found decades later.

Why did McKnight revise it so drastically? We don’t have a definitive answer, but the preface to Prison Poetry suggests he was writing from within the Ohio Penitentiary and may have been influenced by religious reform movements or the collaborative spirit among inmates. Whatever the reason, the result is a poem that feels more like a sermon than a scream.

This poem, especially the original, matters. It’s a reminder that literature can be its own mystery, and that misattribution doesn’t just obscure authorship; it can distort cultural memory. We’ve included both versions here. The first is chilling, unforgettable, and worth preserving. The second? A cautionary tale in revisionism.