The name is a Latinized version of "Timur Lenk", the 14th-century warlord who founded the Timurid Empire, though the poem is not a historical depiction of his life.

[6] Only 17 when he wrote the poem, Poe's own sense of loss came from the waning possibility of inheritance and a college education after leaving the University of Virginia.

A horse-spectacle called Timour the Tartar was staged at the Richmond Theatre and repeated in October.

He used "TAMERLANE" as a pseudonym attached to two of his poems on their first publication, "Fanny" and "To ——", both published in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter in 1833.

Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine is also a story about a Scythian shepherd who falls in love with Zenocrate and conquers most of the Asia, Europe and Africa.

[3] Tamerlane and Other Poems, which appeared in June 1827, was forty pages long and credited only by "a Bostonian".

In 1829, between the poem's first and second publications, Poe sent it along with "Al Aaraaf" for review by influential critic John Neal in his magazine The Yankee.