There are some literary characters you feel for. You ache for their struggles, root for their triumphs, and cry when things don’t go their way. Tamerlane is not one of those characters. Tamerlane is that guy. The one who throws away a perfectly good life for no reason, only to realize—too late!—that he has, in fact, made a terrible mistake. And then he dies. That’s it. That’s the poem. Edgar Allan Poe wrote Tamerlane when he was just 18, which explains a lot. It has the exact energy of a teenager staring dramatically out a rain-streaked window, scribbling in a leather-bound notebook about