His literary career — leaving out the two prize poems — had begun in 1849 with the publication of "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems" by A., which attracted little notice and was soon withdrawn. It contained what is perhaps Arnold's most purely poetical poem, "The Forsaken Merman." "Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems" (among them "Tristram and Iseult"), published in 1852, had a similar fate. In 1858 he published his tragedy of "Merope," calculated, he wrote to a friend, "rather to inaugurate my Professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of humans," and chiefly remarkable for some experiments in unusual – and unsuccessful – metres.