Which poem first appeared under the pen name Lewis Carroll?

The poem “Solitude” was the first work to appear under the pen name Lewis Carroll. It was published in March 1856, when Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a young Oxford mathematician beginning to publish literary work separately from his academic writing.

The pseudonym was assembled from his names: Carolus is the Latin form of Charles, and Ludovicus is the Latin form of Lutwidge. Dodgson reversed and anglicised the elements to create “Lewis Carroll.” Edmund Yates, editor of The Train, helped select the name from Dodgson’s proposed alternatives.

“Solitude” was a romantic poem, not one of the nonsense poems for which Carroll later became famous. It appeared in the first volume of The Train on pages 154–155. The distractors are later or different works: “Phantasmagoria” was published in a 1869 collection, while “Hiawatha’s Photographing” appeared in The Train in 1857. Carroll’s best-known books came later, beginning with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865.