The Raven

Poe stated that he composed the poem in a logical and methodical manner, aiming to craft a piece that would resonate with both critical and popular audiences, as he elaborated in his follow-up essay in 1846, "The Philosophy of Composition".

[3] Poe based the complex rhythm and meter on Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" and made use of internal rhyme as well as alliteration throughout.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore— Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"

said I, "thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!— Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted— On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore— Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!"

"The Raven" follows an unnamed narrator on a dreary night in December who sits reading "forgotten lore" by the remains of a fire[6] as a way to forget the death of his beloved Lenore.

He thinks the air grows denser and feels the presence of angels, and wonders if God is sending him a sign that he is to forget Lenore.

When the raven responds with its typical "Nevermore", he is enraged, and, calling the bird a liar, commands it to return to the "Plutonian shore"[8]—but it does not move.

[13] Christopher F. S. Maligec suggests the poem is a type of elegiac paraclausithyron, an ancient Greek and Roman poetic form consisting of the lament of an excluded, locked-out lover at the sealed door of his beloved.

[16] This devil image is emphasized by the narrator's belief that the raven is "from the Night's Plutonian shore", or a messenger from the afterlife, referring to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld.

"[20] Dickens's raven could speak many words and had many comic turns, including the popping of a champagne cork, but Poe emphasized the bird's more dramatic qualities.

Poe had written a review of Barnaby Rudge for Graham's Magazine saying, among other things, that the raven should have served a more symbolic, prophetic purpose.

[20] The similarity did not go unnoticed: James Russell Lowell in his A Fable for Critics wrote the verse, "Here comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

"[21] The Free Library of Philadelphia has on display a taxidermied raven that is reputed to be the very one that Dickens owned and that helped inspire Poe's poem.

[23] In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a raven also begins as white before Apollo punishes it by turning it black for delivering a message of a lover's unfaithfulness.

[26] Twentieth-century American poet Daniel Hoffman suggested that the poem's structure and meter is so formulaic that it is artificial, though its mesmeric quality overrides that.

[27] Poe based the structure of "The Raven" on the complicated rhyme and rhythm of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship".

[15] Nathaniel Parker Willis, editor of the Mirror, introduced it as "unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift ...

"[4] Following this publication the poem appeared in periodicals across the United States, including the New York Tribune (February 4, 1845), Broadway Journal (vol.

[34] The immediate success of "The Raven" prompted Wiley and Putnam to publish a collection of Poe's prose called Tales in June 1845; it was his first book in five years.

[38] In addition to the title poem, it included "The Valley of Unrest", "Bridal Ballad", "The City in the Sea", "Eulalie", "The Conqueror Worm", "The Haunted Palace" and 11 others.

[45] He explains that every component of the poem is based on logic: the raven enters the chamber to avoid a storm (the "midnight dreary" in the "bleak December"), and its perch on a pallid white bust was to create visual contrast against the dark black bird.

[46] Even the term "Nevermore", he says, is used because of the effect created by the long vowel sounds (though Poe may have been inspired to use the word by the works of Lord Byron or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).

[10] Ultimately, Poe considered "The Raven" an experiment to "suit at once the popular and critical taste", accessible to both the mainstream and high literary worlds.

"[63] A critic for the Southern Quarterly Review wrote in July 1848 that the poem was ruined by "a wild and unbridled extravagance" and that minor things like a tapping at the door and a fluttering curtain would only affect "a child who had been frightened to the verge of idiocy by terrible ghost stories".

[64] An anonymous writer going by the pseudonym "Outis" suggested in the New York Evening Mirror that "The Raven" was plagiarized from a poem called "The Bird of the Dream" by an unnamed author.

The writer, who wrote the article as a response to Poe's accusations of plagiarism against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, showed 18 similarities between the poems.

[67] "The Raven" became one of the most popular targets for literary translators in Hungary; more than a dozen poets rendered it into Hungarian, including Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Árpád Tóth,[68] and György Faludy.

[70] "The Raven" has influenced many modern works, including Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1955, Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird" in 1963 and Ray Bradbury's "The Parrot Who Met Papa" in 1976.

[73][74] Chosen in a fan contest that drew 33,288 voters, the allusion honors Poe, who spent the early part of his career in Baltimore and is buried there.