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"The Raven" is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a distraught lover who is paid a visit by a mysterious raven that repeatedly speaks a single word: "nevermore". The lover, often identified as a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to antagonize the protagonist further with its repetition of the word. The poem makes use of folk, mythological, religious, and classical references.

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". The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens. 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.

"The Raven" was first attributed to Poe in print in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. Its publication made Poe popular in his lifetime, although it did not bring him much financial success. The poem was soon reprinted, parodied, and illustrated. Critical opinion is divided as to the poem's literary status, but it nevertheless remains one of the most famous poems ever written.

Synopsis

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thumb|upright=0.75|"Not the least [[wikt:obeisance|obeisance made he" (7:3), as illustrated by Gustave Doré (1884)]]

"The Raven" follows an unnamed narrator on a dreary night in December who sits reading "forgotten lore" by the remains of a fire as a way to forget the death of his beloved Lenore. A "tapping at [his] chamber door" The tapping is repeated, slightly louder, and he realizes it is coming from his window. When he goes to investigate, a raven flutters into his chamber. Paying no attention to the man, the raven perches on a bust of Pallas above the door.

Amused by the raven's comically serious disposition, the man asks that the bird tell him its name. The raven's only answer is "Nevermore". Finally, he asks the raven whether he will be reunited with Lenore in Heaven. 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" The main theme of the poem is one of undying devotion. The narrator experiences a perverse conflict between desire to forget and desire to remember. He seems to get some pleasure from focusing on loss. The narrator assumes that the word "Nevermore" is the raven's "only stock and store", and, yet, he continues to ask it questions, knowing what the answer will be. His questions, then, are purposely self-deprecating and further incite his feelings of loss. Poe leaves it unclear whether the raven actually knows what it is saying or whether it really intends to cause a reaction in the poem's narrator. The narrator begins as "weak and weary", becomes regretful and grief-stricken, before passing into a frenzy and, finally, madness. 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.

Allusions

thumb|left|upright=0.9|The raven perches on a bust of [[Athena#Pallas Athena|Pallas Athena, a symbol of wisdom meant to imply the narrator is a scholar. Illustration by Édouard Manet for Stéphane Mallarmé's translation, Le Corbeau (1875).]]

Poe says that the narrator is a young scholar. Though this is not explicitly stated in the poem, it is mentioned in "The Philosophy of Composition". It is also suggested by the narrator reading books of "lore" as well as by the bust of Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom.

He is reading in the late night hours from "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore". 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. Poe said the raven is meant to symbolize "Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance". He was also inspired by Grip, the raven in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty by Charles Dickens. One scene in particular bears a resemblance to "The Raven": at the end of the fifth chapter of Dickens's novel, Grip makes a noise and someone says, "What was that—him tapping at the door?" The response is, Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter." 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. 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.

thumb|upright=0.85|alt=|Rendition of "The Raven" as illustrated by [[John Tenniel (1858)]]

Poe may also have been drawing upon various references to ravens in mythology and folklore. In Norse mythology, Odin possessed two ravens named Huginn and Muninn, representing thought and memory. According to Hebrew folklore, Noah sends a white raven to check conditions while on the ark. In that context, the Balm of Gilead is a resin used for medicinal purposes (suggesting, perhaps, that the narrator needs to be healed after the loss of Lenore). In 1 Kings 17:1–5 Elijah is said to be from Gilead, and to have been fed by ravens during a period of drought.

Poetic structure

The poem is made up of 18 stanzas of six lines each. Generally, the meter is trochaic octameter—eight trochaic feet per line, each foot having one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. 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.

Poe based the structure of "The Raven" on the complicated rhyme and rhythm of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship". and said that "her poetic inspiration is the highest—we can conceive of nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself." As is typical with Poe, his review also criticizes her lack of originality and what he considers the repetitive nature of some of her poetry. About "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", he said "I have never read a poem combining so much of the fiercest passion with so much of the most delicate imagination." Poe then sold the poem to The American Review, which paid him $9 () for it, and printed "The Raven" in its February 1845 issue under the pseudonym "Quarles", a reference to the English poet Francis Quarles. The poem's first publication with Poe's name was in the Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845, as an "advance copy".

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. They also published a collection of his poetry called The Raven and Other Poems on November 19 which was the first time the poem was collected and which included a dedication to Barrett as "the Noblest of her Sex". The small volume, his first book of poetry in 14 years, was 100 pages and sold for 31 cents. 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. In the preface, Poe referred to them as "trifles" which had been altered without his permission as they made "the rounds of the press". In 1875, a French edition with English and French text, Le Corbeau, was published with lithographs by Édouard Manet and translation by the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Many 20th-century artists and contemporary illustrators created artworks and illustrations based on "The Raven", including Edmund Dulac, István Orosz, and Ryan Price.

Composition

Poe capitalized on the success of "The Raven" by following it up with his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), in which he detailed the poem's creation. His description of its writing is probably exaggerated, though the essay serves as an important overview of Poe's literary theory. 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. No aspect of the poem was an accident, he claims, but is based on total control by the author. 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). Poe had experimented with the long o sound throughout many other poems: "no more" in "Silence", "evermore" in "The Conqueror Worm".

In the summer of 1844, when the poem was likely written, Poe, his wife, and mother-in-law were boarding at the farmhouse of Patrick Brennan in New York. The location of the house, which was demolished in 1888, has been a disputed point and, while there are two different plaques marking its supposed location on West 84th Street, it most likely stood where 206 West 84th Street is now.

Critical reception

thumb|upright=0.85|Gustave Doré's illustration of the final lines of the poem accompanies the phrase "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted—nevermore!"

In part due to its dual printing, "The Raven" made Edgar Allan Poe a household name almost immediately, and turned Poe into a national celebrity. Readers began to identify poem with poet, earning Poe the nickname "The Raven". The poem was soon widely reprinted, imitated, and parodied. As he later lamented, "I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life—except in hope, which is by no means bankable". Poe's popularity resulted in invitations to recite "The Raven" and to lecture—in public and at private social gatherings. At one literary salon, a guest noted, "to hear [Poe] repeat the Raven ... is an event in one's life." It was recalled by someone who experienced it, "He would turn down the lamps till the room was almost dark, then standing in the center of the apartment he would recite ... in the most melodious of voices ... So marvelous was his power as a reader that the auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken."

Parodies sprang up especially in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and included "The Craven" by "Poh!", "The Gazelle", "The Whippoorwill", and "The Turkey". However, Lincoln eventually read and memorized the poem.

"The Raven" was praised by fellow writers William Gilmore Simms and Margaret Fuller, though it was denounced by William Butler Yeats, who called it "insincere and vulgar ... its execution a rhythmical trick". 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". An anonymous writer going by the pseudonym "Outis" (Ancient Greek for "Nobody", the false name Odysseus gives to Polyphemus in Odyssey) 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. It has been suggested Outis was really Cornelius Conway Felton, if not Poe himself. After Poe's death, his friend Thomas Holley Chivers said "The Raven" was plagiarized from one of his poems. In particular, he claimed to have been the inspiration for the meter of the poem as well as the refrain "nevermore".

"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, and György Faludy. Balázs Birtalan wrote its paraphrasis from the raven's point of view.

Legacy

thumb|Mantel from the Brennan Farmhouse, known as the Raven Mantel, at [[Columbia University]]

"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. The process by which Poe composed "The Raven" influenced a number of French authors and composers, such as Charles Baudelaire and Maurice Ravel, and it has been suggested that Ravel's Boléro may have been deeply influenced by "The Philosophy of Composition".

The name of the Baltimore Ravens, a professional American football team, was inspired by the poem. 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.

The mantel of the room in which Poe penned "The Raven" was removed and donated to Columbia University before the demolition of the Brennan Farmhouse. It currently resides at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, on the sixth floor of Butler Library.

Notes

References

Adams, John F. "Classical Raven Lore and Poe's Raven" in Poe Studies. Vol. V, no. 2, December 1972. Available online
Forsythe, Robert. "Poe's 'Nevermore': A Note", as collected in American Literature 7. January 1936.
Granger, Byrd Howell. "Marginalia – Devil Lore in 'The Raven from Poe Studies Vol. V, no. 2, December 1972 Available online
Hirsch, David H. "The Raven and the Nightingale" as collected in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, Inc., 1990.
Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.
Kopley, Richard and Kevin J. Hayes. "Two verse masterworks: 'The Raven' and 'Ulalume, collected in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.
Lanford, Michael (September 2011). "Ravel and 'The Raven': The Realisation of an Inherited Aesthetic in Boléro." The Cambridge Quarterly 40(3), 243–265.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York City: Cooper Square Press, 1992.
Moss, Sidney P. Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu. Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.
Ostrom, John Ward. "Edgar A. Poe: His Income as Literary Entrepreneur", collected in Poe Studies Vol. 5, no. 1. June 1982.
Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems. Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2002.
Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York City: Checkmark Books, 2001.
Thomas, Dwight and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849. New York: G. K. Hall & Company, 1987.
Weiss, Susan Archer. The Home Life of Poe. New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1907.

External links

Text

"The Raven" – Full text of the first printing, from the American Review, 1845
Page scans at the Internet Archive
"The Raven" – Full text of the final authorized printing, from the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, 1849

Commentary

The Poe Decoder – Essay on the symbols, words and composition of "The Raven"
The Raven. With Literary and Historical Commentary by John H. Ingram. London G. Redway. 1885.
Quaint and Curious – A collection of 19th century parodies and pastiches of "The Raven"

Illustrated

The Raven illustrated by Gustave Doré. From the Collections at the Library of Congress
Le Corbeau = The Raven: Poëme avec illustrations par Édouard Manet. From the Collections at the Library of Congress
Illustrations from The Raven , Gustave Doré illustrations from the University at Buffalo Libraries' Rare & Special Books collection

Audio

Reading of 'The Raven' and text by Classic Poetry Aloud (MP3)
Readings of 'The Raven' in different languages, at Internet Archive