edgar allan poe essay on the raven

Edgar Allan Poe

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A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ This was the riddle posed by the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll ’s 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . Probably the most famous solution proposed to this riddle (for the riddle has never been answered with a definitive solution) is: ‘Because Poe wrote on both.’ ‘The Raven’ is undoubtedly Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poem.

It was first published under Poe’s name in January 1845, and has been popular ever since. It is the only literary work to inspire the name of a sporting team (the American Football team the Baltimore Ravens).

According to Poe himself, in a later work of literary analysis, if he hadn’t had a change of heart we might well be reading a poem called, not ‘The Raven’, but ‘The Parrot’. The poem is so famous, so widely anthologised, that perhaps a closer analysis of its features and language is necessary to strip away some of our preconceptions about it.

First, here is a summary of the poem.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. ‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.’

The unnamed narrator (we can call him a narrator as ‘The Raven’ just about qualifies as a narrative poem) sits up late one December night, mourning the loss of his beloved, Lenore, when a raven appears at the window and speaks the repeated single word, ‘Nevermore’. The narrator starts to view the raven as some sort of prophet.

Throughout the poem, the narrator sits and ponders the meaning of the raven, and asks it questions, such as whether he will be see his beloved Lenore again in heaven, but the bird simply responds enigmatically each time, ‘Nevermore’. In the end, the narrator demands that the raven leave him alone, but it replies once again, ‘Nevermore.’

The poem ends:

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Poe credited two chief literary works in the genesis and composition of ‘The Raven’: he got the idea of the raven from Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge (whose title character has a pet raven, Grip – the same name of Dickens’s own pet raven in real life), and he borrowed the metre for his poem from Elizabeth Barrett Browning ’s poem ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’. Here is a stanza from Barrett Browning’s poem:

Dear my friend and fellow-student, I would lean my spirit o’er you: Down the purple of this chamber, tears should scarcely run at will: I am humbled who was humble! Friend,—I bow my head before you! You should lead me to my peasants!—but their faces are too still.

The metre of this poem, and of Poe’s ‘The Raven’, is relatively rare in English-language verse: trochaic octameter. (Trochaic because the stress falls on the first syllable in each foot, so ‘ Dear my friend and fell ow stu dent’, and ‘ Once up on a mid night drear y’; octameter because there are eight feet in each line, so ‘ Once up on a mid night drear y, while I pond ered, weak and wear y’.

But Poe added something to this rhythm, by including internal rhyme in each stanza of ‘The Raven’:

Once upon a midnight dreary , while I pondered, weak and weary , Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping , suddenly there came a tapping , As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.”

So although each stanza of ‘The Raven’ is rhymed abcbbb , with the ‘ore’ rhyme being constant throughout the poem, the a and c rhymes are complemented by a mid-line rhyme: dreary/weary , napping/tapping .

This makes ‘The Raven’ the perfect poem for reading aloud on a dark, wintry night – but it also arguably underscores the poem’s focus on speech, and on the talking raven that provides the refrain, and final word, of many of the poem’s stanzas. ‘Nevermore’ rhymes with the dead beloved of the poem’s narrator, Lenore, but it is also an inherently ‘poetic’ turn of phrase to end a poem (or successive stanzas of a poem): compare Hardy’s ‘never again’ , or Edward Thomas’s , or Tennyson’s ‘the days that are no more’ .

The word ‘Nevermore’, like ‘never again’ and ‘no more’, evokes finality, something gone from us that will not be regained: time, our youth, a lost lover. Whether Lenore in ‘The Raven’ is the narrator’s dead beloved – perhaps even his wife – is not spelt out in the poem, leaving us not so much to analyse as to speculate upon that point. But the broader point remains: a door has closed that will not be opened again.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this analysis, there is reason to believe that Poe originally planned to have a parrot, rather than a raven, utter the refrain ‘Nevermore’ in the poem. In his ‘ Philosophy of Composition ’, he wrote that in his mind there ‘arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech; and very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech.’

Whether Poe was merely retrospectively having us on, or whether he was being genuine here, the parrot does seem the natural choice for a bird capable of mimicking human speech, and Poe implies that he soon dropped the idea of writing a poem called ‘The Parrot’. Ravens are closely associated with omens and with the dead: it had to be ‘The Raven’.

5 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’”

Many years ago, my mum had me make a recording reading “The Raven.” And I did the best I could as far as enunciating and pausing, etc. She was teaching art in K-8, and for the older grades she played the tape and they were always silent/enraptured listening and then they were to make a drawing of the Raven, or anything from their imagination inspired by the poem. Usually she did it around Halloween and she got some really interesting illustrations/interpretations.

What an inspiring teacher she must have been, you should be proud of her.

I read that Poe did not earn but a paltry sum for this famous work due to the lack of copyright laws. It is sad how much trauma he suffered throughout his life.

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"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most well-known poems ever written. It brought its author worldwide fame and has frequently been analyzed, performed, and parodied. But what about this poem makes it so special?

In this guide, we give you a complete overview of "The Raven," discussing everything from the sad stories behind its creation and what is actually going on between the narrator and the raven, to its themes and the poetic devices it uses so effectively.

The Raven Poem: Full Text

Below is the complete text of The Raven poem, written by Edgar Allan Poe and published in 1845. It consists of 18 stanzas and a total of 108 lines.

What Is "The Raven" About?

"The Raven" is a poem about a man who is heartbroken over the recent death of his beloved Lenore. As he passes a lonely December night in his room, a raven taps repeatedly on the door and then the window. The man first thinks the noise is caused by a late night visitor come to disturb him, and he is surprised to find the raven when he opens the window shutter. After being let in, the raven flies to and lands on a bust of Pallas (an ancient Greek goddess of wisdom).

The man is amused by how serious the raven looks, and he begins talking to the raven; however, the bird can only reply by croaking "nevermore."

The man reflects aloud that the bird will leave him soon as all the people he cared about have left him. When the raven replies "nevermore," the man takes it as the bird agreeing with him, although it's unclear if the raven actually understands what the man is saying or is just speaking the one word it knows.

As the man continues to converse with the bird, he slowly loses his grip on reality. He moves his chair directly in front of the raven and asks it despairing questions, including whether he and Lenore will be reunited in heaven. Now, instead of being merely amused by the bird, he takes the raven's repeated "nevermore" response as a sign that all his dark thoughts are true. He eventually grows angry and shrieks at the raven, calling it a devil and a thing of evil.

The poem ends with the raven still sitting on the bust of Pallas and the narrator, seemingly defeated by his grief and madness, declaring that his soul shall be lifted "nevermore."

Background on "The Raven"

Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven" during a difficult period in his life. His wife, Virginia, was suffering from tuberculosis, Poe was struggling to make money as an unknown writer, and he began drinking heavily and picking fights with coworkers and other writers. It's easy to see how he could have conjured the dark and melancholy mood of "The Raven."

It's not known how long Poe spent writing "The Raven," (guesses range from anywhere to a single day to over a decade) but it's thought most likely that he wrote the poem in the summer of 1844. In his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe stated that he chose to focus the poem on the death of a beautiful woman because it is "unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." He hoped "The Raven" would make him famous, and, in the same essay, stated that he purposely wrote the poem to appeal to both "the popular and the critical taste."

"The Raven" was published in the newspaper The New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845 (depending on the source, Poe was paid either $9 or $15 for it). "The Raven" brought Poe instant fame, although not the financial security he was looking for. Critical reception was mixed, with some famous writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Butler Yeats expressing their dislike for the poem. Despite those initial mixed reviews, The Raven poem has continued its popularity and is now one of the most well-known poems in the world. Countless parodies have been written, and the poem has been referenced in everything from The Simpsons to the NFL team the Baltimore Ravens (their mascot is even named "Poe").

Major Themes in "The Raven"

From The Raven summary, we know it's definitely a melancholy poem, and most of its themes revolve around grim topics. Here are three of the most important themes.

Theme 1: Grief

Grief is the overwhelming emotion in "The Raven, " and the narrator is absolutely consumed by his grief for his lost love, Lenore. At the beginning of the poem, he tries to distract himself from his sadness by reading a "volume of forgotten lore", but when the raven arrives, he immediately begins peppering it with questions about Lenore and becomes further lost in his grief at the raven's response of "nevermore." By the end of the poem, the narrator is seemingly broken, stating that his soul will never again be "lifted" due to his sadness.

Poe stated that the raven itself was a symbol of grief, specifically, that it represented "mournful and never-ending remembrance." He purposely chose a raven over a parrot (a bird species better known for its ability to speak) because he thought a raven suited the dark tone of the poem better.

Edgar Allan Poe had experienced a great deal of grief by the time he wrote "The Raven," and he had seen people close to him leave, fall gravely ill, or die. He would have been well aware of the consuming power that grief can have and how it has the ability to blot everything else out.

Theme 2: Devotion

It's the narrator's deep love for Lenore that causes him such grief, and later rage and madness. Even though Lenore has died, the narrator still loves her and appears unable to think of anything but her. In the poem, he speaks of Lenore in superlatives, calling her "sainted" and "radiant." In his mind, she is completely perfect, practically a saint. His love for this woman who is no longer here distracts him from everything in his current life. With this theme, Poe is showing the power of love and how it can continue to be powerful even after death.

Theme 3: Rationality vs Irrationality

At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is rational enough to understand that Lenore is dead and he will not see her again. When the raven first begins repeating "nevermore," he realizes that the answer is the bird's "only stock and store," and he won't get another response no matter what he asks. He seems to even find the bird vaguely amusing.

However, as the poem continues, the narrator's irrationality increases as he asks the raven questions it couldn't possibly know and takes its repeated response of "nevermore" to be a truthful and logical answer. He then descends further into madness, cursing the bird as a "devil" and "thing of evil" and thinking he feels angels surrounding him before sinking into his grief. He has clearly come undone by the end of the poem.

In "The Raven," Poe wanted to show the fine line between rational thought and madness and how strong emotions, such as grief, can push a person into irrationality, even during mundane interactions like the one the narrator had with the raven.

The 7 Key Poetic Devices "The Raven" Uses

Edgar Allan Poe makes use of many poetic devices in "The Raven" to create a memorable and moving piece of writing. Below we discuss seven of the most important of these devices and how they contribute to the poem.

Alliteration

An allusion is an indirect reference to something, and Poe makes multiple allusions in "The Raven." Some key ones include:

The bust of Pallas the raven sits on refers to Pallas Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom.

Nepenthe is a drug mentioned in Homer's ancient epic The Odyssey, and it is purported to erase memories.

The Balm of Gilead is a reference to a healing cream mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah in the Bible.

Aidenn refers to the Garden of Eden, although the narrator likely uses it to mean "heaven" in general, as he wants to know if that's where he and Lenore will reunite.

Ravens themselves are mentioned in many stories, including Norse mythology and Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses.

The majority of "The Raven" follows trochaic octameter, which is when there are eight trochaic feet per line, and each foot has one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable.

However, Poe actually used several types of meter, and he is said to have based both the meter and rhyming pattern of "The Raven" off Elizabeth Barrett's poem " Lady Geraldine's Courtship." Meter is very prominent in "The Raven," and, along with other poetic devices, helps make it such a popular poem to recite.

The rhyming pattern in "The Raven" follows the pattern ABCBBB. The "B" lines all rhyme with "nevermore" and place additional emphasis on the final syllable of the line.

There is also quite a bit of internal rhyme within the poem, such as the line "But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token," where "unbroken" rhymes with "token."

Internal rhyming occurs in the first line of each stanza. It also occurs in the third line and part of the fourth line of each stanza. In the example "Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!/Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!" "token" and "spoken" in the third line of the stanza rhyme with "unbroken" in the fourth line of the stanza.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is when the name of a word is associated with the sound it makes, and it occurs throughout "The Raven," such as with the words "rapping," "tapping," "shrieked," and "whispered." It all helps add to the atmospheric quality of the poem and makes readers feel as though they are really in the room with the narrator and the raven.

What's Next?

"Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley is another famous and often-studied poem. Learn all about this poem and its famous line "look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" in our complete guide to Ozymandias .

There are many more poetic devices than those included in "The Raven." Read our guide on the 20 poetic devices you need to know so you can become an expert.

Taking AP Literature? We've got you covered! In our expert guide to the AP Literature exam, we've compiled all the information you need to know about the test and how to study for it to get a top score.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis Rhetorical Essay

The Raven is a narrative styled poem by popular poet Poe. It is a brilliant expression of loss and the musings of the narrator about his loss are simply enchanting. The simple musicality and a sense of the supernatural theme contained in the narration are engulfing.

The flow of the poem is vividly described step by step explaining in detail every single action of the narrator. The poem manages to show the untold devotion the narrator has to a love one who has already left him. The raven that visits him briefly makes his mind deviate from the mourning but he soon resumes his old sadness (Gerald 92).

Family relationships

The poem is heavily based on the relationship between the narrator and Lenore with their affection being the subject of the whole poem. The narrator is presumably mourning the loss of Lenore and assumes that the raven was an angel sent to comfort him during his grief. The poem describes the sad state of the narrator and describes how the presence of the bird on his window brings him joy.

The narrator is just indoors almost napping but is awaken by a wrapping on his door that turns out to be just the wind. He most probably created the wrapping on his door by thinking, but then the raven tapping on his window turns out to be real (Gerald 88).

He is momentarily relieved of his mourning as he indulges the raven. He happens to think that the bird can talk and claims that the only answer the bird has given is the word nevermore.

This response does not go well with the narrator since he asks the bird more questions and when the raven replies nevermore to whether the narrator is going to reunite with Lenore in heaven the narrator is infuriated. The speaker is essential to the point of view from which the poem is written.

The poem has a sad tone which is the general atmosphere of sadness that characterizes the personal life journey of Poe. He faced a lot of challenges in his life and it seems he was accustomed to being sad. His father abandoned them when he was young and his relationship with his step father was a struggle. He never managed to finish college because he was a drunk and used to gamble. Even life with his relatives did not work out for him.

This vicious cycle of sadness never left him and after the failure of his first two marriages he married Virginia. This marriage was first done in secret since she was his cousin and in addition thirteen years of age making her a minor. Furthermore, it expresses the unending devotion that the narrator has for a loved one they have lost.

Love and death

It is also a mourning poem like a dirge that never ends. The mournful tone could also be as result of the narrator’s grief due to his mother’s Eliza Poe’s death (Gerald, 72).

The poem describes the narrator’s deep anguish after losing a loved one. This deep feeling of loss can only result from deeper feelings of love. The strong bond that the love causes is the reason as to why the narrator is so saddened by his loss. He keeps thinking that the person who left them is going to come back hence when he hears a knock he assumes that it is Lenore.

The way the knock on the door is described as gentle and his response in a sure manner shows his anticipation that Lenore will return to him. The arrival of the bird makes him excited that he will hear from Lenore. The narrator even seems happy for a moment when the bird is there (Robert 99).

The death of Lenore seems to have devastated the narrator because his current mental state is questionable. He thinks that the bird has been sent from the afterlife with a message from Lenore. He even believes that the bird can speak and when it responds unfavorably to his question he gets agitated.

Structure and literary devices

The poem is composed of eighteen stanzas each of which has five lines. It uses a lot of rhyme within and without the stanzas, for instance the more, evermore and nevermore. It also has a lot of alliteration in the lines one is rapping, tapping and napping.

There is an extensive use of repletion as the word nevermore has been repeated to end the stanzas. The main theme is death that describes loss and mourning and best represented by the sad tone maintained through out the poem (Gerald, 70).

The Raven was Poe’s first work that made him popular and the way he wrote it to satisfy both the classical readers and seasonal readers. This work made Poe a household name in American literature. The work encompasses Poe’s literary skills since he wrote both poems and narratives.

This is a poem that was written in narrative style but contains poem properties. The description is as a narrative but the literary work is done in stanzas and lines just like a poem. This poem shows Poe’s ability to combine his creative abilities to come up with a brilliant work of art (Robert 101).

Works Cited

Gerald, Kennedy. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.

Robert, Regan. Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 2007. Print.

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“The Raven” : Imitated, Admired, and Sometimes Mocked

paul lewis is a professor of English at Boston College, the editor of The Citizen Poets of Boston , A Collection of Forgotten Poems: 1789–1820 , and the author of Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature , Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict , and A Is for Asteroids, Z Is for Zombies: A Bedtime Book About the Coming Apocalypse .

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Paul Lewis; “The Raven” : Imitated, Admired, and Sometimes Mocked . The Edgar Allan Poe Review 1 November 2021; 22 (2): 274–311. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.22.2.0274

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An examination of all eighteen of the poems that imitated “The Raven” known to have been published during Poe's lifetime suggests that, though all of them are grounded in “The Raven,” the grounding is varied and overlapping, ranging from commercial applications; to political satire; to praise or criticism of Poe himself as a person, author, editor, or book reviewer; to more upbeat dramatizations of mourning and the afterlife; to more and less gentle parodies of the poem. Attending to these differences provides insights into the impact of Poe's famous poem as both a literary work and a meditation on death, loss, and mourning. Also—in part because Poe paid attention to some of these poems as they came out, especially to ones published in 1845—looking at them sheds new light on biographical details, including Poe's contemporaneous reputation, willingness to consider alternative ideas, beliefs about racial bias, and engagement with the Boston literary establishment.

“The Raven” has had a great “run,” Thomas — but I wrote it for the express purpose of running. —Poe to Frederick W. Thomas, May 4, 1845

In his discussion of poems written in response to “The Raven” that were published during Poe's lifetime, T. O. Mabbott was of two minds. In the Collected Works , he regarded the fifteen poems he was aware of that imitated “The Raven” between February 1845 and October 1849 primarily as evidence of “the interest excited by” the poem rather than as parodies (M 1:351). In his introductory note to the latest of these derivative poems—J. Chickering's “Oquawka Turning Works for Sale”—he refers to all of them as parodies. 1 The list Mabbott compiled of these works has served as a guide for later biographers and critics who have tended to mention some and then comment on a few of them, noting that, in the words of Kenneth Silverman, “the rash of parodies” treated “many different subjects.” 2 Because it encompasses wider variation, Eliza Richards's characterization of these works as having been written in “the form of parodies, imitations, and versions of all kinds” is more accurate and, therefore, more useful. 3

Among antebellum works that elicited immediate and strong responses, “The Raven” has provided a remarkable range of materials for study, including private letters; published comments about the poem and reviews of the 1845 The Raven and Other Poems volume; Poe's post-“Raven” lectures and “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), which purports to explain how the poem was intended to affect readers; Thomas Dunn English's novel MDCCCXLII. or the Power of the S. F. (1846), which mocks Poe in the character of Marmaduke Hammerhead; James Russell Lowell's Fable for Critics (1848); and especially the eighteen early and quite different adaptations of “The Raven” to be considered here. Few texts are as open to reader-response analyses that, in Hans Robert Jauss's terms, focus not only on their representational or expressive function but also on their influence. 4 From the start, it was clear that “The Raven” was not only a literary work but a cultural phenomenon, an event. 5

According to Adam C. Bradford, Poe hoped that readers of his Gothic narratives in general would actively “recoil” from their macabre “ideas and sentiments” and affirm their own Christian or transcendental values. 6 In the case of “The Raven,” Bradford argues that, whether readers empathized with or were horrified by the speaker's “extreme” despair, they would respond, and were meant by Poe to respond, by imagining alternative, positive ways of coping with lost love: “Drawing readers … to such transcendent conclusions through their objections to what they encountered were both Poe's hope and … aesthetic design.” 7 Although Bradford suggests that the “copious” poems that rewrote “The Raven” should be seen in this way—that is, as what he calls “transcendent parodi es” 8 —only three of the eighteen works to be considered here (“The Gazelle,” “The Dove,” and “To the Author of ‘The Raven’”) fit this model. Rather than taking the speaker's plight seriously, several of the other adaptations eschew empathy in part by shifting down from and implicitly mocking the high seriousness of Poe's speaker and/or poem.

If a copy amuses … readers, and pleases them with the accuracy of its imitation, but leaves them quite unshaken in their admiration of the original, feeling no scorn for it and seeing no weakness they had not seen before, then it is no parody, and it is not satirical. But if it wounds the original (however slightly), pointing out faults, revealing hidden affectations, emphasizing weaknesses and diminishing strengths, then it is satiric parody. 9

Highet's distinction between the (not mutually exclusive) categories of formal and material parody is also applicable to the “Raven” adaptations. 11 Parodic elements in them frequently mimic or exaggerate Poe's already stylized and self-conscious use of trochaic octameter, internal rhymes, and verbal repetition. 12 Some begin with the memorable phrase “Once upon” or a variant. They frequently reuse words, phrases, and lines from the original—either verbatim or tweaking them for comic or serious effect. Just as often, these poems take aim at the high, serious, and Dark Romantic diction, tone, and themes of “The Raven” and/or at its intense, downward-spiraling speaker and plotline. Where Poe's haunted speaker engages in a self-tormenting conversation in a dark room with a creature he struggles to explain away, dismisses with humor, and finally comes to see as demonic, the “Raven” adaptations replace Poe's “ominous bird of yore” with a veritable menagerie of other animals—including a dove, owl, polecat, turkey, horse, cat(s), gazelle, and, most ignominiously, bedbugs! Paying attention to the swapped-in animals is revealing, since the question “How is a raven different from a dove?” is radically different from the same question about how a grim, ominously repetitive raven keeping one up past midnight differs from such common causes of nocturnal irritation as yowling cats and biting insects.

Reviewing all the known “Raven” adaptations published during Poe's lifetime will allow us to see their parodic intensity as a matter of degree. Following Highet, we can observe that many are, at most, imitative to some extent but not parodies. Some feel more like tributes than critiques. Others attend to their own business, which can be more or less literary. While all of them borrow features from “The Raven,” only some take aim at Poe's poem or seem to be motivated by their author's anti-or un-Poe-like literary aesthetic or critical ideas. On the contrary, taken as a group, these poems demonstrate how quickly “The Raven” was both reprinted and then recycled in forms that echoed their source without necessarily critiquing it.

Sarles, “The Owl,” Evening Mirror , February 17, 1845.

Snarles, “The Veto,” New World , February 22, 1845.

Anon., “The Black Cat,” Knickerbocker Magazine, April 1845.

Anon., “The Craven, by ‘Poh,’” Evening Mirror , March 25, 1845.

Snarles, “The Pressgang: A Vision. Fytte the Second,” New World , April 19, 1845.

C. C. Cooke, “The Gazelle,” Weekly Mirror , May 3, 1845.

William W. Lord, “The New Castalia,” 1845 (before May 24).

Anon., “The Whippoorwill,” Evening Mirror , May 30, 1845.

Anon., “The Turkey,” The Jester 1, no. 1 (June 14, 1845).

Thomas Dunn English, “The Mammoth Squash,” Aristidean , September 1845.

Marmaduke Mar-Rhyme, “The Pole-cat,” Quincy (Ill.) Whig , March 18, 1846.

J. J. Martin, “The Dove,” Brooklyn Eagle , January 11, 1847.

Anon., “A Jig in Prose,” Salem (Mass.) Register , November 18, 1847.

Harriet B. Winslow, “To the Author of ‘The Raven,’” Graham's Magazine , April 1848.

Anon., “‘The Voices of the Night—a Poe-um,’ by Professor Shortfellow,” New Hampshire Sentinel , December 7, 1848.

J. E. Tuel, “Moral II,” in The Moral for Authors as Contained in the Autobiography of Eureka, a Manuscript Novel, and Discovered by J. E. Tuel (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1849), 2:23–28 (before June 16).

Anon., “A Poe-um by One of the B'Hoys,” Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch , May 20, 1849.

J. Chickering, “Oquawka Turning Works for Sale,” Spectator (Oquawka, Ill.), October 3, 1849. 15

Turning now in chronological order to the augmented Mabbott list brings us first to a fully realized and complex parody, “The Owl” by one Sarles, which appeared about three weeks after “The Raven” in the same paper ( Evening Mirror ). Perhaps because “The Raven” was an overnight sensation, Poe replaced the pseudonym Quarles, which he used in the American Review , with his own name when the poem ran in the Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. 16 That Poe, with all his soon-to-be familiar baggage, was so early associated with the poem allowed parodies to focus on both the author and his work, as can be seen in subtitle of “The Owl”: “A Capital Parody of Mr. Poe's Raven.” 17 With New York readers already memorizing and reciting “The Raven,” even without the subtitle, it would have been hard to miss the connection to it in a poem that begins: Once upon a midnight dreary, listening until I was weary, To a ghostly guttural noise, which was a fellow-lodger's snore, All at once I heard a flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, Such a strange unearthly flapping, just outside my chamber door. “Sure, there's something there,” I muttered, “flapping at my chamber door— Pshaw! 'tis fancy—nothing more.” In addition to exaggerating Poe's penchant for repetition, Sarles deflates the high emotional seriousness and intensity of its target by substituting and repeating the barnyard noun “flapping” for Poe's ominous and only slightly more varied “rapping” and “tapping”; using oxymoronic juxtapositions (“ghostly” to modify “guttural” and “unearthly” to modify “flapping”); and reducing the attempt to solve the mystery of the raven's midnight visit with the blunt explanation in the second line and the hyper-colloquial version of Poe's refrain: “Pshaw! 'tis nothing more.”

The second stanza offers a sarcastic view of the “Raven” speaker's intellectual responses: rhyming “thinking” with “winking” and associating the as-yet-unknown bird's “flapping” with flights of fancy: Thinking that, tho past denying what is said of fancy's flying,— Flying often no one knows where—yet who ever thought before Fancy's wings were such as could flip-flap against a chamber door!— Then it must be something more. The flapping wings of fancy carry the speaker through his first engagement with the owl, as Poe's “velvet” curtains become cotton, and the “lodger” who's a “codger” snores continually “in the next room.” When the unknown visitor fails to appear, the mystery deepens, but only a bit: Then into my chamber turning, where my lamp was dimly burning, Soon I thought I heard a flapping even louder than before; “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice! But perhaps it but a bat is—I this mystery will explore;— If it cost me two-and-sixpence I this mystery will explore;— 'Tis the wind, and nothing more.” Attentive readers of “The Raven” might have been amused by the replacement of the awkward rhyme of “lattice” and “thereat is” with “a bat is,” and, if they were aware of Poe's reduced material circumstance, they could have associated the impoverished, boarding house setting and concern with money with Poe himself. The “Owl” speaker's poverty, like his determination to get a good night's sleep, shifts out of the “ghostly” frame of “The Raven” into a world where many people struggled to get by. Indeed, the focus on money and exhaustion replaces the “Raven” speaker's emotional turmoil with practical concerns. His willingness to spend only “two-and-sixpence” 18 to solve the mystery lets us know what he values and can afford, while it prepares us for further instances of his real-world distress: Very well do I remember, it was in the cold December, Tho' of blaze, or coal, or ember, not the ghost I had in store, I was over ears in sorrow;—vainly I had tried to borrow Cash to last me thro' to-morrow, and to pay my butcher's score— Just the matter of a dollar, and to pay my butcher's score— Only that, and nothing more. Taken together, “cold,” in place of Poe's “bleak” December, “sought to borrow” in place of “surcease of sorrow,” and “ghost” not as a supernatural being but as an indication of the utter lack of heating fuel, transport us to a world where dying embers have material and mundane significance. Similarly, the desperate need for money to get by and the boarding house setting render the speaker's situation stressful in common, rather than potentially supernatural, ways.

The satirical allusions to Poe himself continue when the owl appears and seems lonely, and when the speaker offers it some whiskey, which the owl spurns, having recently listened to a “temperance lecture.” All of this extends the downshift away from the high, spiritual drama of “The Raven” by pointing to Poe's intemperate drinking. “What? a temperance owl, by thunder! Well, indeed 'tis no great wonder;— He has doubtless just now come from out the “Tabernacle” door. Where he's heard a temperance lecture, and has seen a fearful picture Of the consequence of running up a whiskey-toddy score— Of the evils brought by sixpence worth inside the pothouse door— This it is, and nothing more.” If a reader were already aware of Poe's troubled use of alcohol, this could have seemed risible; if a reader had not heard about this, “The Owl” and other parodies that allude to his intemperance would have helped insinuate the Poe-drunkard association into public knowledge.

Imitating while also trivializing Poe's speaker's conversation with the “ominous bird of yore,” “The Owl” speaker starts asking his nocturnal visitor more pedestrian questions and receiving bad news in response: “is there good for me in store? / Quoth the owl still, ‘Nevermore.’” In the end, the stakes are as practical in “The Owl” as they are highfalutin in “The Raven”: “Prophet!” said I, “who the devil sent you here to warn of evil? Feathered prophet! I must ask thee still a single question more. Tell me now, and tell me truly, and I will reward thee duly, Will that individual in the next room never cease to snore? Will he ever cease that ghostly, guttural, and unearthly snore?” Quoth the owl still, “Nevermore.” Tweaking Poe's “devil sent” into “who the devil” and “prophet still, if bird or devil!” into “feathered prophet” continues the use of colloquialisms and oxymorons to bring “The Raven” down to earth. The offer to bribe or compensate the owl, perhaps with money, again places the interaction within the realm of financial negotiation, just as the use of the phrase “ghostly, guttural, and unearthly” to modify “snore” degrades and mocks the Gothic ambiguity of “The Raven.” The intended awkwardness of the refrain, “Quoth the owl still, ‘Nevermore,’” as a way of reproducing the rhythm of the sixth line of some “Raven” stanzas is implicit in the availability of other bi-syllabic birds including one, the parrot, famous for replicating human speech.

As the first of the “Raven” adaptations, “The Owl” provided a hard-hitting model for later parodies. The timing of its publication so soon after “The Raven” and its appearance in the same periodical raise important questions. If Nathaniel Parker Willis, serving as an editor of both the Evening and Weekly Mirrors , wrote the positive headnote to “The Raven,” as is widely assumed, then it is reasonable to conjecture that he also wrote the attention-grabbing headnote to “The Owl,” which called it “a capital parody of Mr. Poe's Raven.” That both of these headnotes feature Poe's name suggests that in different ways the works they introduced were intended to promote Poe's reputation: “The Raven” through its “subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift” (headnote), “The Owl” by stirring up controversy on the theory that all publicity is good for writers and periodicals. Bruce I. Weiner and Sandra Tomc, among others, have made this point, not about “The Owl” but about Poe and Willis's approach around this time to literary controversy. Weiner notes that Poe “clearly tried to cultivate the kind of notoriety that would make his work marketable,” and Tomc places the effort to gin up literary quarrels in the wider context of a culture of enemy-cultivation rife in New York publishing in the 1840s. 19 If, as Tomc argues, Poe was at this time trying to establish a bad-boy brand akin to Byron's as part of an effort to boost interest in—and, thus, the financial rewards of—his future work, then “The Owl,” with its Poe-like speaker, might have looked like a reasonable, if risky, move in this direction.

To push this line of speculation further, it is worth noting that the publication of both “The Raven” and “The Owl” occurred in the middle of the more familiar publicity-seeking effort, abetted by Willis, that Poe would come to call “The Little Longfellow War.” If the general view of Poe as seeking publicity through literary combat in 1845 is correct, it is interesting to see how the “Raven” adaptations fit into the effort. In the two weeks before “The Raven” appeared, Poe launched his attack on Longfellow in a multipart review of The Waif that ran in the Evening and Weekly Mirrors on January 3, 14, 20, and 25. Predictably and immediately, Longfellow defenders published refutations of Poe's review, also in the Evening Mirror , just before and after the publication of “The Raven”: George Hillard on January 20 and Charles Sumner on February 5. “The Owl” would appear three weeks later on the first page of the February 17 issue of the Evening Mirror. Two days before “The Owl” ran, Willis, tongue perhaps in cheek, stated that he personally disagreed with all disparagement of Longfellow. 20 The “war” would climax in Outis's March 1 defense of Longfellow and Poe's responses to Outis in the March 8, 15, and April 5 issues Broadway Journal , and in the April 1 review of Longfellow's Poems in the Aristidean .

Like Roderick Usher hearing his sister stirring in the tomb, one shudders to engage with the venerable who-was-Outis debate, but this appears to be necessary since Outis mentions not only “The Raven” but “The Owl” as well. The possibility that Poe was Outis could explain why Outis, in the course of defending Longfellow, praised “The Raven” and referred critically to “The Owl”: “It [‘The Raven’] is remarkable for its power, beauty, and originality, (out upon the automaton owl that has presumed to croak out a miserable parody).” Whoever Outis was, this reference to “The Owl” was meant to call attention both to it and to “The Raven.” This is clearly what Poe had in mind when he included all of Outis's letter in his first (March 8) response to it and when, in his March 17, 1845, letter to Jedediah Hunt Jr., he insisted that “If ever man had cause to be in good humor with Outis …, it is precisely myself, at this moment — as hereafter you shall see.” 21 In light of these overlapping activities, it is possible to see that Poe and Willis's publicity-seeking campaign had four tactics: (1) identify and praise Poe as the author of “The Raven”; (2) keep the Longfellow debate fires burning; (3) publish “The Owl”; and (4) make the most of Outis's “Raven”-praising and “Owl”-disparaging letter.

We have already encountered one or two parodies upon Mr. Poe's “ Raven ,” but have seen nothing so faithful to the original, nor so well executed in all respects, as one which has been sent us, entitled “ The Black Cat. ” The lines purport to have “slipped from the hat of a wild-looking young man, as he rushed from the door of a respectable house in one of our inland towns. It only serves to show the effect upon country minds of so large an amount of ‘pokerishness’ as was contained in the poem alluded to. We subjoin a few stanzas.” 23

Published less than two months after “The Raven” as an advertisement for Gouraud's Medicated Soap, “The Craven” draws on the familiarity of Poe's poem by opening with “Once upon,” imitating both its rhythm and internal rhymes, and then shifting out of Poe's romantic frame when its sleep-deprived speaker, the manufacturer of the true Gourard soap, expresses outrage over the cowardly and deceitful marketing of a “counterfeit” version of his product. Though readers might have had their interest piqued by the clear echoes of “The Raven,” the prose that follows the two stanzas of verse renders the purpose of the ad clear: “Dr. F. Felix Gourard, of 67 Walker street, again deems it necessary to caution the public against purchasing … imitations of his matchless Italian Medicated Soap , incomparable Poudres Subtiles , and marvellous Grecian Hair Dye .” In “Poe's Lyrical Medium,” Richards suggests that Gourard may have been toying with the ironic use of his imitative poem to discredit an imitation of his product, 24 but the juxtaposition seems as likely to have been a sort of “celebrity” endorsement along the lines of “If you like Poe's poem, you'll love our soap, poudres, and hair dye.”

Keenly attuned to treatments of himself in current newspapers and magazines, Poe took note of two poems that were less interested in “The Raven” than in either praising or denouncing its author: “The Pressgang: A Vision. Fytte the Second” and J. E. Tuel's “Moral II.” The former is the second installment of a three-part verse essay about New York publications and editors that ran in the New World on March 29, April 19, and April 26, 1845. In the fictive frame, the pseudonymously named Snarles comments on “all the city's press” in the course of recounting a nightmare to his wife (Mrs. Snarles). In the dream, New York's numerous and diverse magazines and newspapers were “personified by goblins” engaged in fierce strife: Those wild, grotesque and frightful things that now stood out to view, The spirits were of all the tribes—the weeklies, dailies, too; While all the groups of men that watched so closely at their call,           Were editors and owners grim—reporters, subs, and all; 25 Despite the aggressive stance implied by the Snarles pseudonym, the speaker of “The Pressgang” praises some publications and editors and puts down others. When the speaker turns to the Broadway Journal , the lines slip into a “Raven”-like form—expanding in length, shifting into trochaic meter, and including internal rhymes—to single Poe out for praise: Then with step sedate and stately, as if thrones had borne him lately, Came a bold and daring warrior up the distant echoing floor; As he passed the COURIER'S Colonel, then I saw THE BROADWAY JOURNAL, In a character supernal, on his gallant front he bore, And with stately step and solemn marched he proudly through the door,                   As if he pondered, evermore. 25 In the stanza that follows, Poe is seen as a fierce but fair critic who wields not a tomahawk but a “broad claymore,” leaves the targets of his reviews fairly criticized (if also wounded and bleeding), is undeviatingly honest, and, in the face of “countless” foes, resists “error evermore.” No wonder Poe raced to insert it in the next issue of the Broadway Journal . Calling it “A Gentle Puff,” Poe could not resist noting that if he included all the “complementary notices that are bestowed upon” “The Raven” in the issue “it would contain hardly any thing beside.” 26

As early as May 3, 1845, the kind of “Raven” adaptation Bradford discusses in Communities of Death entered the field in C. C. Cooke's “The Gazelle.” In it, a young man grieving for his lost love Isabel is visited during a daytime mountain hike not by a raven but by a white gazelle who replies to questions not ominously or negatively but vaguely and uninformatively by saying “Fare thee well.” 27 At first, the speaker only hears these words whispered from someplace out of sight, but the association of its possible speaker with a “holy hermit” draws him on. As the speaker finds and then follows the gazelle, he notices that she is crying and that her dark eyes are like the eyes “of Isabel.” After the animal stops and lies down below an “ancient cedar,” she appears to morph into a “seraphic,” “glorious” incarnation of Isabel—at which point the speaker asks a question: “Speak! oh, speak to me bright being! I am blest thy form in seeing, But shall no sweet whisper tell me,—tell me that thou lovest still? Shall I pass from earth to heaven, without sign or token given, With no whispered token given—that thou still dost love me well? Give it, give it now, I pray thee—here within this blessed dell,                  Still that hated ‘Fare thee well.’” The speakers in both “The Raven” and “The Gazelle” are dealing with lost love, and the questions they pose are similar, though Poe stretches them out in ways that allow his speaker to torture himself by manipulating the implication of the bird's expected replies. Isabel's refrain, “Fare thee well,” is too uninformative—saying nothing about her afterlife existence or disposition toward him—to satisfy the lovelorn speaker. The dreamlike quality of his vision is implied by the word “reverie,” by the suggestion that the speaker is bound by a “spell” from “the land of shadowy visions,” and by the way images and sounds only “seem” to be real: Then I turned, about departing, when she from her covert starting, Stood before me while her bosom seemed with agony to swell, And her eyes so mildly beaming, to my aching spirit seeming,              To my wildered spirit seeming, like the eye of Isabel. The gazelle's utterances seem to have been sweetly murmured in a soothing natural setting and associated with divine rather than demonic forces, but, eschewing spiritual revelation, all they do is wish him well and say goodbye.

“The Gazelle,” then, provides not so much a parody of “The Raven” as a variation on its theme, which may be why Poe praised it in the Broadway Journal a week after it appeared. 28 Rather than mocking Poe's tormented speaker, it models an alternative way of coping with lost love. Cooke eschews the obvious opportunities for parodic mockery by imitating, rather than exaggerating, Poe's meter and rhyme scheme. Like other “Raven” adaptations (notably “The Dove” and “To the Author of ‘The Raven’”), “The Gazelle” engages in a serious and respectful conversation with “The Raven,” reproducing the grief of Poe's speaker but providing an alternative outcome based on receiving a less meaningful message that simply underscores the fact of loss and implies the need for calm acceptance.

Despite, or perhaps to compensate for, Poe's harsh review of Poems by William W. Lord in the May 24, 1845, issue of the Broadway Journal , Mabbott edited a slightly expanded edition of Lord's book in 1938. In the introduction, Mabbott reviewed Poe's comments, pointing out that Poe was biased against Lord and concluding that “when he [Poe] chose to regard the ‘New Castalia’ as a plagiarism, and ended his review with the phrase ‘Good Lord, deliver us,’ he was fighting effectively but criticizing execrably.” 29 Whether one enjoys or deplores Poe's withering treatment of Lord, who was an aspiring young poet, Poe clearly did mistake the parodic “New Castalia,” with its faint echoes of “The Raven” and other Poe texts, for plagiarism. One shudders to think about what Poe would have written if he had seen what Lord was actually doing!

The concern here is not to assess Lord's work in general but to see where “The New Castalia” fits into the array of “Raven” adaptations. If Lord intended it as a parody of “The Raven” specifically, he avoided the most obvious signs of this: eschewing the “Once-upon” opening, splitting Poe's long, caesura-divided lines into separate lines, and preferring the subtly ironic implication of a non-animal-based title. Given the reference to Castalia—a fountain near Mount Parnassus associated with poetic inspiration—the sneer implicit in the modifier “New” is, perhaps, a bit too subtle to announce Lord's intent, although the harm being done to the Castalian waters and thus to poetic inspiration becomes his controlling metaphor. Still, while the opening lines are spoken in first person, the speaker is neither awake at midnight nor disturbed by unexpected noises: On the old and haunted mountain, (There in dreams I dare to climb,) Where the clear Castalian fountain,— (Silver fountain,)—ever tinkling, All the green around it sprinkling, Makes perpetual rhyme,— To my dream, enchanted, golden, Came a vision of the olden Long-forgotten time. 30 This dream soon darkens into nightmare when trees around the fountain shed their leaves, the waters ebb, and the “young and fair” maids singing near the fountain age suddenly and start to sing darker songs: And the maidens there a-sitting Changed to withered beldames knitting, Adder's tongue and knot-grass, fitting Wreathes for Bards our souls affrighting With stone-eyed phantoms of the dark, Moon-eclipsed, and spectre-bark, Nightmares, ghosts, and ravens flitting, Whispering, gibbering, croaking, screaming, O'er a place with phantoms teeming, Vasty phantoms! staring dreaming, Never known in sight or seeming, Moonlight from their garments streaming, With the look, and with the moan Of dead men on the sea alone, Their frozen eyes with ghost-light gleaming. 31 Even here—as the mocking echoes of “Raven” rhyming (sitting-knitting-fitting-flitting and, even more, screaming-teeming-dreaming-streaming-gleaming) abound—the problem with “new” verse seems broader, applying to Gothic and Romantic tropes and to “Bards” in general.

Poe mistook these lines as plagiarism, not parody: And the aged beldames napping, Dreamed of gently rapping, rapping, With a hammer gently tapping, Tapping on an infant's skull. After accusing Lord of stealing from his own poems, Poe extended the accusation to include seven other poets: “Miss Barrett, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Proctor, Longfellow and Lowell — the very class of poets … whom Mr. William W. Lord, in his ‘New Castalia’ … effects to satirize and to contemn.” Casting a wide net, “The New Castalia” presents Poe as an important, perhaps the most important, example of what Lord sees as a soul-crushing tendency of then-current verse that ages nymphs, turns flowers to “blood-spots,” and abuses children.

Like “The Gazelle,” “The Whippoorwill”—which was published anonymously first in the New York Evening Mirror on May 30, 1845, and then in the Weekly Mirror on June 7—uses the techniques of “The Raven” without exaggerating them. Here the bird visits the speaker not as a prophet or omen about the speaker's lost love but to ask the speaker for assistance in dealing with his (that is, the bird's) dead mate: “Then,” said I, “he did implore me, in my chamber flitting o'er me, Flitting to and fro before me, to avert some fearful ill;— With prophetic instinct surely, he entreated human skill               To save the dying Whippoorwill.” 32 After following the grieving bird outside and through a “benighted” wilderness, the speaker arrives at the source of the whippoorwill's distress: “Soon beneath him, as he hover'd, by the starlight I discovered / That his gentle mate was lying on the dead leaves, dead and still.”

When “The Whippoorwill” moves from the “Raven” speaker's wallowing in self-torturing sorrow to the healing power of sensibility, it gently pushes back against Poe's poem: O'er the lifeless bird then kneeling, all his grief within me feeling, And my soul within me moving all its longing to fulfill, On her velvet wing I laid her, in a grave my hands had made her, Underneath the little cedar, and beside the running rill:— Odorous leaves her shroud and pillow, and her dirge the running rill—                   Buried I the Whippoorwill. Where “The Gazelle” promotes a calm acceptance of the unknowable mysteriousness of death and the afterlife life, “The Whippoorwill” affirms the value of empathy and moving beyond one's own self-isolating feelings. Both literally and figuratively, the speaker leaves his “chamber” and ventures out to help a suffering creature.

Originally published in the first (June 14, 1845) issue of a short-lived Bostonian satirical magazine called The Jester , “The Turkey” should be read as both a continuation of the “Little Longfellow War” and an early salvo in the literary combat that both preceded and followed Poe's reading at the Boston Lyceum on October 16, 1845. The popularity that followed the publication of “The Raven” boosted Poe's standing on the lecture circuit, which led to his appearance at the Society Library of New York on March 1, 1845. After Horace Greeley, writing in the New York Daily Tribune , praised Poe's presentation and bemoaned the fact that “only three hundred of our four hundred thousand people” attended—the Boston Daily Atlas snapped back, “The Tribune may think as it pleases—but we commend the taste of the 399,700 people, as far preferable to that of the 300, in this case.” 33 Four days later, on March 5, 1845, Cornelia Wells Walter, the editor of the Boston Transcript , which would later publish many of the most snarky comments on Poe's Boston Lyceum lecture, served up this premature epitaph: There lies, by Death's relentless blow, A would-be critic here below; His name was Poe His life was woe: You ask, “what of this Mister Poe?” Why nothing of him that I know;                 But echo, answering, saith “Poh!” Never one to avoid a quarrel, Poe used an essay, “Longfellow's Poems,” in the April issue of the Aristidean to riposte, describing Boston's “literary circle” as a “knot of rogues and madmen.” 34

According to The Poe Log , although Poe had been abstemious after moving to New York in 1844, “after the publication of ‘The Raven’ he began to fall into old habits,” 35 which other people noticed, including Bostonian James Russell Lowell who visited Poe in New York in late May 1845 and found him intoxicated. Recalling the episode in 1884, Lowell said, “His manner was rather formal, even pompous, but I have the impression he was a little soggy with drink — not tipsy — but as if he had been holding his head under a pump to cool it.” 36

“The Turkey,” as it appeared in the first (June 14, 1845) issue of The Jester , a short-lived Bostonian satirical magazine. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

The first thing to note about “The Turkey” is that it imitates both “The Raven” and “The Owl.” Parodic shifts from the ominous and Gothic sensibility, setting, and diction of “The Raven” are apparent in (1) the speaker's early and unsuccessful effort to acquire the money he needs to keep drinking: “I would have reveled till the morrow, but I vainly, to my sorrow, / Half a dollar tried to borrow, from a friend who keeps a store”; and (2) the move from Poe's demon-conjuring diction (for instance, “thing of evil,” “bird or devil”) to the speaker's references to the “adipous old turkey,” “'tarnal critter,” and “gobbling creation.”

The second thing to note about “The Turkey” is that it adds real bite to the gentle mockery of “The Owl.” In “The Owl,” as in “The Raven,” the speaker is inside his “chamber” from the start of the poem. In “The Turkey,” the speaker is in worse shape, trying to find his way home in the “pitchy darkness.” “Oh! [he recalls] the most unpleasant dodging, as I tried to find my lodging.” In “The Owl,” the bird turns down an offer of whiskey; in “The Turkey,” the speaker is in the throes of a disturbingly hallucinatory bout of mania-a-potu. “The Owl” devotes two out of its eighteen stanzas to whiskey and temperance, while the speaker's intoxicated rant spans all twelve stanzas of “The Turkey.” Where it is possible to see “The Owl” as a scandal-provoking effort to promote Poe and the New York Mirrors , “The Turkey” is “The Owl” translated into Frogpondian, its moralistic depiction of Poe intended as both a warning and an insult.

From the opening stanza, it is clear that the wag who wrote “The Turkey” had trouble maintaining or exaggerating Poe's rhythm effectively: Once upon a morning dreary, I was in a sad quandary Coming from a Tom and Jerry, where I'd often been before; I felt a strange sensation, with exceeding consternation And no end of perturbation, for upon my head I wore A hat uncommon heavy, weighing pounds almost a score,                    Or perhaps a trifle more. 37 Since the Tom and Jerry was a familiar cocktail, we should understand the second line as an indication that the speaker has often indulged in it and often been drunk—a reading supported by the internal rhyming of “wabbler” and “gobbler” with “sherry cobbler” in the third stanza, later references to the speaker's “sick brain” and “mania a potu”–induced hallucinations, and the silhouette illustration of a man (certainly the speaker but, by association, also Poe) staggering backwards into a lamppost. 38

The speakers in both “The Owl” and “The Turkey” struggle with intemperance and its familiar consequence: indebtedness. Both are sleep-deprived. In both poems, the word “score” refers to unpaid tabs. 39 In “The Owl,” the scores are held by both the speaker's butcher and tavern owner; in “The Turkey,” the speaker refers only to his tavern “score” and then uses the word to frame an awkward pun based on the dual association of “score” with both money he owed and the number twenty. Thus, the speaker tells us that the turkey on his hat weighs “almost a score” and that he left the tavern because he lacked the money to keep drinking. Asked “what and where you came from,” the turkey replies “from a score,” suggesting that the speaker's excessive drinking caused his disturbing hallucination.

In both “The Owl” and “The Turkey,” the visiting bird perches on an object above the speaker's “chamber door”: in “The Owl,” the object is a box; in “The Turkey,” it's a demijohn, that is, a large bottle with a round body and thin neck. This difference is significant, since it highlights how much more insulting “The Turkey” is than “The Owl.” Where “The Owl” speaker voices legitimate concerns about the needs of the poor, “The Turkey” speaker harbors murderous, violent thoughts and ends up shooting at the hallucinated gobbler and breaking his demijohn instead: But the fowl evaporated, as the powder dissipated And the neck was off the demijohn, just that and nothing more, It stands there as a warning, how I, sober conduct scorning Bring home turkeys in the morning to get up behind the door And its probable that demijohn behind the chamber door                 Shall be lifted–o'er and o'er. Unable to maintain sobriety, the addicted speaker expects to keep using the demijohn despite its broken neck, perhaps because he can't afford a new one. As a shorter, rougher, and more didactic reworking of “The Owl,” “The Turkey” intensifies the attack on Poe by associating him with a deranged and violent drunkard.

Poe would almost certainly have been aware of “The Turkey” not only because he had his vulture eye focused on the Boston literary establishment at the time but also and specifically because the first issue of The Jester in which the poem appeared was noticed in the “Number One's” column in the June 21, 1845, Broadway Journal when Poe, C. F. Briggs, and H. C. Watson were editors. Whether he or, perhaps, Briggs wrote the tepid note on The Jester —which mentions its “Boston birth” and describes it as “a very slender imitation [of] Punch ”—the prominence of the poem, which takes up almost all of page 6, would have caught Poe's eye, as would its taunting headnote: “ The Jester, having encountered a piece of POE-TRY, endeavoreth to give a grotesque shadow of the same ” (italics in the original).

We occupied some fifteen minutes with an apology for not “delivering,” as is usual in such cases, a didactic poem: a didactic poem, in our opinion, being precisely no poem at all. After some farther words — still of apology — for the “indefinitiveness” and “general imbecility” of what we had to offer — all so unworthy a Bostonian audience — we commenced, and, with many interruptions of applause, concluded. 41

We like Boston. We were born there — and perhaps it is just as well not to mention that we are heartily ashamed of the fact. The Bostonians are very well in their way. Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good. Their common is no common thing — and the duck-pond might answer — if its answer could be heard for the frogs.

Although Mabbott was aware of the existence of Thomas Dunn English's “The Mammoth Squash,” he left it off his list of “Raven” parodies, perhaps because the similarities between the two poems are comparatively inconspicuous. By filling the raven's place with an award-winning vegetable, rather than another animal, and by eschewing the stanzaic format of “The Raven,” English's poem aims at Poe the man more than the poem. That said, echoes of “The Raven” can be heard in lines like these: Green and specked with spots of golden, Never since the ages olden— Since the time of Cain and Abel , Never such a vegetable, So with odors sweetest laden Thus our halls appearance made in. Who—oh! who in kindness sent thee To afford my soul nepenthe? 43 The enthusiastic and colloquial fourth line is apparently spoken in the hall of an agricultural fair, which is as far as possible from Poe's haunted, midnight chamber. And the notion that a squash, however large, could help one forget a disturbing memory is, of course, risible.

My dear Sir:—For old acquaintance sake, I comply with your request; but your attempt will be a failure. Reasoning a priori , I could demonstrate that it cannot succeed. But I will not waste my logic on an obstinate man.                        Your obedient servant,                           edgar a. poe

It is true, as suggested it might be, that I have never seen Poe's “Raven”; and I very well know that a parody is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the reader's acquaintance with the original. Still there is enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one several hearty laughs. I think four or five of the last stanzas are decidedly funny, particularly where Jeremiah “scrubbed and washed, and prayed and fasted.” 49

Mr. Editor — I should probably never have published the enclosed poem, did I not feel it a duty I owe to the republic of letters, to expose a culprit, who disregards its laws. Mr. Edgar A. Poe, to whom this was shown in confidence, has, in his parody called “The Raven,” most shamefully plagiarised both my stanza and my subject, with such silly alteration in both, as, in his feeble cunning, he thought would disguise the theft. Such, for instance, is the perpetual repetition of the rhymes, “Evermore” and “Nevermore” — a wretched shift to conceal the poverty of his invention: and such his transformation of the formidable pole-cat into a dull jackdaw, whose vocabulary is as monotonous as his own.

While it retells Poe's story, little about the meter of “The Dove” (iambic tetrameter) or rhyme scheme (eight-to twenty-two-line stanzas, mostly in rhyming couplets) echoes “The Raven.” Eschewing humor, it seriously rebukes Poe's treatment of spiritual despair in three significant ways. First, the dove, after floating around the speaker's head, comes to rest not on the bust of Athena but “beside a picture, lovelier / Than heathen gods, and holier: / Two beauteous babes, whose sinless eyes / Bespeak them still in Paradise.” Second, it subtly indicts the self-absorption of Poe's speaker by contrasting it with a lament about the condition of all humankind in a postlapsarian world marred not only by pain and loss but also by crime, poverty, war, and slavery. A headnote to the poem, attributed to Walt Whitman, praises its “graceful spirit of Christianity,” which points to the third rebuke of Poe: that doing one's duty on earth by helping others, rather than by obsessing over one's own despair, is redemptive.

Shifting down in the animal kingdom, “A Jig in Prose” runs a version of the verse lines of “The Raven” into a single prose paragraph that offers a low-stakes encounter with a pair of rats. Elements of “The Raven” mocked include the anything-but-high mystery of figuring out whether the grating noise from below the floor was made not by “some little mouse” 51 but by rats; replacing the “curious volume of forgotten lore” with a “forsaken, antique [news]paper”; rhyming the “particular,” “perpendicular,” and “orbicular”; absurdly over-describing its narrator's rising sense of mystery and terror as “watching, gazing, pondering, trembling, doubting, tearing, wondering”; and by replacing Poe's speaker's agonizing and evolving responses to the raven with the simple act of throwing a boot at the rats, whirling “it safe across the floor; but the imps had scattered, and the door was bruised and battered, that it hit and nothing more.” Certainly parodic, “A Jig in Prose” is as playful and lighthearted as its title suggests.

Anything but a “jig,” Harriet Winslow's “To the Author of ‘The Raven’” is both less parodic and far more serious in its attempt to engage Poe himself in a dialog about the right way to understand the “grim … nocturnal” visitor of the original poem. The fact that Poe read and proofread Winslow's poem prior to its publication in Graham's Magazine and suggested specific tweaks shows that the author of “The Raven” was open to this exchange. 52 In “To the Author,” Winslow returns imaginatively to the fated chamber, casts Poe as the speaker, and asks questions about the raven: whether he is still sitting in the same place, repeating the same word, and, if so, whether he is “conscious or unwitting when he answers ‘Nevermore.’” 53 Perhaps the bird is also grieving, “inly praying … to forget some matchless mate, beloved yet lost for evermore.”

Winslow's most interesting argument deploys abolitionist rhetoric to refute the biased assumption that the raven is demonic: Though he is a sable brother, treat him kindly as another! Ah, perhaps the world has scorned him for the luckless hue he wore, No such narrow prejudices can he know whom love possesses— Whom one spark of Freedom blesses. Do not spurn him from your door                       Lest Love enter nevermore! Between implication and indictment, Winslow suggests that Poe's speaker and/or Poe himself falsely assumed that the raven was evil, indeed, demonic, because he was black, a prejudice no true lover, grieving or otherwise disposed, could hold. Perhaps the raven is an unrecognized angel who, once seen this way, could rend the veil that separates Earth from “that world of wonder,” dispelling our “doubts and fears.”

Nothing about Winslow's rebuttal puts down “The Raven.” It imitates formal features without exaggerating them, and its argument is respectful and Socratic, advanced in a series of questions that culminate in “Rend—oh rend the veil asunder! Let our doubts and fears be o'er! / Doth he answer—‘Nevermore’?” Poe's willingness to assist Winslow suggests that—though he expressed frustration with some abolitionist arguments 54 —he was open to both Winslow's love-based repudiation of racial bias and her alternative reading of “what the ominous bird or yore / Meant in croaking ‘Nevermore.’”

First published in the Boston Courier , “‘The Voices of the Night—a Poe-um,’ by Professor Shortfellow” has intriguing connections to Poe's career-long engagement with the Boston literary establishment. 55 Only twenty lines long and not divided into stanzas, absent its title, readers might not recognize the connection to “The Raven.” “Professor Shortfellow” is confusing, since it seems to diminish Longfellow, not Poe. In his review of Longfellow's Voice of the Night in the February 1840 issue of Graham's Magazine , Poe made two points about the writer against whom he would most frequently wield his tomahawk: (1) that Longfellow was a plagiarist and (2) that, however admired Longfellow was at the time, his high reputation would not endure. 56 Poe had made this point four months earlier in his review of Longfellow's Hyperion (1839): “We grant him high qualities, but deny him the Future.” 57 In the Voices of the Night review, after faintly praising “Hymn to the Night,” Poe observes that Longfellow lacked the “capacity for the ultimate achievement of any well-founded monument — any enduring reputation.” 58

“‘The Voices of the Night—a Poe-um,’ by Professor Shortfellow” feels, then, like a response to Poe's “Little Longfellow War” attacks, a late manifestation, perhaps, of the Lyceum lecture aftermath. Relying on internal rhyme and trochaic meter to evoke “The Raven,” its speaker, far from haunted by inextinguishable grief, just longs to get a good night's sleep: Tired of reading, tired of writing, tired of copying and inditing, And the bed looked so inviting, as if courting me to sleep, That I folded up my paper and extinguishing my taper, Without cutting even a caper, softly to my rest did creep. In colloquial diction that contrasts with the High Gothic language of “The Raven,” the speaker explains that he was awakened “when a sound outside my ‘winders’ burnt my vision into cinders— / Knocked my sleep all into flinders, so that I got up and dressed.” Rather than engage the yowling cats in conversation, the speaker opens a “winder” and hurls “shovelfuls of fire and ashes, on the maddened beasts below.” Downshifting from the serious, even hysterical references to the demonic in “The Raven,” in this parody such references are far more mundane and figurative, as is the resolution of the conflict: Quick the fiends began to scatter, and to cease their tarnal clatter, Having settled thus the matter, I again to bed did go. In addition to making fun of “The Raven,” is it possible that this Bostonian parody cuts two ways: at both the raven's croaking and the high seriousness of Longfellow's Voices ? If so, its broadest target could be both sides of the Poe-Boston feud. 59

In private, writing to Annie Richmond on June 16, 1849, Poe complained about the “miserably stupid” parody of “The Raven” included in Part 2 of J. E. Tuel's The Moral for Authors as Contained in the Autobiography of Eureka, a Manuscript Novel, and Discovered by J. E. Tuel . The reference to Poe's Eureka (1848) sets up Tuel's primary target. In the introduction to The Moral for Authors , Tuel assails the literary scene—comprising authors, critics, editors, and publishers—and ironically characterizes the “mighty Press” as “the Railroad of the Intellect.” 60 Stupid or not, Tuel's Moral for Authors is oddly rooted in disappointment about his failure as a writer that he seems to concede he deserved. Reviewing his early work “with a deserved severity by a rigid examination” leads him to “self-chastisement” and humiliation “wrought upon [him] by high anticipations of success … followed by repeated disappointments.” 61 The self-inflicted humiliation continues in Part 2 when Tuel's “Raven” adaptation monotonously insults Poe as a bore:                        When I had hop'd to gaze High up on Heav'n, and find my name a blaze— A comet blaze—to find this dismal row Of croaking authors dire, led on by POE, All pecking on my lean and hungry book, Some with a pen, the others with a hook The one to bleed, should it be charg'd with blood, Th' other hang'd, should it be reckon'd good! 62 In his version of “The Raven,” which Tuel seems to call “Plutonian Shore,” 63 the refrain, “Read this o'er,” is spoken by an aspiring, frustrated writer who intrudes on the speaker, who is an editor (probably intended to be Poe), at midnight, foists a manuscript into his hand, and then refuses to leave. As this sample demonstrates, the lines adapted from “The Raven” are so clumsy as to more than fully justify any editor's unwillingness to “read them o'er”: “Thus I sat, engaged in reading, but no syllable revealing, To the Youth, whose fiery eyes roll'd a fiery phrenzy o'er, And o'er its pages turning, with thoughts of mystic learning, I began a critique burning on its M athews style and more, When coming to a Chapter, which I heartily did deplore,                     Cried the author, ‘Read it o'er.’[”] One cannot help wondering why Tuel bothered to insult Poe and the literary marketplace in general for not accepting his submissions or reviewing his work favorably in a book that conclusively demonstrated that his writing was unworthy of being published. The aroma of self-pity is tempered only slightly by the self-tormenting quality of the work. The speaker in “The Raven” can be indicted for impiety or excessive mourning, but at least he, unlike Tuel, has a legitimate reason to grieve.

“A Poe-um by One of the B'Hoys” is delightfully parodic. From the title on, the reference to Poe and “The Raven” is clear in the long lines, trochaic feet, exaggerated internal rhyming, and mundane version of a late-night encounter with an ignoble but dreaded—indeed, reasonably feared—creature. Awakened from dreams, the speaker says, “Down my air built castles tumbled, as beneath the clothes I fumbled— / Fumbled, rumbled, grumbled, jumbled—for the cause of my affright, / Startling me at lone midnight, with its dire attempt to bite.” 64

After realizing that the menace is real and not “the bed-bug of a dream,” the speaker defaults into American Irish (b'hoy) dialect to describe a legitimate (as opposed to fanciful) source of terror: There! again that awful crawling—crawling as it crawled before— “No mistake, this time, by thunder!” shrieked I, as I reached the floor— Lit the lamp, turned down the kiver, to my horror to diskiver A great bed-bug! red as liver, red with blood from me he bore! By contrasting the mental states of the speaker and the bedbug with those of the speaker of “The Raven” and the raven, the final, four-line stanza strikes parodic gold: In the shadow of a vision I can see him crawling here, O'er the bed that I deserted, I deserted in such fear; And the look has all the seeming of a bed-bug that is dreaming, Of some dark infernal scheming, scheming that is mischief fraught. The abrupt, not-rhyming and, therefore, aborted couplet that ends the poem leaves us not with a beak in our hearts but with the ridiculous idea of a dreaming bedbug in our minds. Similarly, the difference between real and fanciful dangers—between the bedbug described in this poem as a literally “back-biting devil” and Poe's fiendish raven from “the Night's Plutonian shore” is hilariously deflating.

Speaking of deflating imitations, we come finally to J. Chickering's ad, “Oquawka Turning Works for Sale,” which Mabbott called “an old parody of Poe's Raven” and regarded as a “curious tribute to “Poe's popularity.” 65 Set at a furniture manufacturing shop during a “day so dreary,” it begins with the colloquial variant, “Wunst upon” and tells the story of its speaker's effort to make a cherry bedpost on a horse-driven lathe: As I turned on without delay Sweating, puffing and gouging away I heard the old beast distinctly say (Old mare) I'll turn no more ! ! I am old and well stricken in years ! After the horse is “turned out to grass,” the speaker invites potential customers to visit his “turning works.” The metamorphosis of the raven into a tired, old horse could imply criticism of the exalted status of Poe's bird—but, as with “The Craven, by ‘Poh’”—Chickering's ad would seem to have had a more practical, less literary purpose.

There is a wild unearthliness, and unheavenliness, in the tone of all his pictures, a strange unreality in all his thoughts; they seen to stand shivering, begging admission to our hearts in vain, because they look not as though they came from the heart. 66

About twenty months before he wrote and published “The Mammoth Squash” under Poe's name in the October 1845 issue of the Aristidean , Poe's friend-turned-enemy Thomas Dunn English wrote and published a two-part story called “ hints to authors . On the Germanesque [and] The Tale of a Grey Tadpole” also under Poe's name in the Irish Citizen , a Philadelphia newspaper. 67 Generally seen as a parody of “The Black Cat” (1843), “ hints … Tadpole” is better understood as a parody, or, rather, a parodic mashup of Poe's “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838) and “A Predicament” (1842) and “The Black Cat.” As in Poe's two-part narrative, the first part, “ hints to authors ,” instructs writers on how to construct “Germanesque” stories, and the second part provides an example of such an attempt, replacing Poe's “The Predicament” with a parody of “The Black Cat” in which a tadpole terrifies the narrator who responds with irrational violence. Seen this way, English's attempt to parody Poe reflects poorly on English, since Poe's own self-consciousness and ability to make fun of the kind of stories he himself was in the process of writing was based on his more capacious and self-aware sense of humor.

“Hillo! hillo, there!” said a gruff voice in reply. “What the devil's the matter now?” said a second. “Get out o' that!” said a third. “What do you mean by yawling in that ere kind of style, like a cattymount?” said a fourth; and hereupon I was seized and shaken without ceremony, for several minutes, by a junto of very rough-looking individuals. They did not arouse me from my slumber — for I was wide awake when I screamed — but they restored me to the full possession of my memory (M 3:969).

I am grateful to Richard Kopley, who read an early version of this article, and to Sean Casey and Jessy Wheeler at the Boston Public Library for help in recovering what is probably the only surviving copy of the first issue of The Jester , a short-lived Bostonian magazine that published an early parody of “The Raven.”

T. O. Mabbott, An Old Parody of Poe's Raven by J. Chickering (Montreal: J. A. Hamon, 1929,) 1. In their summary of the year 1845 in The Poe Log , Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson similarly note that “The Raven” was “reprinted by journals throughout the country and followed by numerous parodies” ( PL 483). In Poe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), James M. Hutchisson refers to “rash of parodies” that “broke out in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston” (165).

Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 238. In his treatment of the reception of “The Raven,” Silverman mentions eight “parodies” and quotes from two of the pre–October 1849 poems. In “Poe's Lyrical Medium: The Raven's Return” in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture , ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), Eliza Richards mentions ten and discusses three of the pre–October 1849 “Raven” adaptations in the context of a broader treatment of the afterlife of the poem (207–8). In his discussion of “Raven” parodies in Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014) Adam C. Bradford discusses one work published during Poe's lifetime—Mary Townsend's “The Dove” (1847)—along with two later works: Thomas Holley Chivers's “The Vigil in Aidenn” (1851) and Walt Whitman's “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859).

Richards, “Poe's Lyrical Medium,” 201. See also Michael C. Cohen in “Echoes of ‘The Raven’: Unoriginality in Poe's Verse,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), who alludes to the way “The Raven” has generated “a never-ending system of citation, parody, and pastiche” (105).

Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception , trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 15.

Although Hervey Allen does not discuss the “Raven” adaptations, they surely contain evidence for his view of Poe's image following the revelation that Poe wrote the poem: “With the revelation of the author's name, Poe found himself instantly famous, the object of curiosity, and the strange, romantic, diabolic, and tragic figure that he has ever since remained.” Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938), 706.

Bradford, 81.

Bradford, 68.

Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 68.

Robert Chambers , Parody: The Art That Plays with Art (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 3–12. A reviewer of Chambers's book enumerates the range of distinguishable human activities and genres that Chambers includes under his broad definition of parody: “Its scope is therefore very wide indeed, encompassing children's mimicry, all of the traditionally designated parodic genres (so: mock-epic, comic epic, burlesque, travesty, spoof, lampoon and hoax …), word-play and puns, much of the history of the novel, skaz, film adaptations, imitations, Dada, self-reflexive art, and what we know as modernism and postmodernism.” Simon Dentith, “Review,” Modernism/Modernity 18, no. 1 (January 2011): 189.

Highet, Anatomy of Satire , 69.

In “Mad Ravings or Sound Thinking? ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ and Poe's Parodic Raven,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism , ed. James M. Hutchisson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), Dennis W. Eddings argues that “The Raven” itself “parodies the wretched verse produced by an imagination that has overwhelmed reason” (188), and that its specific literary target is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “Lady Geraldine's Courtship,” from which Poe “borrowed the form and meter of ‘The Raven’” (189) and which Poe reviewed in “the same month as ‘The Raven’” was published. The extent to which the apparent excesses of “The Raven”—including the “multiplicity of inadmissible rhymes” and “deficiencies of rhythm” that Poe criticized in his review of the Barrett poem—should be seen as parodic or only imitative is also worth pondering about the “Raven” adaptations considered here.

Poe's most famous poem appeared first and almost simultaneously in the American Review 1 (February 1845):143–45; and the Evening Mirror , January 29, 1845, 4.

For Mabbott's list, see M 1:351n4. Mabbott's order has been modified by moving “The Voices of the Night—A Poe-Um” up one space to reflect an earlier publication date than the one Mabbott knew. For some of these “Raven” adaptations and many more published in the decades after Poe's death, see Walter Hamilton, Parodies of the Works of English and American Authors (London: Beeves and Turner, 1884), 2:260–80; and Murray Ewing, “Quaint and Curious, Parodies and Pastiches of ‘The Raven,’” accessed November 12, 2020, https://www.murrayewing.co.uk/raven/index.php .

Excluded here but interesting in their own right are “Raven” adaptations that were written but not published before October 7, 1849, such as Sarah Helen Whitman's “The Raven,” available in the Mabbott Poe archive at http://mabbottpoe.org/items/show/372 (accessed September 18, 2021).

For a discussion of why Poe chose “Quarles” and dropped it almost immediately, see Joseph Jackson, “Poe's Signature to ‘The Raven,’” Sewanee Review 26, no. 3 (1918): 272–75.

Evening Mirror , February 17, 1845, 1.

According to Adam C. Roberts, a poor English family of two adults and three children could expect to pay 3 shillings and 6.5 pence per week for bread in 1841. See Victorian Culture and Society: The Essential Glossary (London: Arnold, 2003), 142.

Bruce I. Weiner, The Most Noble of Professions: Poe and the Poverty of Authorship (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, 1987), 11; Sandra Tomc, Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790–1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 105–6. See also Burton R. Pollin, who observed that “Poe carried over from the Evening Mirror a campaign against Longfellow, begun in January and encouraged apparently by Willis, for the sake of the nearly scandalous publicity, that Briggs uneasily tolerated” (“The ‘Little Longfellow War’” in P 4:l).

On Willis's comment, see Pollin, “‘Little Longfellow War’” (P 4:l).

CL 1:496. For Pollin's discussion of this letter and the case for Poe as Outis in general, see “Poe as Author of the ‘Outis’ Letter and ‘The Bird of the Dream’” Poe Studies / Dark Romanticism 20, no. 1 (1987): 10. For the other side of the Poe-Outis question, see Kent Ljungquist and Buford Jones, “The Identity of ‘Outis’: A Further Chapter in the Poe-Longfellow War,” American Literature 60, no. 3 (October 1988): 402–15.

New World , February 22, 1845, 120.

Knickerbocker , April 1845, 363.

See Richards, “Poe's Lyrical Medium,” 208–9, for a discussion of Gourard's ironic use of an imitation of Poe's poem to assail an imitation of his soap.

Snarles, “The Pressgang, A Vision. Fytte the First,” New World , March 29, 1845, 202.

Snarles, “The Pressgang, A Vision. Fytte the Second,” New World , April 19, 1845, 250.

Edgar Allan Poe, “A Gentle Puff,” Broadway Journal , April 26, 1845, 102.

C. C. Cooke, Weekly Mirror, May 3, 1845; Hamilton, Parodies of the Works , 2:29.

“The Mirror of last week contains a poem of much merit, entitled ‘The Gazelle.’ It is the composition of a mere boy of fifteen, C. C. Cooke, and, although professedly an imitation of ‘The Raven,’ has a very great deal of original power.” Edgar Allan Poe, “Miscellany,” Broadway Journal , May 10, 1845, 302.

T. O. Mabbott, introduction to The Complete Poetical Works of W. W. Lord , by W. W. Lord, ed. T. O. Mabbott (New York: Random House, 1938), viii.

W. W. Lord, “The New Castalia,” in Complete Poetical Works , 40.

Hamilton, Parodies of the Works , 2:30.

For an account of this public discussion, see PL 510–14.

Edgar Poe, “Longfellow's Poems,” Aristidean , April 1845, 130–42.

Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941), 461.

Anon, “The Turkey,” The Jester 1, no. 1 (June 14, 1845): 6. Mabbott, who believed that no copies of The Jester had survived, transcribed “The Turkey” from its reprinting in Alexander's Weekly Messenger. Happily, in the process of researching this subject, I found a surviving copy of the issue of The Jester that included “The Turkey” languishing in the Boston Public Library's open collection of nineteenth-century magazines. As far as I know, The Jester ran only three issues; the New-York Historical Society has the only surviving copy of the third issue, and the second issue has vanished.

If the association of “The Turkey's” staggering-man illustration with Poe himself is valid, then it would make sense to see it in relation to F. O. C. Darley's silhouette of Poe as “our literary Mohawk” in the January 3, 1849, issue of the Dollar Magazine . The former deals with Poe's personal flaws directly, the latter with his work as a critic—though it is worth noting that the lines that ran with Darley's silhouette mock the tyrannical and violent quality of Poe's reviews.

The OED has this relevant definition of a “score” and provides examples of its use from the antebellum period back to 1400: “Now chiefly, the row of chalk marks on a door, or of strokes on a slate, which in rural alehouses used to serve to record the quantity of liquor consumed on credit by a regular frequenter.” OED Online , s.v. “score, n.,” accessed September 19, 2021, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/173033 .

For a broader discussion of the Lyceum affair, see Silverman, Edgar A. Poe , 264–70.

Edgar Allan Poe, “Editorial Miscellany,” Broadway Journal , November. 1, 1845, 261.

According to Thomas and Jackson ( PL 3–4), “Poe's mother … wrote on the back of her watercolor painting, ‘Boston Harbour, morning, 1808’: “For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best , and most sympathetic friends.”

Thomas Dunn English “The Mammoth Squash,” in “The American Poets,” Aristidean , September 1845, 287.

The primary targets would appear to be the “Raven” speaker and Poe, but the idea of studying nature to better understand oneself echoes a core precept of Transcendentalism as articulated by Emerson: “So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.” See The American Scholar (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1838), 8.

Edgar Allan Poe, “Editorial Miscellany,” Broadway Journal , September 6, 1849, 142.

Edgar Allan Poe, “Our Book Shelves,” Aristidean , September 1845, 234.

For a discussion of Poe's response to the assumption that he negatively reviewed Coxe's poem, see Kent P. Ljungquist, “‘Mastodons of the Press’: Poe, the Mammoth Weeklies, and the Case of the Saturday Emporium,” in Masques, Mysteries and Mastodons: A Poe Miscellany , ed. Benjamin F. Fisher (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, 2006), 77, accessed September 19, 2021, https://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb20061j.htm .

For a discussion of Lincoln's response to “The Pole-cat,” see Harry E. Pratt, “Lincoln and Andrew Johnston: ‘Poets,’” Abraham Lincoln Association Bulletin 58, no. 1 (December 1939): 6–8. I worked from the transcription posted by “Tem42” on Everything2 at https://everything2.com/title/The+Pole-Cat (accessed September 19, 2021).

Abraham Lincoln to Andrew Johnston, April 18, 1846, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln , ed. Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 1:377.

J. J. Martin, “The Dove,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle , January 11, 1847, 1.

Anon., “A Jig in Prose,” Salem (Mass.) Register , November 18, 1847, 2. For a discussion of later reprintings, including in Walt Whitman's Brooklyn Eagle on January 11, 1848, see Joseph Coulombe and Marjorie Feasler, “‘A Jig in Prose’: A Parody,” PSA Newsletter , 24, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 3.

According to Mabbott, Poe's willingness to edit “To the Author of ‘The Raven’” was based on the extent to which it “pleased him” (M 1:350). For a discussion of specific edits Poe suggested, see M 1:492–3.

Harriet B. Winslow, “To the Author of ‘The Raven,’” Graham's Magazine , April 1848, 203.

See, for example, Poe's comments on Longfellow's Poems on Slavery in the April 1845 Aristidean review of “Longfellow's Poems”; the October 11, 1845, Broadway Journal review of Amanda M. Edmond's The Broken Vow and Other Poems ; and the February 14, 1849, letter to Frederick. W. Thomas.

The earliest publication I can find of “‘The Voices of the Night—a Poe-um,’ by Professor Shortfellow”—on page 4 of the New Hampshire Sentinel (Keene) of December 7, 1848—credits the Boston Courier as the source of the poem. Three weeks later, it ran in the December 31, 1848, issue of the Lincoln Courier (Lincolnton, N.C.). Mabbott found it in the April 28, 1849, issue of the Boston's Flag of Our Union . Starting in the March 3, 1849, issue many of Poe's last publications ran in the Flag of Our Union , including “For Annie,” which appeared in the same April 28, 1849, issue that featured “The Voices of the Night.”

Paul Lewis, “Longfellow's Serenity and Poe's Prediction: An Antebellum Turning Point,” New England Quarterly 86, no. 1 (March 2012): 144–58.

Edgar Allan Poe, “ Hyperion, a Romance . By the author of Outre-Mer ,” Burton's Gentleman's Magazine , October 1839, 227.

Edgar Allan Poe, “ Voices of the Night . By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Burton's Gentleman's Magazine , February 1840, 100.

For a discussion of a similarly ambiguous, later representation of Poe and Longfellow, see Paul Lewis, “Hiding on Boston Common Since the 19th century: The Tell-Tale Face of Edgar Allan Poe,” Boston Globe , December 29, 2019.

J. E. Tuel, The Moral for Authors as Contained in the Autobiography of Eureka, a Manuscript Novel, and Discovered by J. E. Tuel (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1849), 1:iii.

Tuel, 1:iv.

Tuel, 2:23–24.

I have followed Mabbott in using “Moral II” as Tuel's title, since the poem is set up as a “Review” perhaps sent by someone from “Plutonian Shore, Raven Creek,” ambiguously suggesting that what reads like a title could be the lines of an unusual mock Gothic address.

Anon., “A Poe-Um by One of the B'hoys,” Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch , May 20, 1849, 1.

Mabbott, An Old Parody , cover page, 1.

John S. Dwight, “Tales, by Edgar A. Poe,” Harbinger (Brook Farm, Mass.), December 6, 1845, 410. The charge of heartlessness, coming from the Frog Pond, reappears in Lowell's A Fable for Critics (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1848): “There comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, / Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, / Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, / In a way to make people of common sense damn metres, / Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, / But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind” (57).

In “Poe and the Philadelphia Irish Citizen ,” Mabbott notes that the publication of “The Tale of a Grey Tadpole” in the February 1, 1844, Baltimore Republican states that it was by Edgar A. Poe and copied from The Irish Citizen , but that no copies of the Citizen had been found.” See Journal of the American Irish Historical Society 29 (1931): 121–31. I am quoting from Mabbott's transcription of the printing in the June 3, 1848, issue of the John Donkey , available at https://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1921/tom19310.htm#tf0011 (accessed November 19, 2020).

Paul Lewis, “Poe's Humor: A Psychological Analysis,” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 4 (1989): 531–46.

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Essay On The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Literature , Beauty , Poem , Edgar Allan Poe , Death , Love , Poetry , Theater

Published: 01/16/2020

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The Raven is a dramatic monologue, a narrative poem and one of the most popular poems of Edgar Allan Poe. The poem shows different stages of the speaker’s mood which is pensive and sorrowful throughout as his beautiful beloved has died. Loneliness and alienation as well as beauty and death are the themes of the poem. The speaker is reminiscent of the beauty of his beloved, and also her untimely death. The speaker shouts out in the end, “Leave my loneliness unbroken!” because it also helps him reflect upon himself.

It is certainly a long poem of eighteen stanzas comprising of six lines each. The meter of the poem is trochaic octameter. The poem has a supernatural and grave tone, but a remarkable imagery. The repetition of words like “nothing more” and “nevermore” give the poem a musical lilt and emphasize the rhyming pattern. The setting of the poem seems very Gothic as the speaker lives in a lonely apartment, the fire is dying, and it’s a “bleak December” night. The use of a ‘devil bird’ such as raven also suggests this as it represents death and darkness. It’s a dreary night, the speaker is feeling “weak and weary” and is tormented by the loss of love. Poe creates a spooky and creepy atmosphere of horror and suspense. It’s dark, cold, late and bleak. The rustling sound of the curtains is also sad for him. The protagonist is grieving the loss of his love Lenore, whom he describes as "the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore”. He is visited by a mysterious bird that speaks, but only one word ‘Nevermore’. When he hears some tapping in the house he is startled and has “fantastic terrors never felt before”, but his “soul grew stronger” and he calls out to the visitor, thinking it is Lenore but it is unexpectedly a raven, an overbearing intruder so to say. He describes the raven as “Ghastly grim and ancient” which is an embodiment of grief. He wonders if the bird is a devil or a prophet who can tell whether he and his beloved will ever meet in heaven and if there is “balm in Gilead” meaning respite and hope in future. To this the bird replies ‘Nevermore’ which is the only word it knows. Every time the speaker asks or says something, the bird only responds by saying ‘Nevermore’. This word is used as a refrain at the end of each stanza, giving the lines a different meaning. The speaker assumes that the bird will go away like everyone else and leave him alone the next day. He is drowned in grief for his beloved who is no more and finds it difficult to overcome the loss. Throughout the poem we see the speaker’s depression and the melancholy side is emphasized by the darkness of the cold night of December. With the speakers growing tension revealed in his thoughts and questions, the stanzas become more and more dramatic. Gradually in the poem we observe that he becomes growingly agitated both mentally and physically, the ending of every stanza with “Nevermore” just adds to the despair of his soul. Some critics call the poem one of the bleakest poems written by Poe, because of the negative answers repeated throughout. The poet uses literary devices such as alliterations like ‘while’, ‘weak’ and ‘weary’ in the first line which produces an effect of unsteadiness. The symbol used in the poem is that of the raven itself that has a dark and gloomy countenance similar to the narrator’s mental turmoil. The Bust of Pallas is also symbolic of the goddess of Wisdom and the speaker’s beautiful chamber symbolizes the beauty of his beloved, Lenore. The narrator can’t avoid thinking of his beloved and her memories just add to his pain and sorrow. It’s interesting to see in the poem how the raven stimulates his nostalgia for Lenore and he expresses his grief through the medium of a creature that has no feelings or consciousness. The poet Edgar Allan Poe uses a number of folk and classical references such as the bust of Pallas, night’s Plutonian shore, Gilead, distant Aidenn, etc. The main theme of the poem as we can understand is undying love and devotion of the narrator towards his beloved Lenore, whom he desires to both forget and remember at the same time. He experiences a conflict here that simply adds to his grief. This suggests some ambiguity in the mental state of the narrator as it dwindles between forgetting and remembering. However, he wishes and hopes that one day he will be united with his beloved in heaven. But it’s strange to note that inspite of missing his beloved so intensely, the poet doesn’t describe Lenore in detail in the poem. The other themes in the poem are the death of the young beautiful woman and the helplessness and grief of the narrator. The poem tells of the poet’s remarkable imagination and deft command of the language which he uses so beautifully to bring out the larger meaning of the poem. He uses words such as weary, bleak, dying, mystery, stillness, grave, which contribute to the overall meaning and melancholic tone of the poem. It’s a dramatic poem possessing a tragic element and expressing deep human pain of the loss of love.

The Raven. 2012. ENotes. 6 December 2012. Poe’s Poetry Summary and Analysis. 2012. Gradesaver. 6 December 2012

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Last Update: March 19, 2024 Navigation: Main Menu Poe's Works Bookshelf Editorial Policies Searching

Text: Lee Hawkins, “Honors Memory of Great Poet,” Times Dispatch (Richmond, VA), January 17, 1909 (special Sunday section), p. 4

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

[page 4, column 1:]

HONORS MEMORY OF GREAT POET

———————

University of Virginia is Now Celebrating Birth of Its Greatest Alumnus.

FOR ONE YEAR HE WAS UNDER ITS TUTELAGE

Time Has Wrought Changes in School Which Claims Poe for Its Own, but Many Places Are Hallowed to Memory Through Association With Him.

BY LEE HAWKINS.

CHARLOTTESVILLE. VA., January 16. — The year 1909 is an annus mirabilis in the matter of centenaries — Poe, Mendelssohn, Darwin, Chopin, Fitzgerald, Tennyson, Holmes and Gladstone — to speak only of the very greatest who were born in 1809. Of the eigh [[eight]] named, four were distinguished as men of letters, and Gladstone might be reasonably made a fifth in the literary group.

America has two — New England one in Oliver Wendell Holmes and the South the other in Edgar Allan Poe. Holmes was the product of New England, perhaps even only of Boston. With flashes of genius that went around the world, Poe unquestionably was independent of local limitations, and has been accepted as a world author. Upon his one-hundredth birthday tributes are coming from all over the world, and the warmest of them from across the seas, from distances which have annihilated any influence of sectional prepossession, if any exists anywhere; and when the exclusion of the poet from that toy elysium, the American Hall of Fame, is recalled, something of the kind is feared. Tennyson, Swinburne, Sainte-Beuve. Victor Hugo and other immortals long ago proclaimed him a prince among men of genius, and in the recent weeks Zanwill, Hewlett, Dowden and Walter A. Raleigh abroad and at home too many to be named in this place, have approved of their decision.

No literary man among those whose centenary will be observed, unless it be Tennyson, attracts a profounder interest than the author of “The Raven,” and of those remarkable detective stories which were the forerunners of everything of distinction done in that line since the days of Dupin

Its Greatest Alumnus.

Among the American observances of his one-hundredth birthday, perhaps the most notable is that in progress at the University of Virginia, where Poe spent one year of his life as a student. This institution has never let pass an opportunity to honor its greatest alumnus. Ten years ago the fiftieth anniversary of his death was commemorated with a program the distinction of which attracted widespread attention. At that time the Zolnay bust, a highly idealized but forceful expression of Poe's spiritual life, was unveiled, and to this day divides with Galt's status of Jefferson the attention and interest of those who visit the library in the rotunda of the University of Virginia.

The centenary program, as was to be expected, is of profound interest. It gives opportunity for the expression of American and European appreciation of the original genius of Edgar Poe. Next Tuesday will witness the rendering of the larger part of this program — addresses in English, German and French, epistolary and poetical tributes from Americans and Europeans, and other features which will pleasantly accompany those named.

Member of Society.

This evening the Jefferson Literary Society held a Poe meeting. The poet, as a seventeen-year-old student, was a member of this society, which, the year before his matriculation — that is, in the first session of the university — was organized in one of the dormitories on the lawn. He appeared in the program of one of its meetings, reading an essay on a pseudo-scientific subject, and also acted as temporary secretary on at least one occasion. The minutes of the society attested this fact, and were in existence until the great fire which destroyed the rotunda in 1895. These facts one speaker, Mr. W. W. Powell, of Belmont, Va., rehearsed with much pride at the meeting this evening. Mr. Harry Hudley Thurlow, of Buffalo, N. Y., sketched Poe's life. Mr. Alvin Bryant Hutzler, of Richmond Va., told the story of Poe's life at the university, and Mr. D. C. Strachan, of Brooklyn, N. Y., gave incidents of student life in 1826. Mr. S. M. Cleveland, of Charlottesville, ventured upon an attempt to indicate poems which Poe had written at the university. “How the Faculty Fared in 1826,” was the theme discussed by Mr. A. Gray Gilmer, of Pulaski, Va., who did not fail to take advantage of the opportunity it afforded for humorous treatment.

Pathos of Poe's Life.

Mr. DeRoy Ransom Fonville, of Surlington, N. C., a member of the Washington Society, by invitation, addressed the Jefferson Society on the pathos in the lives of our Southern poets, a theme which, of course, had its natural and unforced climax in the pathetic life story of Edgar A. Poe. Mr. Hutzler pointed out that Poe matriculated ten years to the day after the bill establishing the Central College, which was the germ of the University of Virginia, was passed by the Legislature. This building, first used as the university library, is now the home of the Colonnade Club, with a non-resident alumni membership of over 200.

A delightful feature of the program was the singing of two of Poe's lyrics by Mr. George Francis Zimmer, of Birdseye, Ind., accompanied by Miss Nell Irvine, of Charlottesville.

The president of the Jefferson Literary Society, who was in the chair this evening, was Mr. Paul Miccu, of [column 2:] the Theological Seminary of Virginia.

The Raven Society, the name of which suggests its origin, will have its share in the general celebration on Monday Evening, when the feature of largest interest will be an address, with reminiscences by Dr. Herbert M. Nash, of Norfolk, Va, who had a three-weeks’ acquaintance with Poe.

Other features will be recitations of Poe's poems, vocal renditions of Poe's songs, and an organ rendition of “The Raven.” The organist will be Mr. S. H. Freeman, of St. John's Church, Washington, D. C.

—————

Proud of Virginia.

Poe was proud of being a Virginian, and was very fond of the Mother of States. In 1841 he wrote to a friend in Baltimore: “I am a Virginian — at least, I call myself one — for I have resided all my life, until with the last few years, at Richmond.”

Virginia is likewise proud of Poe. His memory has been vindicated by the fine old university, where he was a student, and the would-be assassins of his character have been silenced forever. There were all too many of these vultures, the chief of whom was the unspeakable Griswold, the ghoulish slanderer, destined, like the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus, to live forever in lasting infamy, his dishonored name dragged after that of the brilliant genius, to emulate the work of whom is the despair of great minds and the confusion of little ones — C. G. Stansbury.

Mother Married at Norfolk.

The stupendous sadness of Poe's life, brightened only by fitful gleams of happiness in his boyhood, was doubtless accentuated by prenatural influences. In 1802 the lady, who afterward became his mother, an attractive and accomplished actress, was married to C. D. Hopkins, an actor in her company, and the pair played in Norfolk that year.

Herbert Milton Nash was born May 29, 1831 and died April 26, 1911. What was preserved of his comments about Poe appears in The Book of the Poe Centenary , 1909, pp. 26-31.

[S:0 - RTD, 1909] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Honors Memory of Great Poet (L. Hawkins, 1909)

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The Raven (The Raven)

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The Raven is the main antagonist from the Edgar Allan Poe's poem titled of the same name. Poe describes in "The Philosophy of Composition" the methods he employed in composing "The Raven." According to the essay, Poe first determined the proper length of the poem, about one hundred lines, to sustain the excitement and allow reading in one sitting. Then he selected the impression to be conveyed, that of Beauty (which he defined not as a quality but as the elevating effect on the soul of contemplating the "beautiful"), and the poetical tone of melancholy.

History [ ]

For artistic effects, he wished to use a refrain. In order to allow variation in the application of the refrain, he required a single word - preferably containing the long o, a sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant. He selected "Nevermore" as fitting both the sound and the melancholy tone desired. Having selected the word, Poe then had to come up with a pretext for the continuous use of the word. The idea came to him to use a non-reasoning creature capable of speech, and the Raven was his natural choice in keeping with the intended tone. Next addressing the topic of the poem, Poe reasoned that the most poetical of melancholy topics must closely ally itself to Beauty, and therefore concluded that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetical topic in the world. It then followed that the poem should be narrated by a bereaved lover. By having the Raven repeat "Nevermore" in answer to the questions posed by the lover, Poe saw the opportunity to make the queries progressively more serious, reflecting the changes in the narrator's state of mind as he indulges in self-torture.

Then Poe proceeded to establish the climax; the ultimate query to which the reply of "Nevermore" should cause the utmost amount of sorrow and despair. In composing the concluding stanza first, Poe was also able to settle the rhythm, meter, and the structure of the stanzas. With the denouement in place, he then went back to set the location and the manner of introducing the Raven to the protagonist. He preferred the confinement of a chamber to an outdoor setting, and so made the night tempestuous to account for the Raven's seeking admission. In calculated contrast, he gave early stanzas an air of the fantastic, before turning the tone serious leading to the climax.

Having completed the narrative, Poe then added the last two stanzas to elevate the poem artistically, giving it the undercurrent of meaning. He points out that "from out my heart" is the first metaphorical expression employed in the poem, and that the Raven is shown, in the very last line, to have become the emblem of mournful, never-ending Remembrance.

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• 2 Winnie-the-Pooh (Twisted Childhood Universe)

The Symbolism of ‘The Raven’ by Poe

This essay about “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe explores the deep symbolism and themes within the poem, focusing on grief, madness, and the search for meaning. It discusses how the raven, as a symbol of death and the supernatural, haunts the narrator, who is mourning his beloved Lenore. The bird’s repeated utterance of “Nevermore” emphasizes the permanence of loss and mocks the narrator’s desire for answers. The essay highlights Poe’s interest in the human mind’s fragility and our quest to find meaning in a universe filled with despair and uncertainty. Through its analysis, the essay reveals “The Raven” as a complex piece that engages with universal human experiences, making it a masterpiece of American Gothic literature.

How it works

Edgar Allan Poe’s opus “The Raven” stands as a pinnacle of American literary achievement, celebrated for its intricate cadence and profound allegory. Originally published in 1845, this poetic masterpiece has ensnared both readers and scholars, eliciting myriad interpretations regarding its essence and motifs. Through the tale of a man’s encounter with a raven, Poe plumbs the depths of sorrow, insanity, and the quest for significance in a seemingly indifferent cosmos. This discourse endeavors to unravel the strata of symbolism embedded within “The Raven,” elucidating its enduring import within the pantheon of American Gothic literature.

At its nucleus, “The Raven” orbits the motif of bereavement and lamentation. The protagonist, mourning the loss of his beloved Lenore, crosses paths with a raven that incessantly croaks the word “Nevermore.” This refrain metamorphoses into a haunting reverberation of his anguish and a stark testament to the permanence of bereavement. The raven, draped in ebony plumage and exuding an ominous aura, embodies mortality and the inexorability of death. Its incessant recitation of “Nevermore” serves as a cruel taunt of the protagonist’s yearning for reunification with Lenore, accentuating the futility of his pursuit for solace and comprehension.

Moreover, the raven symbolizes the intrusion of the irrational and the preternatural into the protagonist’s realm. Despite its limited lexicon, the bird’s capacity for speech challenges the demarcations between the mundane and the supernatural, propelling the protagonist—and the reader—into a realm of ambivalence and ambiguity. This fusion of reality and the occult mirrors the poem’s scrutiny of insanity. As the protagonist’s interaction with the raven unfolds, his endeavors to rationalize the bird’s presence and import gradually unravel into madness, spotlighting Poe’s fascination with the fragility of the human psyche.

“The Raven” further plumbs the depths of existential inquiry in a universe steeped in loss and desolation. The protagonist’s incessant interrogation of the raven, notwithstanding the foreknowledge of its monotonous response, epitomizes humanity’s proclivity to pursue answers to existential quandaries, even amidst the specter of nihilism. The raven’s relentless negation embodies the ultimate enigma of the cosmos and the futility of the protagonist’s quest for comprehension and closure.

In summation, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” constitutes a tapestry interwoven with symbols, interlacing themes of loss, insanity, and existential quest. The enduring allure of the poem resides in its capacity to engage with universal human experiences and apprehensions, beckoning readers to contemplate the nature of grief, the allure of irrationality, and the pursuit of meaning in a cryptic world. Through the emblem of the raven, Poe confronts readers with the stark realities of mortality and the boundaries of human cognition, imprinting an indelible mark on the landscape of American letters.

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"The Symbolism of 'The Raven' by Poe," PapersOwl.com , 25-Mar-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-symbolism-of-the-raven-by-poe/. [Accessed: 12-Apr-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Symbolism of 'The Raven' by Poe . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-symbolism-of-the-raven-by-poe/ [Accessed: 12-Apr-2024]

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Edgar Allan Poe Influences

The grotesque and heart-shattering tales of American Gothic fuel the dark alleyways of American literature. Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. During his literary career, his works focused on the grotesque and horrifying parts of American life. This was fueled and influenced by his dreadful and depressing life. Edgar Allan Poe’s influential works gained popularity posthumously thanks to his twisting stories and heartbreaking tales, which still inspire people today for his distinctive brand of American Gothic. Edgar Allan Poe's tragic childhood and depressing career influenced his distinctive Gothic style. During his childhood years Edgar experienced multiple tragic deaths: his parents in 1811, and his step mother in …show more content…

Takacs). He died on October 7, 1849, and the cause of his death remains a mystery (“Edgar Allan Poe”). Edgar Allan Poe faced physiological trauma in early parts of his life such as his birth mother, father, and later his step mother which significantly influenced his interest in dark and depressing writing. Poe’s financial struggles impacted his writing, which was commonly found in American literature at the time. Poe helped set literary standards for literature and created the theory of “unity of effect” which focuses on the author creating a meaning in a work (“Edgar Allan Poe and Literary Criticism”). Edgar Allan Poe's use of symbolism and allegories influenced and paved the way in American Literature, one notable work which displays this is “The Masque of the Red Death” (S. A. Takacs). Poe was an influential figure in American Literature as he laid the groundwork and influenced American Gothic through his skill and dedication. Poe’s use of symbolism and allegories helps readers understand the deeper meaning of his works. Poe's creation of the “unity of effect” helped authors find a purpose for their works, which is still used today by present day authors around the …show more content…

The shift from the lack of light to the eerie glow of the ocean creates a sense of mystery. It makes readers question the unknown forces of the sea, with the vivid imagery sending the readers to the scene. In the city by the sea, you can see temples near the water. Full of treasures, they stop waves, creating a flat and calm sea surface (Poe. 32-38). The vivid imagery helps us understand how life does not last forever and time does not stop as the city is being swallowed up by the sea. The calm and flat surface of the sea compared to the once lively city shows the flow of time, showing the insignificance of humanity as it is represented as a small spec in the vast Milky Way galaxy. Edgar Allan Poe’s ability to create vivid imagery and deep themes shows us how he is still able to stay relevant by demonstrating the unpredictable forces that mold our lives. Lastly, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most prolific authors of American Gothic literature and literature as a whole. Poe established standards for literature such as his “unity of effect” which focuses on the author creating a meaning to a work. Poe’s idea of “unity of effect” helped transform

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