| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
Edgar Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of indigent actors. Poe's father had deserted the family earlier, so at age three, when his mother died, Poe was taken in by John Allan, a merchant from Richmond, Virginia. He attended a private school in England, where he lived with the Allans between 1815 and 1820. After returning to America, he continued private schooling until 1826, when he entered the University of Virginia. However, he was forced to leave after less than a year because of gambling debts which John Allan refused to pay.
After quarreling with his guardian, Poe went to Boston where, under an assumed name, he joined the army. A few months later, at the age of eighteen, his first collection of poems, privately financed, was published. In 1829, after the death of John Allan's wife, Poe was discharged from the army. He reconciled with his guardian, and received an appointment to West Point. However, because Allan would not support him adequately, including more heavy debts (and because he did not like military life) he purposely neglected his duties to get himself dismissed from the academy.
Poe then went to Baltimore, where he resided with his impoverished aunt and her young daughter, Virginia. In 1832 he began his career as a writer of bizarre and romantic short stories by publishing 'Metzengerstein,' a tale about feuding families and supernatural revenge. However, his first real success came the following year when his 'MS. Found in a Bottle,' an eerie tale about a shipwreck and ghostly seamen, won a $50 prize from a Baltimore newspaper. More importantly, it won him recognition and led to a position as an editor on a monthly magazine published in Richmond.
In 1836 Poe married his cousin Virginia, who was not quite fourteen years old at the time, and in 1837, after the end of his editorship, he and his child-bride and her mother moved to Philadelphia. Poe soon published the only novel-length fiction he ever wrote, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a rambling adventure yarn filled with mutiny at sea, shipwreck, cannibalism, fierce South Sea natives, and a voyage to the South Pole.
Between 1838 and 1849, the year he died, Poe was at the center of magazine publishing in America, serving as the editor of several journals and writing reviews, critical articles, stories, and miscellaneous pieces which won him admiration for his critical acumen. His most famous works—including gothic horror stories such as 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and 'Ligeia,' detective stories such as 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Purloined Letter,' and tales of obsession such as 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart'—all were published during this period. He also earned great fame and wide acclaim in Europe with poems such as 'The Raven.'
For all this renown, however, Poe waged a constant struggle for money. To add to his distress, in 1847 his young wife developed tuberculosis and died, leaving Poe almost insane with grief. In early October 1849, while on a trip from Richmond to New York, Poe stopped in Baltimore and began drinking, a habit for which he had absolutely no tolerance. On October 3, election day, he was discovered near a polling place in a coma. He died on October 7, 1849, reportedly of delirium tremens.
| II | OVERVIEW |
As usual with Poe's poetry, and in accord with his theory, 'The Raven' is not a long poem. In its 108 lines, however, are packed a great deal of emotion and literary skill. It can be read on one level for Poe's impressive choice of words and striking figures of speech. On another level, it can be appreciated for the story contained in the text—the true nature of the brief narrative can be understood fully only through careful study. The text of the 'The Raven' provides a lesson on the structure of Romantic verse.
| III | SETTING |
The action of the poem takes place in the study of a young man who is pondering 'Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.' Thus, the poet both sets the scene and prepares the somber and uneasy mood of events to come. The room is described in some detail, most of it lush and romantic, from the shadows caused as 'each dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor' to the 'silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.' The principal object in the room is the bust of Pallas placed 'just above my chamber door,' upon which the raven perches.
| IV | THEMES AND CHARACTERS |
As Poe proclaims in 'The Philosophy of Composition,' the aim of his poem was to elevate the soul, a goal that could best be reached by the presentation of 'Beauty.' For Poe, Beauty is most readily perceived in a mood of sadness, and the most mournful event that the artist could conceive was 'the death of a beautiful woman' (an incident that he believed was 'the most poetical topic in the world'). So, a sense of loss, with no hope of ever again seeing the beloved is the real topic of the poem.
To address this topic, only two characters are needed—one of them the mourning lover and the other a grimly symbolic bird, an omen of evil. Poe carefully selected a raven for two sensible reasons: the bird suggests melancholy associations; and sometimes such a creature can utter a few syllables. In this case, the syllables are cleverly chosen by the poet: 'Nevermore.' It is important to note that the meaning of this one word, which is repeated throughout the poem, depends on the questions posed by the melancholy student.
As the stanzas advance, the student loses his initial surprise at the appearance of the raven, and each question becomes more serious and portentous. Thus, the entire poem can be seen as a vision of the unhappy flow of tragic emotions and hopeless thoughts in the mind and heart of the student. The bird may be taken as merely a device by which the young man reflects on his loss and penetrates more deeply into his own suffering.
| V | LITERARY QUALITIES |
Probably the first aspect of 'The Raven' to strike most readers is the phonetic devices employed by the poet to achieve what he calls 'sonorous' effects. Certainly, these devices make the lines memorable. Few readers can forget the internal rhymes and alliterations of the opening lines: 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 someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
The general rhyme scheme of the poem was devised so as to provide plenty of rhymes for the key syllable: 'ore,' found both in the name of the lost love, Lenore, and the bird's constant 'Nevermore.'
The general rhyme scheme of the poem was devised so as to provide plenty of rhymes for the key syllable: 'ore,' found both in the name of the lost love, Lenore, and the bird's constant 'Nevermore.'
These sound patterns persist throughout the text with occasional variations, as in 'On this home by Horror haunted' and 'thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!' At first, the student tries to interpret the bird as a source of humor. But his failure to do so helps establish the prevailing tone of the poem. As the mood of the poem darkens (exactly in the middle of the text, as Poe intended), the choice of words becomes intense and more extreme. The young man starts out by referring to his visitor as 'this ebony bird' but later calls it a 'fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core.' So, the diction of the poem reflects the growing misery in the heart of the unhappy lover.
In his essay, Poe makes much of the structure of the poem. His claim with regard to his careful selection of every feature of the construction makes a great deal of sense—especially considered in light of the final product. There are eighteen stanzas, each six lines long. The lines are of a length calculated to draw out the possibilities for internal rhyme and fully developed metaphors and other figures of speech. Most of the lines contain fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen syllables, making them of unusual length for a lyric poem. Such length is needed, however, to allow room for such a forceful passage as 'get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!'
The most important aspect of good poetry often proves to be those images and figures of speech that remain in the reader's mind to press home the central effect of the poem. One such stands out in the closing lines of 'The Raven.' As the young lover begins to realize that his position is completely desolate, he pleads with the now ghostly symbol of his despair, 'quit the bust above my door!/ Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!' As always, the raven answers, 'Nevermore.'
Taken together, the poem's symmetry, phonetic qualities, figures of speech, and artful progression of psychological analysis (some readers have noted the accuracy of this vision of almost clinical depression) provide the reader with a moving experience.
| VI | TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION |
1. Critics have suggested that, by taking the bird as such an omen and by reacting to it as he does, the student actually loses his chance of seeing the lost Lenore. Is this reading justified by the text?
2. Are there any violations of the prevailing rhyme scheme of the poem? Can a reason be found for the poet's allowing such aberrations?
3. Could the entire poem be interpreted as a nightmare in the mind of the young lover, who, it must be remembered, admits that he was nearly asleep at the start of the text? What evidence can be adduced to support such an interpretation?
4. Was Poe's choice of a raven as the force that would push the student to despair a wise one? Was it a better choice, for instance, than another person would have been?
5. Does the division of the poem into stanzas, each with its final refrain, advance the theme and impact of the poem? Would some other design have been more effective? Why or why not?
6. Do the 'sound effects' that appear throughout the text ever distract one's attention from the substance of the lines? Cite examples.
7. What are the three or four most striking figures of speech in the poem? How would each be categorized (metaphor, simile, and so on), and why is each so impressive?
8. Since much of the poem is quoted speech, do these passages seem too unrealistic, or do they sound like what such a person might say when in a frenzy of emotion?
| VII | IDEAS FOR REPORTS AND PAPERS |
1. Poe, as he often did, revised 'The Raven' for book publication. Research these changes. Do they improve the poem?
2. Poe was always fearful of plagiarists of his own work, but a number of scholars have pointed out that 'The Raven' was very strongly influenced by at least three authors; Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and an obscure American writer named Thomas Holly Chivers. Chivers was a friend of Poe's, but later claimed that Poe had plagiarized one of his poems in 'The Raven.' Does an examination of Chivers tend to indicate that Poe was guilty of plagiarism?
3. Most biographies of Poe note that he had a good education. Does a careful review of a couple of such studies, along with an attentive reading of some of his poems, support that view?
4. 'The Raven' contains several allusions of a clearly literary-cultural nature. Which ones are they, and how do they enhance the effect of the poem?
5. Poe's influence on foreign literature has often been observed. Does a study of some of the more prominent poems by such foreign masters as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé reveal these influences?
6. Poe has been called the real initiator of the Symbolist movement in poetry in American literature. Research that movement and its central symbols. How does Poe's work compare with that of the Symbolists?
7. Does Poe's explanation in 'The Philosophy of Composition' of how he structured the lines of his poem (including verse forms and syllabic configurations) seem reasonable in view of his other poetry and his intended effects? Consider especially Poe's other major essay, 'The Poetic Principle.'
8. Could Poe have been thinking of the inevitable loss of his beloved wife when he wrote this poem? What evidence can be found in his poem and in his biography?
| VIII | RELATED TITLES |
Poe's 'The Philosophy of Composition' explains in detail how Poe created 'The Raven.' This essay, written the year after the poem was composed, sets forth a number of interesting principles of poetry to which Poe was devoted. Also, the short lament 'Lenore,' first written in 1831, expresses similar themes to those found in 'The Raven,' and the name of the dead girl is the same as that which Poe used in the later poem.
Contributed by: Fred B. McEwen, Waynesburg College
Source: Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults. Copyright by Gale Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
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