The Raven

About this book

The Raven is a narrative poem of eighteen six-line stanzas by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first printed in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845 and was reprinted in newspapers and magazines across the United States within weeks, making Poe famous almost overnight, though it did not make him much money. It is the most widely known American poem of the nineteenth century, and its refrain is recognized by many people who have never read the rest.

The poem has lasted because of its sound. Poe built it on a heavy trochaic meter, internal rhyme, alliteration and a single repeated word at the end of most stanzas, so that the whole thing moves like an incantation. In an essay published the following year, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe claimed to have constructed the poem backward from its effect with mathematical deliberateness. Scholars disagree about how seriously to take that account, but it has shaped how the poem is taught.

The story

A man sits alone in his study at midnight in December, reading old books to distract himself from grief over a dead woman he calls Lenore. He hears a tapping, finds no one at the door, and then a raven flies in through the window and perches on a bust of Pallas Athena above the door. When the man speaks to it, the bird answers with a single word, and it answers the same word to every question that follows.

The drama of the poem is in the questions. The speaker begins by treating the bird’s reply as a learned trick, then starts asking it things to which that reply will hurt most. By the final stanza the raven has not moved.

Themes and historical context

Poe wrote The Raven in the early 1840s, when he was living in New York and Philadelphia, working as a magazine editor and critic, and struggling financially. His young wife Virginia was ill with tuberculosis and would die in 1847. Readers have long connected the poem’s subject, mourning for a dead young woman, to Poe’s own life, and Poe himself declared in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetical topic in the world.

The poem belongs to the Gothic and Romantic currents of its period: a solitary scholar, a stormy night, a talking bird as an omen, a mind that will not let go of its loss. The bust of Pallas, goddess of wisdom, under a bird that can only repeat one word, sets reason against obsession. Poe acknowledged a debt to the talking raven in Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge, which he had reviewed, and the meter and some phrasing echo Elizabeth Barrett’s poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”; Poe dedicated the 1845 collection containing The Raven to her.

The Raven was parodied almost at once and has been illustrated, set to music, filmed and quoted ever since. Gustave Doré’s illustrations of 1884 are among the best known.

Who should read it

At just over a thousand words, The Raven takes ten minutes to read and is best read aloud, since the meter and rhyme do much of the work. The vocabulary includes a few archaic or learned words (Plutonian, nepenthe, seraphim) that most editions gloss, and the Wikipedia article explains them. It is a natural first Poe, before the short stories, and a good introduction to how rhythm and sound can carry a poem.

Edition notes

The Project Gutenberg edition was prepared by Levent Kurnaz, with an HTML version by Al Haines. It contains the poem alone.