The Raven – poem (1845)

The Raven is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe.

First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven’s mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man’s slow fall into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word “Nevermore”. The poem makes use of a number of folk, mythological, religious, and classical references.

The poem was partly inspired by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty by Charles Dickens. Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett’s poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”, and makes use of internal rhyme as well as alliteration throughout.

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

The New World said, “Everyone reads the Poem and praises it … justly, we think, for it seems to us full of originality and power.”The Pennsylvania Inquirer reprinted it with the heading “A Beautiful Poem”. Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Poe, “Your ‘Raven’ has produced a sensation, a fit o’ horror, here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the music. I hear of persons haunted by ‘Nevermore’.” Poe’s popularity resulted in invitations to recite “The Raven” and to lecture – in public and at private social gatherings.

“The Raven” was praised by fellow writers William Gilmore Simms and Margaret Fuller, though it was denounced by William Butler Yeats, who called it “insincere and vulgar … its execution a rhythmical trick”. Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I see nothing in it.” A critic for the Southern Quarterly Review wrote in July 1848 that the poem was ruined by “a wild and unbridled extravagance” and that minor things like a tapping at the door and a fluttering curtain would only affect “a child who had been frightened to the verge of idiocy by terrible ghost stories”

Poe wrote the poem as a narrative, without intentionally creating an allegory or falling into didacticism. The main theme of the poem is one of undying devotion. The narrator experiences a perverse conflict between desire to forget and desire to remember. He seems to get some pleasure from focusing on loss. The narrator assumes that the word “Nevermore” is the raven’s “only stock and store”, and, yet, he continues to ask it questions, knowing what the answer will be. His questions, then, are purposely self-deprecating and further incite his feelings of loss. Poe leaves it unclear if the raven actually knows what it is saying or if it really intends to cause a reaction in the poem’s narrator.

Popular culture:

• “The Raven” was recreated as a hallucination of Poe’s in the 1915 silent film The Raven. A fictionalized biography, it starred Henry B. Walthall as Poe.
• The 1935 film The Raven has Bela Lugosi as a Poe-obsessed doctor and co-stars Boris Karloff. The film has an interpretive dance of “The Raven”.
• In 1942, Fleischer Studios created A Cartoon Travesty of The Raven. A two-reel Technicolor cartoon that turned the story of the poem into a lighthearted comedy.
• A Bugs Bunny cartoon, No Parking Hare, has Bugs reading a few lines from the poem, starting with the words, “While I nodded nearly napping”. The comic he reads them from is stated as “Poe’s Kiddie Comics”.
• In 1963, Roger Corman directed The Raven, a comedy horror film with Boris Karloff and Vincent Price, very loosely based on the poem.

• In the 1967 stop-motion film Mad Monster Party?, Baron von Frankenstein tests his new potion on a raven, and lets it fly until it lands on a tree branch. Watching the resulting explosion, he says with a chuckle, “Quoth the raven… nevermore. Ah, I’ve done it — created the means to destroy matter!”
• The stop-motion short film Vincent (1982), by Tim Burton, features a protagonist named Vincent Malloy, whose “favorite author is Edgar Allan Poe.” As Vincent lies, seemingly dying, at the end of the film, he quotes the final couplet of “The Raven”.
• In the 1983 film The Dead Zone, Christopher Walken (as a school teacher Johnny Smith) quotes “The Raven” to his class during a lesson.
• In the 1986 film Short Circuit, the robot Number 5 (voiced by Tim Blaney) makes the comment “nevermore” in reference to a pet raven of Stephanie Speck’s (portrayed by Ally Sheedy).
• In the 1989 film Batman, Jack Nicholson (as The Joker) quotes “The Raven” to Kim Basinger’s Vicky Vale when he says, “Take thy beak from out my heart.”
• Hannes Rall directed an animated, German-language version of The Raven (Der Rabe) in 1998.
• In the 1994 film The Crow, Eric, the tragic main character, references “The Raven” after breaking down the door to Gideon’s pawn shop: “‘Suddenly, I heard a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.’ You heard me rapping, right?”
• A 2003 album by Lou Reed

• The film Nightmares from the Mind of Poe (2006) adapts “The Raven” along with three Poe short stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial”.
• In the 2005 film The Crow: Wicked Prayer the third sequel to The Crow, during the final battle between Jimmy and Luc, Jimmy tauntingly shouts “Quoth the raven nevermore, motherfucker!”
• A film entitled The Raven, which stars a fictionalized Poe, was released in March 2012.
• The Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror parodies the poem in its third segment as Lisa reads the story to Bart and Maggie. In the animated segment, Homer serves as the protagonist, Bart takes the raven’s form, Marge appears in a painting as Lenore and Lisa and Maggie are angels. Bart complains that the poem is not scary, and at one point the raven says his catchphrase “Eat my shorts” instead of “Nevermore.”

The Raven

Wikipedia