Today in History—January 29: “Once upon a midnight dreary…”

On this day in 1845, “The Raven” appeared in print for the first time—though who published what first gets a bit tangled. In the New York Evening Mirror of January 29, advance sheets from the American Review brought readers Edgar Allan Poe’s ballad of lost love. The American Review publication carried the note: It “will bear date Feb. 1845, but will be issued early in January.” Alrighty then.

In the Review the poem ran under Poe’s pseudonym “Quarles.” The Mirror gave him full credit. Either way, the poem introduced the world to a grieving student, a lost love named Lenore, and a raven with a very persistent vocabulary. We all know the bird’s immortal refrain, because the poem is as famous now as it was then.

The poem consists of 18 six-line stanzas, written in carefully arranged octameter and tetrameter. The tight rhyming pattern creates a sort of hypnotic inevitability, drawing the reader into the obsessive spiral.

Poe was well acquainted with grief. He was two when his mother died, and he was raised by John and Fanny Allan, a wealthy couple who provided a good education but not much love. As a teen he fell in love with a friend’s mother; after her death, he haunted her grave.

As an adult, he fared no better. His fiancée left him. He was expelled from West Point. He developed a drinking problem and a gambling habit. When his foster father, John, died, Poe was excluded from the will.

By then Poe was living in Baltimore, soon to marry his teenage cousin, Virginia Clemm.

“The Raven” wasn’t Poe’s first publication, but it was the one that made him famous. A year later he published “The Philosophy of Composition,” a “how I did it” explaining that the poem was crafted “step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” He claimed it was meant to appeal to both popular and critical tastes, but the consensus is that he really needed money.

Poe’s wife died of tuberculosis in 1847, and Poe died two years later, at age 40, under mysterious circumstances. And yet here we are, still talking about his talking bird, 181 years later.

Nevermore.