The Raven

“The Raven” is the best-known poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845 and collected in The Raven and Other Poems the same year. It is one of the greatest examples of American Gothic literature. Poe achieved instant national fame with the publication of this melancholy evocation of lost love.

On a stormy December midnight (“Once upon a midnight dreary”), a grieving student is visited by a raven who speaks but one word, “Nevermore.” As the student laments his lost love Lenore, the raven’s insistent repetition of the word becomes an increasingly harrowing response to the student’s own fears and longing.

Poe’s 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition” describes his careful crafting of the poem:

It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.

Indeed, the poem has a complex structure consisting of 18 six-line stanzas. The first five lines of each stanza are written in trochaic octameter (i.e., consisting of eight metrical feet, with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one). The sixth line is written in trochaic tetrameter (i.e., consisting of four metrical feet, with the same syllabic pattern). The rhyme pattern, abcbbb, enhances the gloom of the lyric; the b rhymes are, or rhyme with, “Lenore” and “Nevermore.”

Haunting and hypnotic, the poem made Poe a literary celebrity. It was reprinted at least 10 times within a few weeks of its first appearance, and it spawned many imitations and parodies, a few of which were attributed to Poe. Among the contemporary homages that have paid tribute to the “The Raven” are a 2003 concept album of the same name by rocker Lou Reed and the Baltimore Ravens professional football team.