Edgar Allan Poe

## Biography

### Early Life

Edgar Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 to traveling actors Eliza and David Poe. When Edgar was a baby, David abandoned the family, leaving Eliza to support three young children. In a devastating turn, Eliza contracted tuberculosis and spent the last few months of her life in Richmond. She died on December 8th, 1811 at the age of 24, leaving behind her three children. **Two-year-old Edgar was taken in by Richmond couple John and Frances Allan**. Edgar was never officially adopted, a cause and result of constant tensions between him and his foster father. He did not take their last name, but instead he became Edgar Allan Poe.

**At the age of 17, Edgar travelled to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia** (UVA). Edgar almost immediately ran into trouble at UVA. **Although he was a talented student, he had arrived at college with only $110 for tuition**. UVA’s tuition was three times that, so **he decided to gamble to raise the rest of the funds. Instead, Edgar generated $2,000 worth of debt**. After just a couple months at UVA, **he returned to Richmond disappointed and continued to feud with his foster father**.

**Poe then moved to Boston**. He didn’t stay long, but during that time **he published his first book of poetry *Tamerlane and Other Poems* under the pseudonym “A Bostonian.”** When Poe was 18 **he joined the army** under the name “Edgar Perry.” Poe did exceptionally well in the army, **rising to the rank of sergeant major in just two years**. He then went to West Point, where once again he did well academically, but ran into financial issues. Poe was court marshalled for extreme dereliction of duty. **He then moved to Baltimore**.

**In Baltimore Poe lived with several relatives, including his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia**. Poe lived in Baltimore for **four years**, during which time **he shifted from writing poetry to short stories**. One publication that took special interest in him was the Southern Literary Messenger based in Richmond, Virginia. **Poe published “Metzengerstein” which is considered his first horror story**, and **“Berenice”** which was **so graphic and terrifying that the magazine received multiple complaints** from readers. Editor Thomas White offered Poe a job on the staff of the Messenger. Poe agreed and **moved back to Richmond**.

Soon after Poe joined the Southern Literary Messenger till 1837. Poe invited his aunt and cousin, Maria and Virgina to live with him in Richmond. One year later, Poe and Virginia then got married. She was 13, he was 27.

### Literary style

“He refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today.”(p.40)

**Starting in 1838 while living in Philadelphia, he enjoyed his prime years of literature. Poe wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the “Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and more.**

**“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”** is particularly important because it was **the first modern detective story**. Poe was the first to write about an eccentric genius who solves mysterious crimes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cites Poe’s character, C. Auguste Dupin, as the literary inspiration behind his character, Sherlock Holmes. Poe was also an early pioneer of science fiction. Interestingly, the majority of his stories are comedies.

Poe wrote in many genres, but **his contribution to horror is what makes him famous today. Poe revolutionized the genre. He was one of the first to involve deep, intuitive, psychological horror. He often wrote stories where the true monster was the capacity for evil that is inside each person, and what happens when that evil is acted upon.**

**In every genre, Poe explores the psyche. Profound psychological insights glint throughout the stories.** To explore the exotic and strange aspect of psychological processes, Poe delved into accounts of madness and extreme emotion. The painfully deliberate style and elaborate explanation in the stories heighten the sense of the horrible by making the events seem vivid and plausible.

**Europeans at least had a firm, complex social structure that gave them psychological security**. **In America**, there was no compensating security; **it was every man for himself**. Poe accurately **described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed the price of materialism and excessive competition, loneliness, alienation, and images of death-in-life.**

Of all nineteenth-century, Poe seems most thoroughly our contemporary in his attempt to give language and a narrative structure to what Freud came to describe as the unconscious. He was empathically not a man of his time: as Kenneth Silverman, a recent Poe biographer, observes, “at a time when James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson [and others] were creating a feeling of space and self-reliant freedom, he was creating in his many accounts of persons bricked up in walls, hidden under floorboards, or jammed in chimneys a mythology of enclosure, constriction, and victimization.”

***Poe explored the unconscious before Freud, not from a scientific point of view but from a literary side. He asks himself what is within us that makes us behave in outrageous ways, there is a part of us we cannot control.***

He loved to explore the borders between sane and insane, light and darkness.

**Poe’s most famous piece is “The Raven.” Once published, in the early months of 1845, this poem made him an overnight success**. Before the publication, Poe was well known in literary circles, but **because of “The Raven” Edgar Allan Poe became a household name**. Although Poe only made around $15 from the publication of “The Raven,” its international success created financial opportunities like taking on literary clients and giving lectures and recitations. Poe was the first American writer to live completely off of his earnings from writing. But for most of Poe’s adulthood, he struggled to financially support himself and his family.

He is widely acknowledged as **the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre,** but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

### Adult life and death

Unfortunately, by this time, his wife Virginia began exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis. She was sick for several years and died in 1847 while the couple lived in New York. Virginia was 24 years old when she died. Poe never emotionally recovered from the death of his wife. It was evident that he relied on her for mental and emotional support. Poe began to drift back south towards the city of his childhood: Richmond.

While in Richmond, Poe rekindled his childhood romance with Elmira Royster Shelton, who was then a wealthy widow. At the dismay of her children, she and Poe once again became engaged in 1849. Elmira was worried about his health. After his bout of cholera, his health had been quite fragile.

Poe was found delirious in a tavern called Gunner’s Hall in Baltimore. He appeared drunk, wearing someone else’s clothes and was taken to Washington University Hospital. For the next four days he was in and out of consciousness, sometimes being alert, sometimes screaming at nothing and no one. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7th, 1849.

## Key Facts

* **Brevitiy Musicality**
* **Pshycological Depth**

* **Poet** : His poetry alone would ensure his spot in the literary canon. Poe's notable verses range from the early masterpiece “To Helen” to the dark, mysterious “Ulalume.” From “The Raven,” which made him world-famous upon its publication in 1845, to “Annabel Lee,” the posthumously published eulogy for a maiden “in a kingdom by the sea."
* **Master of Macabre and Gothic Fiction**: Most famously, Poe completely transformed the genre of the horror story with his **masterful tales of psychological depth and insight not envisioned in the genre before his time** and scarcely seen in it since. Stories like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” reveal Poe’s talent at its height.
* **Pioneer of Science Fiction**: He was an early pioneer in the genre of science fiction. Poe was fascinated by the science of his time, and he often wrote stories about new inventions.
* **Father of the Detective Story**: Poe is credited with inventing the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His concept of **deductive reasoning**, which he called "ratiocination" inspired countless authors, most famous among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
* **The poet as critic :** Edgar Allan Poe, poet, short story writer, and critic, was a controversial figure in the publishing world of America. Poe’s challenge to moralistic strictures against literature, his confrontations with the New England literary establishment, and his caustic and satirical critical style won him many enemies. As many scholars have noted, Poe derived his definition of poetry in part from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, praised in the essay for his “towering intellect” and “gigantic power.”

## Essays

**The philosophy of composition (1846)**

The three central elements of Poe's philosophy of composition are:

-**Length:** Poe believed that all literary works should be short. He writes, "[...] there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art — the limit of a single sitting [...]" He especially emphasized this "rule" with regards to poetry, but also noted that the short story is superior to the novel for this reason.

-**Method:** Poe dismissed the notion of artistic intuition and argued that writing is methodical and analytical, not spontaneous. He writes that no other author has yet admitted this because most writers would "positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes... at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair... at the cautious selections and rejections".

-"**Unity of effect":** The essay states Poe's conviction that a work of fiction should be written only after the author has decided how it is to end and which emotional response, or "effect", he wishes to create, commonly known as the "unity of effect". Once this effect has been determined, the writer should decide all other matters pertaining to the composition of the work, including tone, theme, setting, characters, conflict, and plot. In this case, Poe logically decides on "the death... of a beautiful woman" as it "is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover." Biographers and critics have often suggested that Poe's obsession with this theme stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his mother Eliza Poe, his foster mother Frances Allan and, later, his wife Virginia.

In the essay, Poe traces the logical progression of his creation of "**The Raven**" as an attempt to compose "a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste." He claims that he considered every aspect of the poem. For example, he purposely set the poem on a tempestuous evening, causing the raven to seek shelter. He purposefully chose a pallid bust to contrast with the dark plume of the bird. The bust was of Pallas in order to evoke the notion of scholar, to match with the presumed student narrator pouring over his "volume[s] of forgotten lore." No aspect of the poem was an accident, he claims, but is based on total control by the author. Even the term "Nevermore," he says, is based on logic following the "unity of effect." The sounds in the vowels in particular, he writes, have more meaning than the definition of the word itself. He had previously used words like "Lenore" for the same effect. The raven itself, Poe says, is meant to symbolize Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. This may imply an autobiographical significance to the poem, alluding to the many people in Poe's life who had died.

**The Poetic Principle (1850)**

The Poetic Principle" is an essay by Edgar Allan Poe, written near the end of his life and published posthumously in 1850, the year after his death. It is a work of literary criticism, in which Poe presents his literary theory. It is based on a series of lectures Poe had given late in his lifetime. The essay argues that a poem should be written "for a poem's sake" and that the ultimate goal of art is aesthetic. He also argues against the concept of a long poem, saying that an epic, if it is to be worth anything, must instead be structured as a collection of shorter pieces, each of which is not too long to be read in a single sitting. The essay critiques, sometimes rather sharply, the works of other poets of his time. His most common complaint is against didacticism, which he calls a "heresy". Though Poe is referring to poetry here, it is believed that Poe's philosophy against didacticism extends to fiction.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### 19th Century USA

-US westward expansion

-Manifest Destiny

-Antebellum period: 1832-1860 the time between the formation of the u.s government and the outbreak of the American civil war.

-Slavery conflict (CIvil War)

### Romanticism

1828-1865:  from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War, often identified as the Romantic Period in America This period is sometimes known as the American Renaissance, the title of F. O. Matthiessen's influential book'(1941) about its outstanding writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is also sometimes called the Age of Transcendentalism, after the philosophical and literary movement, cantered on Emerson, that was dominant in New England.

### Dark Romanticism

American Romanticism authors were most prolific between 1830-1865. Within the genre of Romanticism, two opposing sub-genres emerged: the optimists who believed in human goodness and spirituality, grew in to the Transcendentalist Movement; the pessimists, who embraced human fallibility and our predisposition towards sin, grew into the Dark Romantic Movement.

The Dark Romantics were drawn to the dark side of the human psyche, the evil side of spiritual truth. The Dark Romantics rebelled against the Puritans, who came to the country to escape persecution, but imposed their own religion and societal rules (government) on others, judging those who did not conform. These authors were drawn to human's imperfections, self-destruction, sin, and the hazards of social reform.

Firstly, Dark Romantics are much less confident about the notion that perfection is an innate quality of mankind, as believed by Transcendentalists. Subsequently, Dark Romantics present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. Secondly, while both groups believe nature is a deeply spiritual force, Dark Romantics view it in a much more sinister light than Transcendentalists do, who see nature as a divine and universal organic mediator. For Dark Romantics, the natural world is dark, decaying, and mysterious; when it does reveal truth to man, its revelations are evil and hellish. Finally, whereas Transcendentalists advocate social reform when appropriate, works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts to make changes for the better.

### Gothic Fiction

Gothic fiction originated with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Works of the genre commonly aim to inspire terror, including through accounts of the macabre and supernatural, haunted structures, and the search for identity; critics often note Gothic fiction's "overly melodramatic scenarios and utterly predictable plots." In general, with common elements of darkness and the supernatural, and featuring characters like maniacs and vampires, Gothic fiction is more about sheer terror than Dark Romanticism's themes of dark mystery and scepticism regarding man. Still, the genre came to influence later American Dark Romantic works, particularly some of those produced by Poe.

Poe embraced gothic fiction because it was perfect to explore all the issues, he was interested in. Therefore, he adapts the gothic fiction from the 18th century with original contributions. For example, common settings in gothic literature (castles), Poe presented urban settings (room) with elements of gothic fiction such as the time of the day (night, dark) and main events such as murder.

Edgar Allan Poe made tremendous contribution to horror fiction. Poe’s inheritance of gothic fiction and American literature tradition combined with his living experience forms the background of his horror fictions. He inherited the tradition of the gothic fictions and made innovations on it, so as to penetrate to Sub consciousness. Poe’s horror fictions became the origin of Southern fictions, to a certain degree. In his works, he revealed people’s horror towards super nature, nothingness, death, evil and disintegration of personality. He tried to demonstrate that horror originates from our soul. By means of symbol, suspense, first person narrator, exaggeration of atmosphere and anti-closure, Poe tried his best to construct an intact uniform, mysterious and shaking effect. Poe’s fictions feed readers aesthetic enjoyment. In the portrait of evil and horror, he achieves the sublimation and purification of man’s inner world.

**Horror from the Soul—Gothic Style in Allan Poe’s Horror Fictions -Chunyan Sun- Foreign Language Teaching Department, Inner Mongolia University for the Nationalities, China**

### Quotes

Example of gothic fiction

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; / But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token, / And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'" (25-28) - The Raven

"What you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses." - The Tell-Tale Heart

## Bibliography

### Short Stories

* “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” (1841)
* “The Black Cat” (1843)
* “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)

### Poems

* “Annabel Lee” (1841)
* “The Raven” (1845)
* “The Bells” (1849)

### Literary Criticism

* “Philosophy of Composition” (1846)
* “The Poetic Principle” (1848)

## Works

### The Tell-tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short-story first published in January 1843 in the inaugural issue of The Pioneer*: A Literary and Critical Magazine*, a short-lived Boston magazine. Poe was likely paid $10 for the story. Its original publication included an epigraph that quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "A Psalm of Life."

* YEAR: 1843
* GENRE: American Gothic Fiction
* SETTING: A room

* PLOT : An unnamed and unreliable narrator opens the story by addressing the reader and claiming that he is nervous but not mad. He says that he is going to tell a story in which he will defend his sanity yet confess to having killed an old man. His motivation was neither passion nor desire for money, but rather a fear of the man’s pale blue eye. Again, he insists that he is not crazy because his deliberate and measured actions, though criminal, are not improvised as those of a madman. Every night, he went to the old man’s apartment and secretly observed the man sleeping. In the morning, he would behave as if everything were normal. After a week of this activity, the narrator decides, somewhat randomly, that is the time to kill the old man has come.

When the narrator arrives late on the eighth night, though, the old man wakes up and cries out. The narrator remains still, stalking the old man as he sits awake and frightened. The narrator understands how frightened the old man is, having also experienced the lonely terrors of the night. Soon, the narrator hears a dull pounding that he interprets as the old man’s terrified heartbeat. Worried that a neighbour might hear the loud thumping, he attacks and kills the old man. He then dismembers the body and hides the pieces below the floorboards in the bedroom. He is careful not to leave even a drop of blood on the floor. As he finishes his job, a clock strikes the hour of four. At the same time, the narrator hears a knock at the street door. The police have arrived, having been called by a neighbour who heard the old man shriek. The narrator is careful to be chatty and to appear normal. He leads the officers all over the house without acting suspiciously. At the height of his audacity, he even brings them into the old man’s bedroom to sit down and talk at the scene of the crime. The policemen do not suspect a thing. The narrator is comfortable until he starts to hear a low thumping sound. He recognizes the low sound as the heart of the old man, pounding away beneath the floorboards. He panics, believing that the policemen must also hear the sound and know his guilt. Driven mad by the idea that they are mocking his agony with their pleasant chatter, he confesses the crime and shrieks at the men to rip up the floorboards.

* THEMES:
	+ **Madness/sanity**: the narrator’s attempt to prove his sanity as he explains his meticulous plans for killing the old man only prove his madness. What is evident, however, is that “The Tell-Tale Heart” is both confession and defence. Since he admits to the crime almost immediately, madness takes the place of legal guilt as the accusation against which the narrator is continually defending himself. As the typical suspect only increases the perception of his guilt by continually protesting his innocence, so the narrator sounds more and more insane as he insists upon his sanity.

“Why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them” (pp.1)

“You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded -- with what caution -- with what foresight, with what dissimulation, I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him” (1)

“I moved it slowly, very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this? And then when my head was well in the room I undid10 the lantern cautiously -- oh, so cautiously – cautiously” (1)

“And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?” (2)

* + **The pressure of guilt**: though he claims to be innocent and justified in his actions, the narrator’s guilt manifests in the sound of the dead man’s beating heart. According to the narrator, it was 4:00 a.m. when he had finished skilfully disposing of the body, and three police officers knocked on the door. He smiled and welcomed them in, which is itself an unusual and therefore suspicious response for someone who is visited by the police at 4:00 a.m. To the reader, he professes great confidence, even the “wild audacity” of “perfect triumph,” but very soon, he hears a ringing in his ears, followed by a heartbeat. The pressure of psychological guilt leads him to confess to the murder, though even in doing so, he retains his egotistical perspective, accusing the police officers of dishonesty, and calling them villains even as he reveals the act of villainy he has been attempting to hide.

“I smiled, -- for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome” (3) “They heard! -- they suspected! -- they KNEW! (…) But anything was better than this agony! (…) I felt that I must scream or die! -- and now -- again -- hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER!

* + **Time**: Time appears to be a consistent theme in the story. The recurring references to time emphasize the narrator’s obsession with it and it effect on his psyche. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” tells his story with an untrustworthy precision, though the precise details are often strange as to make his story even less convincing.

Time is a consistent theme and motif throughout the story. The narrator seems fixated on time. He catalogues exactly how much time he spends watching the old man before the murder. When he finally kills the old man, he claims that the old man’s “hour had come.” Sound also contributes to this theme. He hears “death beetles,” a type of beetle that sounds like a clock ticking, in the walls; he hears a watch ticking; he hears the old man’s heart beat.

“And every night about midnight I turned the latch of his door and opened it oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head” (…) “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed”(…) “And this I did for seven long nights, every night just at midnight,” “A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine” (1)

“When I had made an end of these labours, it was four o'clock -- still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door” (3)

“MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON” (3)

* + **The Dark side of man’s Nature:** The Tell-Tale Heart unfolds the evil or dark side of man. The narrator is the epitome of evil as he deliberately kills the old man to satisfy his nerves. He admits that the old man has not done any wrong to him at various places, yet he can’t bear his vulture eye. Through this story, the writer unfolds that if someone becomes evil, he can go to any extreme-

“Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire” (1)

* SYMBOLS:
	+ **The eye:** The eyes symbolize the essence of human identity, which cannot be separated from the body. The eye cannot be killed without causing the man to die.

Eyes are frequently considered as the reflection of a person’s personality and honesty of nature. In the story, however, one of the eyes of the narrator’s neighbour is described in a rather sinister and unpleasant way. In fact, the narrator calls it “the eye of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it”. The eye has taken away the madman’s attention from anything else in the old neighbour. He admits that he “could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person”. By the end of the story, the reader realizes that the hideousness of the character the narrator sees in the eye belongs not to the old man but to himself. Being unable to endure it any longer, the narrator kills the owner of the eye in the hope of gaining peace with himself. In the end, being the eye the only reason the narrator has to kill his neighbour reinforces his mental insanity and human evil.

“I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture. a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever” (1)

* + **The Watch**: A symbol of the Approach of death both for the old man and the narrator. Each tick of the watch symbolizes a movement closer to the inevitable death that all humans face. Firstly, the narrator literally controls the time of the old man's death: "The old man's hour had come!”(2) Secondly, the beating of the heart resembles the inevitable approach of death, symbolically, the confession of the crime and its consequences for the narrator: " It was A LOW, DULL, QUICK SOUND -- MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON" (3)

### The Raven

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 distraught lover who is paid a mysterious visit by a talking raven.

* YEAR: 1845
* GENRE: American Gothic Fiction
* SETTING: The chamber door
* FORM and STRUCTURE: The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe is a ballad made up of eighteen six-line stanzas. Throughout, the poet uses trochaic octameter, a very distinctive metrical form. He uses the first-person point of view throughout, and a very consistent rhyme scheme of ABCBBB. There are a large number of words that use the same ending, for example, the “ore” in “Lenore” and “Nevermore.”

* SUMMARY: An unnamed speaker sits in his chamber on a monotonous December night, reading old, esoteric books. He profoundly misses his love, Lenore, who presumably died recently, and he hopes that reading will distract him from his loss. He has nearly fallen asleep when he suddenly hears someone—or something—knocking on the door. He’s instantly uneasy but reassures himself that it’s probably just a visitor. He calls out, apologizing for his delayed response. However, when he opens the door, no one is there. He whispers, “Lenore,” to the darkness outside but hears only his words echo back at him. Gloomily, the knocking continues, this time from the window. The speaker assumes it is the wind but still feels uneasy. He opens the window shutters, and a raven hops in, perching on a bust of the Greek goddess Pallas Athena above the chamber door. The sight of the bird relieves the speaker momentarily. He jokingly asks the bird’s name. To his utter shock, the raven cries out, “Nevermore.” The speaker is stunned and unsure of the raven’s meaning. He regains his composure and whispers that the bird will fly away soon. The raven responds again, “Nevermore!” Still trying to console himself, the speaker theorizes that the bird must have an owner who taught it to say that one hopeless word. Curious, the speaker moves his chair in front of the raven. He lounges in the chair, pondering the raven for a few moments. He thinks about how Lenore will never again lounge upon this chair. He admonishes himself—God has granted him this one respite from his guilt, and still he thinks of Lenore. He tells himself to forget Lenore. As if in response, the raven says again, “Nevermore.” Now the speaker addresses the bird, calling it “evil” and a “prophet.” He asks if he will ever find relief. The raven says, “Nevermore.” He asks whether he will hold Lenore when he reaches Heaven. The raven replies, “Nevermore.” Enraged, the speaker orders the raven to leave him alone in his chamber. He accuses the raven of lying and shouts for it to get out. Without moving at all, the bird repeats its sole refrain—"Nevermore.” The speaker concludes that the raven still sits upon the bust of Pallas Athena, casting a shadow over his soul that will always linger.

The Raven’ explores the world of emotional wars that individuals face in all walks of life; specifically, the fight one can never ignore, the fight of control over the emotions of grief and loss. These battles are not physical, but leave scarring and bruising just as if they were. Poe has produced a wonderful piece of work that resonates with the feelings and experiences of every reader that comes across this poem.

* THEMES:
	+ **Death and the Afterlife**: As with many other of Poe’s works, “The Raven” explores death. More specifically, this poem explores the effects of death on the living, such as grief, mourning, and memories of the deceased, as well as a question that so often torments those who have lost loved ones to death: whether there is an afterlife in which they will be reunited with the dead.

At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is mourning alone in a dark, cheerless room. He portrays himself as trying to find “surcease of sorrow” (line 10) by reading his books. One might read this as an effort to distract himself and thereby escape the pain of the death of a loved one. One might also interpret the narrator’s reading of books of “forgotten lore” (2) to indicate that he is looking for deep knowledge about how to reverse death. In either case, his reaction to the death of a loved one is rather typical: to try to escape the pain of it, or to attempt to deny death.

Before the Raven’s arrival, the narrator hears a knocking at the door of his room, and after finding no one their calls “Lenore?” (28) into the darkness, as if sensing or hoping she has returned to him. Following the Raven’s arrival, he eventually asks the bird:

“By that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore--

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp66 a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore--

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."(92-95)

Implying a hope that he might see Lenore once more in heaven. In either case, the narrator’s desperate desire to be reunited with Lenore in some way is obvious.

* + **Memory and Loss**: Often, memories of the dead are presented as purely positive – as a way for the departed to continue to exist in the hearts and minds of those who remember them, and as a source of comfort for those who are still alive. “The Raven” flips this notion on its head, envisioning memories of a deceased loved one as a sorrowful, inescapable burden. That moment of hearing the knock on the door and opening it to an almost-there ghostly presence shows the widower´s obsessive memories that continue to intrude into one’s thoughts and from which one can’t escape.

“Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

………………………………………………………………………

Respite --respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"(79-83)

* + **The Supernatural**: “The Raven” contains many elements that point to the narrative’s **Gothic nature**: a lonely character in a state of deep emotion, the cold and dark of a midnight in December. The Raven itself, a seemingly demonic, talking bird that arrives at midnight, is the poem’s most prominent example of the supernatural. Gothic fiction tends to make ambiguous whether the supernatural events they describe are actually happening, or if these events are a product of their characters’ subconscious. “The Raven,” by leaving unresolved the question of whether the Raven is the genuine presence of a supernatural force or a figment of the tortured narrator’s imagination, fits squarely into this tradition.

The narrator describes himself as having been roused by a mysterious tapping at his door and senses the presence of his dead love Lenore, followed by the arrival of the Raven through the window. Perhaps the Raven truly has arrived, but the fact that the bird speaks makes the poem of supernatural nature:

“Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, / Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;” (49-50)

“But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only / That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour” (55-56)

* + **-Rationality/Irrationality:** In an essay titled “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which Poe explained his writing of “The Raven,” he describes the narrator as a scholar, a learned person devoted to rational investigation. It is therefore natural for the speaker to attempt to escape his obsessive memories of his wife by reading “ancient lore,” and when he senses Lenore’s presence, he comforts himself with the words :

“Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; --/ This it is and nothing more” (17-18) explaining the situation rationally. Even after he meets the Raven, he supposes that its replays of “Nevermore” are only “stock and store,” (62) that the bird is only parroting a phrase it has heard before from a previous unhappy owner.

All in all, the speaker attempts to respond to and understand the Raven in a rational manner, but the poem shows how the speaker’s paradoxically gets so deeply involve with the Raven and its responses, with together with his despair at the death of Lenore, results in irrationally ask the bird questions about her dead lover: “ On this home by Horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore-- / Is there--is there balm63 in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!"(88-89)

Through the poem, the Raven perches above a bust, or statue, of Pallas, a reference to Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. This placement of the bird on top of the goddess of wisdom, can suggest the victory of the irrational over the narrator’s ability to think clearly and rationally. At the conclusion of the poem, the narrator describes seeing the Raven still sitting upon the bust of Pallas, “never flitting”(103)suggesting that the bird makes its eternal nest in the narrator’s frantic mind. His irrational tendencies in the face of his lost Lenore, bordering on madness, make his rational approach doubtful, suggesting that the aftermath of an event as traumatizing as the death of one’s beloved cannot be overcome with measured, sensible thinking.

* SYMBOLISM:
	+ **The Pallas:** “Pallas” refers to Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. The bust of Pallas in the narrator’s chamber represents his interest in learning and scholarship, and also can be taken as representing rationality in general and **his own rational, sane mind** in particular. The Raven, by landing on the bust when it flies into the room, signifies a threat to the narrator’s reason. That the Raven stays on top of the bust of Pallas at the end of the poem, never flitting, suggests the dominance of irrationality and fear over reason in general, and, more particularly, that irrationality has taken up a permanent home in the narrator’s formerly rational mind. “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;” (103-104)

* + **The Raven**: Ravens are commonly viewed as symbols for evil, death, and supernatural forces. The narrator comes to see the Raven, which visits when the narrator is in deepest mourning over the death of his beloved Lenore, in exactly these terms: as a kind of supernatural emissary that has come to crush his hopes of ever being reunited with Lenore in heaven. The narrator sees the Raven not just as symbolizing death, but as symbolizing a specific kind of death: a death without heaven, a death that will change his life and torment forever:

“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

………………………………………………………….

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted--nevermore! “(103-109)

* + **The Night's Plutonian shore**: Plutonian” is a reference to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. The narrator, upon first encountering the Raven, is amused by its stately comportment, and jokingly accuses it of having emerged from the “Night’s Plutonian shore” (47), the border between the worlds of the living and the dead. At the close of the poem, the narrator, no longer amused and convinced that the bird means him ill, mentions again this underworld of Pluto with conviction, suggesting that the Raven is a messenger of death, but not a death in which souls travel up to a heavenly paradise where they are reunited with the other departed, but instead a death of blackness and despair: "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!”(98)

## Intro Paragraph

During the 19th century, in America, Romanticism took two very different approaches: the optimists who believed in the Over-soul and the creation of a restored world through education and philosophy, grew into the Transcendentalist movement, and the pessimists who embraced human fallibility and self- destruction, grouped into the so-called Dark Romantic Movement. Dark romantic literature focused on human's imperfections and the natural dark side of humanity. Among the representatives of this movement, the American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is considered the leading figure. Similar to many of his life experiences, his productions are full of mystery, desolation, and psychological depth. This is the case of his 1845 trochaic octameter, “The Raven” and one of his most prominent short-stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843). Exploring the themes of death and loss, mental instability, rationality, and the supernatural together with the use of strong symbolism, both of Poe's works reflect his mastery of Gothic fiction.

### MLA citation

Allan Poe, Edgar. “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 1843. *Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe*, pp. 979-982.

Allan Poe, Edgar. “The Raven,” 1841. *Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe*, pp. 937-940.

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1  VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. *Outline of American Literature*. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1994. Print.
2. ↑  Hogle, Jerrold E. *The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction*. Cambridge, 2002.
3. ↑  Thompson, G.R. "Introduction: Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition." *Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism*. Pullman, Washington State University Press, 1974.