The Raven, first published in January 1845, is Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem and one of the best-known poems in American literature. On a December midnight, a grieving student is visited by a raven that answers all his questions with a single word. Its haunting music made Poe famous overnight, and it gave its title to his collection The Raven and Other Poems.
The poem
A young man reads late at night to forget the death of Lenore, the woman he loved, when he hears a tapping. A raven enters, perches on a bust of Pallas Athena above his door and replies to each of his questions with the same word.
Half amused at first, the narrator becomes more and more desperate as he asks whether he will ever find comfort or see Lenore again. By the end, the bird's shadow lies over him and he is lost in grief. The poem has eighteen stanzas of six lines, with insistent rhymes and repetitions.
Publication and fame
The Raven appeared on 29 January 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror, which printed it in advance of its publication in The American Review, where it was signed with a pseudonym, Quarles. It was reprinted in newspapers across the country and parodied endlessly.
In November 1845 it opened The Raven and Other Poems, published by Wiley and Putnam in New York. Poe became a celebrity, invited to recite the poem in literary salons, and was nicknamed the Raven.
The Philosophy of Composition
In 1846 Poe published an essay, The Philosophy of Composition, claiming that he had written The Raven step by step, with the precision of a mathematical problem: choosing first the length, then the melancholy tone, the refrain, and the subject of the death of a beautiful woman.
Many readers have doubted that the poem was really written so coldly, but the essay has been very influential, especially in France, where poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé saw in Poe a model of conscious artistry.
Anecdotes
Nine dollars
Despite its immense success, The Raven earned Poe very little money. He is generally said to have received about nine dollars for its first publication, and since there was then no copyright protection for reprints, the countless newspapers that copied it paid him nothing.
Translated by French poets
Charles Baudelaire translated The Raven into French prose in 1853 and again in his essay on the poem's composition. In 1875 Stéphane Mallarmé published his own prose translation in a large-format edition illustrated by Édouard Manet.
Frequently asked questions
When was The Raven published?
On 29 January 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror, then in The American Review in February 1845.
Who is Lenore in The Raven?
The narrator's lost love, whose death he mourns throughout the poem.
How many stanzas does The Raven have?
Eighteen stanzas of six lines each.