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| Edgar Allan Poe, daguerreotype, 1849. Digitally restored. Public domain. |
The word, of course, is “Nevermore.” The grieving man asks the bird its name, and it says “Nevermore.” He asks if he will ever be free of his sorrow. “Nevermore.” Finally he asks if he will ever hold Lenore again in heaven.
You can guess the answer.
The music is what makes it unforgettable. There are 18 stanzas of six lines, and each long line rolls with eight beats, stressed then unstressed: ONCE up-ON a MID-night DREAR-y. Rhymes hide inside the lines as well as at their ends… dreary and weary, napping and tapping. In other words, it is built to be read aloud.
Poe did exactly that. At literary parties in New York, he would turn the lamps down until the room was nearly dark, then recite it from memory. One listener said that hearing him was an event in one’s life.
A year later, he published an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), claiming he had built the poem like a maths problem. He chose “Nevermore” for its long, mournful o. And he chose his subject coolly too.
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“The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” 1846
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He had a model for his bird, as well. In Charles Dickens’s novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), a talking raven named Grip taps at a door. Poe had reviewed the book and thought Dickens wasted the bird.
The fame did not make him rich. His publisher, the American Review, reportedly paid him nine dollars. Newspapers reprinted the poem across the country without paying anything at all.
“I have made no money,” he admitted. Two years later, in January 1847, Virginia died. Poe himself died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849, aged 40, and nobody has ever proved what killed him.
But the poem kept growing. In 1884, the great French illustrator Gustave Doré made more than twenty engravings for a lavish American edition. He died before it was published.
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| Gustave Doré, cover for “The Raven,” Harper & Brothers, New York, 1884. Public domain. |
Inside, Doré drew the poem almost line by line. Here is the man at the open door, peering into the dark.
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| Gustave Doré, “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” 1884. Public domain. |
I first met the poem at school, as a chore. Years later, at a dinner, an elderly guest recited the whole thing after dessert, in a low voice, with the candles burning down. Nobody moved. I finally understood that it was never meant for the page.
It is in the public domain, so you can read every stanza tonight: The Raven, full text →
Poe was paid about nine dollars, and he never escaped poverty. The raven, it turned out, was right about almost everything… except the poem. That will be forgotten nevermore.
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Three Things Worth Knowing
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In 1875, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé translated “The Raven” into French, and his friend Édouard Manet, the painter of Olympia, made the illustrations. Manet drew in ink with bold, quick strokes, and the drawings were transferred onto lithographs: the man by his lamp, the bird on its bust, the shadow on the floor. Both men signed the edition. It sold poorly then, and it is a collector’s treasure now.
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Sport
The Baltimore Ravens
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When an American football team moved to Baltimore in 1996, it needed a name. A fan contest drew 33,288 votes, and the winner honoured the city’s most famous resident, who is buried there. So every NFL season, a team takes the field named after a poem.
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Music
Poe’s Method and Ravel
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Poe’s essay on how he built “The Raven” travelled well. French writers, beginning with Charles Baudelaire, admired its idea of art as deliberate construction rather than pure inspiration. Some scholars have argued that Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928), one melody repeated and rebuilt to a crushing climax, owes a debt to Poe’s method. Repetition, after all, is how “Nevermore” works.
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Curious & Controversial
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How much was Poe paid? Most sources say nine dollars. But the Poe Museum in Richmond notes that accounts give $9, $10, $15 or even $30, and the true figure is uncertain. |
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Was the poem really built like a maths problem? Most scholars think “The Philosophy of Composition” exaggerates. Poe wrote it after the poem was a hit, and he enjoyed playing the cool genius. |
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Not everyone was won over. Ralph Waldo Emerson said he saw nothing in it, and W. B. Yeats later called it insincere and vulgar. |
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Poe was accused of copying, too. An anonymous writer signing himself “Outis” listed similarities with another poem, and after Poe’s death his friend Thomas Holley Chivers claimed the rhythm and the refrain had been his. |
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Connoisseur’s Diary
Worth Seeing This Week
October is the best month of the year to visit the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, the city where Poe grew up. It keeps his boyhood belongings, letters and portraits in Richmond’s oldest standing house, around a garden inspired by one of his poems.
Where: The Poe Museum, 1914 East Main Street, Richmond, VA 23223. Open Tuesday to Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; last admission 4:30 p.m. Tickets: general admission can be bought online or at the door. Insider tip: Look out for the museum’s two resident cats, Edgar and Tib, who rule the Enchanted Garden. And check the calendar for its Halloween evening in the garden this month. Plan your visit at poemuseum.org →
Worth Reading
Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance — Kenneth Silverman (1991). The standard modern biography, humane and gripping, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Its title comes from Poe’s own description of what the raven stands for.
Explore Further
Browse: The Raven with Manet’s illustrations →, the 1875 edition, free on Project Gutenberg.
Browse: The Raven with Doré’s engravings →, the 1884 edition, also free on Project Gutenberg.
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