[page 350, continued:]

THE RAVEN

“The Raven” is Poe’s most famous composition. Like the short stories, it was written to please all kinds of readers, and it was immediately successful. Not only was it copied in countless newspapers at once, but it soon was to be found in textbooks and anthologies. Since it is, despite all its elaborate metrical ornamentation, a straightforward narrative, it can be and has been translated into every major language. Woodberry wrote of it: “No great poem ever established itself so immediately, so widely, and so imperishably in men’s minds.”(1) [page 351:]

The subject is of universal appeal, for every mature person has lost someone beloved, and even for the firm believer in immortality death is a separation from the living. Poe himself said (in his “Philosophy of Composition”) that his poem was emblematic of undying remembrance. The best comment I have seen is the remark of Charles Fenno Hoffman: “It is greater than we know — it is Despair brooding over Wisdom.”(2)

There can be no doubt that Poe himself regarded it as a masterpiece. In the New-York Tribune of November 26, 1845, Margaret Fuller, who had certainly discussed the poem with him, called it “a rare and finished specimen ... intended to show [his] artistic skill.” On December 15, 1846, he wrote to George Eveleth that while “in the higher qualities of poetry [‘The Sleeper’] is better than ‘The Raven’ ... The Raven, of course, is far the better as a work of art.” He told Frederick Saunders, later for many years chief librarian of the Astor Library, that he was sure that “future generations will be able to sift the gold from the dross, and then ‘The Raven’ will be beheld, shining above them all as a diamond of purest water.”(3) On the other hand, he wrote to his close friend, F. W. Thomas, on May 4, 1845: “ ‘The Raven’ has had a great run ... but I wrote it for the express purpose of running — just as I did ‘The Gold-Bug’ ... the bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.”

Evidence of the interest excited by “The Raven” is to be found not only in its innumerable reprintings and many translations but [page 352:] also in the imitations that continue to appear. More than a dozen circulated during Poe’s lifetime;(4) one of them so pleased him that he polished it, and hence part of “To the Author of the Raven” by Harriet Winslow appears in this volume among the Collaborations below.

The great popularity of “The Raven” gave rise to many stories concerning its genesis. In many cases the development of Poe’s poems can be traced through several successive versions, but in the case of “The Raven” no early forms are known. Legend, however, and some remarks by Poe himself indicate that there may have been, in the poet’s mind if not on paper, at least two precursors. I give here what is firmly or with some probability known about these. [page 353:]

PRECURSORS OF THE RAVEN

The Parrot

In his “Philosophy of Composition,” which includes a partly fictional account of the planning of “The Raven,” Poe said that as a pretext for the repetition of the word “Nevermore,” there “arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech; and very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech.” The word “forthwith” is part of the fictional element. As early as 1829, Poe wrote in “Romance” of “a painted paroquet” who “taught me my alphabet to say.” And in Roderick Usher’s library (in “The Fall of the House of Usher” of 1839) Poe placed the poem Ver-Vert (1734) by Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset, which concerns a parrot to whose remarks more meaning is attached than the poor bird understands.

The parrot as a precursor of the Raven is given support in the otherwise almost valueless Edgar Allan Poe (1901), by Colonel John A. Joyce, who tells a story (p. 78) that has a ring of truth about it. Joyce says:

[Mathew] Brady, the noted photographer, told me in 1866 that he met Poe [in Washington] in March, 1843, at the house of the widow Barrett, where he was rooming on New York Avenue, south side, near the junction of H and Thirteenth Streets, adjoining the “Halls of the Ancients” ... In one of his “moody moments,” as Brady expressed it, he wrote the first draft of “The Raven.”

Now the same Colonel Joyce, in the book just referred to (p. 207), claimed that Poe “plagiarized” his “Raven” from an Italian poem called “The Parrot” by Leo Penzoni in the Milan Art Journal of 1809. Penzoni and the periodical are unknown to bibliographers, and the English “translation” presented is obviously a concoction by Joyce. But did he get an idea of a parrot from some remark of Brady’s?

The Owl

During his stay in Richmond in 1849, Poe discussed the composition of “The Raven” with Susan Talley: [page 354:]

His first intention, he said, had been to write a short poem only, based upon the incident of an Owl — a night-bird, the bird of wisdom — with its ghostly presence and inscrutable gaze entering the window of a vault or chamber where he sat beside the bier of the lost Lenore. Then he had exchanged the Owl for the Raven, for the sake of the latter’s “Nevermore”; and the poem, despite himself, had grown beyond the length originally intended.(5)

She thought several phrases in “The Raven” were possibly survivors from the verses on the Owl, for they were more appropriate for the glaring-eyed bird of Pallas Athena: in particular “the bust of Pallas,” “the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,” and “his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s.”

In this connection it may be noticed that Poe must have seen “The Old Night Owl” by James Rees, dated June 20, in the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper of June 28, 1843, the very same issue in which appeared the first part of Poe’s own “Gold-Bug” — of which Rees was to write a dramatization produced on August 8, 1843. In the following extracts I have italicized the parts that may have impressed Poe.

The old night owl sat in the hollow tree, While the winds they passed him fearfully His eye like a demon’s glar’d around, And from his throat came this mournful sound — Ha, woo! ha, woo! ... Far, far aloft, on the night-wind floats — Ha, woo! ha, woo! ... He courts no kin, in his woody haunt, But to himself all night doth chaunt ... Ha, woo! ha, woo! ...

SOURCES

Poe obviously took considerable interest in stories and legends about ravens, and in real birds of the species too. Few little boys sojourning in the British metropolis fail to see the ravens stalking about the Tower of London. The story may not be wholly fabulous that Poe once said to Cornelius Mathews: “That bird [a raven], that imp bird pursues me, mentally, perpetually; I cannot rid [page 355:] myself of its presence; ... I hear its croak as I used to hear it at Stoke Newington, the flap of its wings in my ear.”(6)

Poe’s friend Henry B. Hirst kept a bird store and owned a tame raven, and Poe apparently studied it to good purpose.(7) The artist George W. Peck, reviewing Poe’s Works in the American Review, March 1850, wrote (p. 310):

There is not, in all poetry ... a more vivid picture ... than in this poem ... The “tapping,” the appearance of the Raven, and all his doings and sayings are ... perfectly in character (we were once the “unhappy master” of one of these birds) ... Poe ... considered what motions a bird of that species would ... make, and concluded to choose the most natural, as the most fantastic.

In reviewing Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge in Graham’s for February 1842, Poe wrote: “The raven ... might have been made ... a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.” Dickens’ raven Grip is fond of saying “I’m a devil,” and on one occasion when Barnaby says, “Grip hopes, but who cares for Grip?” the raven answers, “Nobody.” Barnaby’s mother warns that dreams and ghosts are abroad, and Dickens mentions a bright red light shining in the raven’s eye as he and his owner [page 356:] look out at the buildings burning during the Gordon riots. It is perhaps significant that Poe began his “Philosophy of Composition” with a reference to a letter he had received from Dickens, and he made his own raven a prophet.(8)

A number of poems have been mentioned as possible contributory sources for “The Raven.” Some have been discussed in connection with “Lenore” and “Eulalie” (which like the tale “Eleonora” are akin to the more famous poem), and others are mentioned in my notes on individual parts of the poem below. I relegate some other decidedly peripheral things to a footnote here.(9) But unquestionably the cardinal source of the final stanzaic form of Poe’s poem was Elizabeth Barrett’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” (1844). A few of the lines that probably influenced him follow, from the original first American edition; some were revised in later publications.

“Eyes,” he said, “now throbbing through me! are ye eyes that did undo me? Shining eyes, like antique jewels set in Parian statue-stone! Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid, O’er the desolate sand-desert of my heart and life undone? With a rushing stir, uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows; While the gliding of the river sends a rippling noise forever Through the open casement whitened by the moonlight’s slant repose. · · · · · Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling ...

Miss Barrett used the last line quoted as a kind of refrain.

In his review in the Broadway Journal of January 11, 1845, of Miss Barrett’s Drama of Exile and Other Poems, Poe said that “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” combined “the fiercest passion ... with the most ethereal fancy” but that it was a “palpable imitation” of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall.” Poe’s dedication of his volume [page 357:] The Raven and Other Poems (1845) to Miss Barrett seems to be a tacit recognition of his own similar debt to her.(10)

The acknowledged source of Poe’s metrical form rules out mere alternative suggestions, but one of them is so well known that it must be noticed. Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers had a notion that Poe “plagiarized” from a poem in memory of the doctor’s little daughter, “To Allegra Florence in Heaven.” In the Macon Georgia Citizen of July 12, 1850, he claimed he had sent Poe the following stanza:

Holy angels now are bending To receive thy soul ascending Up to Heaven to joys unending, And to bliss which is divine; While thy pale cold form is fading Under Death’s dark wing now shading Thee with gloom which is pervading This poor broken heart of mine!

This does not seem to me much like Poe’s poem, but a surprising number of people have thought it so.(11)

COMPOSITION

Since the metrical form of “The Raven” as we have it seems to place its composition not earlier than 1844, the poem must be ascribed to that year. The date of publication very early in 1845 makes such an ascription sure. Nevertheless, various stories about its composition persist.

Susan Archer Talley Weiss recalled that in Poe’s conversation with her about the poem in 1849 he told her that it “had lain for [page 358:] more than ten years in his desk unfinished, while he would at long intervals work on it, adding a few words or lines, altering, omitting, or even changing the plan or idea of the poem in the endeavor to make of it something which would satisfy himself.”(12)

At the Yaddo Artists’ Colony near Saratoga, New York, there is a tradition that Poe composed a version of “The Raven” while visiting the Barhyte Trout Pond there in 1843. He is said to have discussed the poem with Ann Van Riper Gillespie Barhyte, wife of the owner, John Barhyte, and herself a poet. Their children, James and Mary, remembered Poe, and the former claimed to have heard Poe reciting parts of the poem aloud in the open air. Poe did sometimes compose aloud, and the story is well witnessed. Since Mrs. Barhyte died in April 1844, the date is fixed as prior to the time Poe composed a version of his poem he finally published.(13) Woodberry (Life, II, 113) suggested that it was this (Saratoga) version of the poem that was rejected by Graham in Philadelphia, as described below.

The story told at the General Wayne Inn, Merion, Pennsylvania, that Poe wrote part of “The Raven” there seems to me due to the zeal of a local historian.

We do have a definite story, indubitably true, of how Poe wrote another version of the poem, probably the one he actually submitted for publication. While boarding at the farm of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Henry Brennan near the Hudson River late in 1844, Poe one day (it is said) sat down and began to write steadily; as he finished a sheet of paper he laid it on the floor. The eldest daughter of the family, fifteen-year-old Martha Susannah (whom Poe called “the little lady”), picked up the sheets and arranged them, and found the work was a poem called “The Raven.” The [page 359:] fullest account comes from Martha’s husband, General James R. O’Beirne, in the New York Mail and Express of April 21, 1900. Other members of the family told the story without important discrepancies. Mary Brennan, Martha’s mother, told Gill she heard Poe composing viva voce on occasion, and there is family tradition that Poe read his famous poem to her before its publication.(14)

Poe admitted freely that his “Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham’s Magazine for April 1846, was not expected to be taken as literal truth, but it is a dramatized account of the actual writing of the earliest published version. Poe’s descriptions of his intentions are serious, and that he planned the antepenultimate stanza first may be true.

Wholly irresponsible stories of Poe writing his masterpiece after 1845 have been told.(15) And there have been claims that Poe’s poem is either largely or in part a translation,(16) and even that it was composed by somebody else.(17)

PUBLICATION

When Poe had decided that the poem was in a form fit for publication in a magazine, he took his manuscript to Philadelphia, [page 360:] where he tried to sell it. Horace Wemyss Smith related that he was in George R. Graham’s office when the poem was offered, and declared that he carried to Poe fifteen dollars, “contributed by Mr. Graham, Mr. Godey, Mr. [Morton] McMichael and others, who condemned the poem, but gave the money as charity.”(18) Mrs. Weiss in her Home Life of Poe (p. 107) records that William Johnston, Graham’s office boy, said he was present when Poe read the poem, but that he saw no subscription taken up. She sensibly remarks that this was probably done when the office boy was not in the room. In his still unprinted “Living Writers of America” manuscript, Poe himself refers to a rejection of his “Raven.”

He had better luck with George Hooker Colton, a young man who was establishing The American Review: A Whig Journal as a “five-dollar monthly” in New York. For its second number (February 1845) he bought “The Raven,” probably for fifteen dollars, fair compensation at space rates.(19) The piece was printed with a pseudonym, “—— Quarles,” appropriate to an emblematic popular poem since the best-known work of Francis Quarles is called Emblems (1635) and his verses were long treasured by people who read little else save the Bible. Some doubts of the success of the poem led Colton to print the following introduction, in which it is thought Poe had a hand.

The following lines from a correspondent — besides the deep quaint strain of the sentiment, and the curious introduction of some ludicrous touches amidst the serious and impressive, as was doubtless intended by the author — appear to us one of the most felicitous specimens of unique rhyming which [page 361:] has for some time met our eye. The resources of English rhythm for varieties of melody, measure, and sound, producing corresponding diversities of effect, have been thoroughly studied, much more perceived, by very few poets in the language. While the classic tongues, especially the Greek, possess, by power of accent, several advantages for versification over our own, chiefly through greater abundance of spondaic feet, we have other and very great advantages of sound by the modern usage of rhyme. Alliteration is nearly the only effect of that kind which the ancients had in common with us. It will be seen that much of the melody of “The Raven” arises from alliteration, and the studious use of similar sounds in unusual places. In regard to its measure, it may be noted that if all the verses were like the second, they might properly be placed merely in short lines, producing a not uncommon form; but the presence in all the others of one line — mostly the second in the verse — which flows continuously, with only an aspirate pause in the middle, like that before the short line in the Sapphic Adonic, while the fifth has at the middle pause no similarity of sound with any part beside, give the versification an entirely different effect. We could wish the capacities of our noble language, in prosody, were better understood. — ED. AM. REVIEW.

If Poe had doubts about his poem, they vanished before publication. “The Raven” is in the third sheet of the magazine, not the last, and was printed off before the issue was complete. Poe showed the poem to N. P. Willis, and they decided that it should be first published with the author’s name. In the Evening Mirror of January 29, 1845, it was so published with Willis’ famous introduction:

We are permitted to copy (in advance of publication) from the 2d No. of the American Review, the following remarkable poem by EDGAR POE. In our opinion, it is the most effective single example of “fugitive poetry” ever published in this country; and unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift and “pokerishness.” It is one of these “dainties bred in a book” which we feed on. It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it.(20)

Poe also sent the poem to Benjamin B. Minor of the Southern Literary Messenger, who published it in the March number with the following introduction, of which the second paragraph is quoted from the New York Morning Express of February 5, 1845.

The following poem first appeared, we think, in the Evening Mirror; though intended for the American Review. It has since been frequently republished with the highest approbation. Still we take pleasure in presenting [page 362:] it to our readers, who must remember with delight many of the contributions of Mr. Poe to the Messenger. Mr. Brooks, editor of the New York Express, says: There is a poem in this book, (The American Whig Review,) which far surpasses anything that has been done even by the best poets of the age: — indeed there are none of them who could pretend to enter into competition with it, except, perhaps, Alfred Tennyson; and he only to be excelled out of measure. Nothing can be conceived more effective than the settled melancholy of the poet bordering upon sullen despair, and the personification of this despair in The Raven settling over the poet’s door, to depart thence “Nevermore.” In power and originality of versification the whole is no less remarkable than it is, psychologically, a wonder.

Within a week of the poem’s first publication, Poe eliminated its most obvious fault, the “bad rhyme” in the eleventh stanza, sending the changes to J. A. Shea for the New-York Tribune, but he made other changes occasionally until the last months of his life, and even then was not satisfied with a few words and phrases. We know which these are because he talked them over with Susan Talley, who gives a record of what he pointed out to her. She comments that she knew he discussed the poem with at least two other persons in Richmond.(21)

When the latest version of “The Raven” was published in the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner of September 25, 1849, the editor, John M. Daniel, one of those who had discussed the poem with Poe, added a long introduction.(22) This is here abridged, but [page 363:] so as to include the statements most probably inspired by the poet’s conversation:

Mr. Edgar A. Poe lectured again last night ... and concluded ... with ... The Raven ...(23) we furnish our readers, to-day, with the only correct copy ever published — which we are enabled to do by the courtesy of Mr. Poe himself ... To build theories, principles, religions ... is the business of the argumentative, not of the poetic faculty. The business of poetry is to minister to the sense of the beautiful ... That sense is a simple element in our nature ... the art which ministers to it may ... be said to have an ultimate end in so ministering. This the “Raven” does in an eminent degree. It has no allegory in it, no purpose — or a very slight one ... In the last stanza is an image of settled despair ... which throws a gleam of meaning and allegory over the entire poem — making it all a personification of that passion — but that stanza is ... unconnected with the original poem. The “Raven” itself is a mere narrative of simple events. A bird ... taught to speak by some former master, is lost in a stormy night, is attracted by the light of a student’s window ... and flutters against it. Then against the door. The student fancies it a visitor, opens the door, and the chance word uttered by the bird suggests to him memories and fancies connected with ... his dead sweetheart or wife. Such is the poem. The last stanza is an afterthought ... the “Raven” is a gem of art.