![]() After briefly attending West Point, Poe went to New York City and soon after to Baltimore. Neither of his first two collections attracted much attention. Poe was discharged from the army in 1829, the same year he published a second volume of verse. There he enlisted in the army and published his first collection of poetry, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poe returned to Richmond in 1827 but soon left for Boston. He distinguished himself academically at the University but was forced to leave due to inadequate financial support from his step-father. As a youth, Poe attended the finest academies in Richmond, his step-father overseeing his education, and he entered the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. Both his parents died before he was three years old, and he was subsequently raised in the home of Frances Keeling Valentine Allan and her husband John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia. Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the son of Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, both minor professional actors. The narrator begins with innocent and amusing remarks that build in a steady crescendo to intense expressions of grief, all of which conclude with “Nevermore” or one of its variants. The stanzas become increasingly dramatic as the speaker makes observations or asks questions that reveal his growing tension and diminishing reason. The poem uses this refrain, or variations of it,Īs the closing word for each stanza. ![]() In the essay Poe also discusses his method of composing “The Raven.” He claims to have given much thought to his selection of the refrain, recognizing in it the “pivot upon which the whole structure might turn.” His selection of the word “Nevermore” came after considering his need for a single, easily remembered word that would allow him to vary the meaning of the lines leading up to it. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe’s own essay about “The Raven,” he describes the poem as one that reveals the human penchant for “self-torture” as evidenced by the speaker’s tendency to weigh himself down with grief. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “The Raven” has become one of America’s most famous poems, partly as a result, of its easily remembered refrain, “Nevermore.” The speaker, a man who pines for his deceased love, Lenore, has been visited by a talking bird who knows only the word, “Nevermore.” The narrator feels so grieved over the loss of his love that he allows his imagination to transform the bird into a prophet bringing news that the lovers will “Nevermore” be reunited, not even in heaven. Sources of “The Raven” have been suggested, such as “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, and two poems, “To Allegra Florence” and “Isadore” by Thomas Holly Chivers. “The Raven” was first published in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845, and received popular and critical praise.
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