Summary Of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

“The Raven” has been one of the most recognizable works in American poetry because of its haunting, music-like quality. It is also known for its hypnotic sound and uniform tone of melancholy. Poe needed to create a masterpiece people could remember him by. He used all of his best writing talents in his poem; repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, so that he would be committed to the memories of all people for countless generations.

In his essays, Poe defended beauty and pleasure as the primary concerns of poetry and was very much against excessive length. (Funk & Wagnalls, 104) He, therefore, chose his yet-to-be-written poem to be around 100 lines long—short enough to be read in one sitting, but long enough to be enjoyed by

His poem, The Raven, united both his philosophical and aesthetic ideas. In this, Poe was able to vividly picture the mental anguish of others because he had endured many sufferings and pain in his own life. (Porges, 157) On the poem, The Raven, Charles Baudelaire had this to say: It is indeed a poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor driveling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible. (World Literature Criticism, 2751).

The Raven is melancholy, dark, and foreboding: all of Poe’s best tones, all rolled into one. That is probably why The Raven is one of his best-known works. It has been made into an episode of The Simpsons, along with another of his works, The Tell-Tale Heart. It has been made into countless movies, many starring the well-known actor, Vincent Price. All in all, the Raven is one of Poe’s best-known works because he had put all of his best writing talents when he sat down to create his monster, and his masterpiece, “The