The Raven: And Other Poems
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About this ebook
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before... '
It is one of the most enduring scenes of American literature; an eerie winter evening full of memories and ghosts, when a bereaved man comes face to face with a strange bird utterin the foreboding phrase 'Nevermore'. Edgar Allan Poe's celebrated poem 'The Raven' is a haunting elegy of loss and mourning that has resonates with readers for over 150 years.
This handsome edition sets the text alongside the famous illustrations by Gustave Dore, which capture and enhance the brooding atmosphere of the poem and the psychological turmoil of its subject. The book is completed with other poems fromPoe's acclaimed 1845 collection including 'Tamerlane', 'A Dream', and 'The Valley of Unrest'.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) reigned unrivaled in his mastery of mystery during his lifetime and is now widely held to be a central figure of Romanticism and gothic horror in American literature. Born in Boston, he was orphaned at age three, was expelled from West Point for gambling, and later became a well-regarded literary critic and editor. The Raven, published in 1845, made Poe famous. He died in 1849 under what remain mysterious circumstances and is buried in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Reviews for The Raven
263 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An absolute master of verse and prose
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love Edgar Allen Poe.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5It was very slow and calm in the beginning not to much excitement. It didn’t have my attention but I read it to see if I would understand it a little more then what I thought about it. I had given up on this book because I wasn’t finding any interest and I didn’t really understand its way of explaining things or what they were doing. Yea, there were some good parts in the book I am not going to lie but not to the point where I wanted to read more about it. It’s a good book for those who are into like poem type readers or those who know how to read in the way they talked back then as like in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ It has some mystery that is quit interesting. In some moments when I wasn’t reading the book I read the poems in the back of the book to see what they were about. They were long and not to the point. I had to read it a few times before I actually got what he was talking about.
Book preview
The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe
INTRODUCTION
Poe before ‘The Raven’
When the popular comedic actress Elizabeth Poe gave birth to Edgar Poe in Boston in January 1809, her husband David was already increasingly absent. Upon her death less than three years later, Edgar was left with little other than a lock of her hair, a miniature portrait showing her exaggerated dark eyes set in a pale, fine-featured face, and a vague sense of what he had lost from which he would never recover. In an informal way that would both help and haunt him, the orphan was taken in by John and Fanny Allan, an affluent merchant family in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan provided for Edgar’s education in England, and Fanny offered the boy what motherly attention and affection she could manage through a life of illnesses. In 1823, a close friend’s mother, Jane Stanard, began to serve as a surrogate mother and early erotic interest, joining Eliza and Fanny as loving figures made inaccessible by illness. A classically beautiful and melancholic woman, Stanard died in 1824, most likely from a brain tumour. Poe celebrated her beauty as rivalling the classical Helen’s in its effects on the poet in the early verse ‘To Helen’ (see here).
After a year away at the University of Virginia, an already frayed relationship with John Allan deteriorated further and the rebuffed foster son returned to Boston, determined to show signs of his literary talents. His self-published Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) received no notice in the press and Poe enlisted in the Army just days after its publication. He was promoted regularly, proving his foster father’s dismissiveness wrong, but by early 1829 he wanted out. He engineered a discharge, but not before an urgent letter about Fanny’s health reached him. Poe rushed to Richmond, to find that she was buried not far from the very familiar grave of Jane Stanard, and with her the young poet’s best hope for continued commitments from John. While he retained ‘Allan’ as his middle name, Poe almost never signed with it.
By the end of the year, Poe had moved on to Baltimore, where he lived briefly with his aunt Maria Clemm, her daughter Virginia, and other relatives. Maria, or ‘Muddy’, and Virginia, then a girl of eight, seem to divide the qualities Poe had sought in images of his mother, in Fanny, and in Mrs Stanard. The aunt, a poor widow with a stout, squarish appearance but motherly affection and an insistence on cleanliness in spite of poverty, and Virginia, whose pale, childish beauty would later take on the blush of tuberculosis, were soon to become the core of Poe’s household.
By December 1829, Poe had published several poems in magazines, and finally the collection Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. It received ambivalent praise in the press, and he returned to the military, this time as a student at West Point, the Army’s officer academy. As he had at Virginia, Poe excelled in languages and mathematics. But again, he left within a year, after collecting from his fellow cadets subscriptions for a new book of poems. Upon the publication of Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831), the cadets were furious, having expected a volume of the kind of doggerel Poe