It was on this date in 1845 that Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" was first published (in the New York Evening Mirror). It's been read a few times since then. Mental Floss has some interesting details about the poem.
For instance...
3. Not everyone was as kind as Nathaniel Parker Willis. In fact, some of Poe’s contemporaries kind of hated it. William Butler Yeats thought it was “insincere and vulgar” and Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I see nothing in it.” Aldous Huxley thought it was too poetic, saying that it “falls into vulgarity” by being overly so.
4. Poe took his inspiration from a couple of sources: the talking raven idea was likely borrowed from Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty and the rhythm and meter definitely comes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.”
Pictured above: Illustration by Édouard Manet for a French translation by Stéphane Mallarmé of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven."
1 comment:
For what it's worth, Poe himself stated that he had written many poems that were better than "The Raven." However, I suspect he may have said that simply because he had gotten rather weak and weary of it by then. He was rather in the position of a pop artist who has one big hit that everyone wants him to play over and over and over again.
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