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The Raven
In "The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe employs a Gothic ambiance to explore themes of grief, negativity, and depression. As the poem opens, the narrator is at home alone at night feeling sad and lonely....
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The Raven
In line 36, the speaker expresses his certainty, or perhaps his hope, that whatever has tapped at his chamber door and now taps at his window is simply the wind. He flings open the shutter, and a...
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The Raven
In the twelfth stanza of this poem, the speaker describes how the raven had so amused him with its comical, noble mien that he felt utterly beguiled and distracted from his grief. He has been...
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The Raven
Onomatopoeia is a word that sounds like its meaning, such as bang, pop, or fizz. Using onomatopoeia in literature allows readers to hear the sounds of the words, which helps them become part of the...
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The Raven
Although he is often regarded as one of the major voices of American Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe describes the composition of "The Raven" in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition" as a cool and...
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The Raven
In the third and fourth lines of the poem, the speaker describes a tapping that he hears at his door, and this is an eerie occurrence because it is midnight—very late at night for someone to come...
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The Raven
The speaker of this poem recalls a particular evening during one "bleak December." December is a rather gray month, cold and dreary, and so the speaker refers to it as bleak; further, he is...
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The Raven
The Raven can be considered a gothic poem because it has many elements that distinguish it as such. It begins "Once upon a midnight dreary..." , hence evoking the feature of darkness and night. The...
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The Raven
The "Five W's" of "The Raven" Who: The only two living characters are the narrator and the visitor who comes to his chamber--The Raven. What: The narrator, who is up late and alone at night, is...
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The Raven
"Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—"Pallas = Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom"Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I...
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The Raven
“The Raven,” a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, was first published in the Evening Mirror in January 1845. It is a narrative poem and one of the best-known works written by Poe, a dark Romantic writer. It...
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The Raven
The narrator of "The Raven" first describes the bird as "a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore." This is an odd description of a raven and should alert the reader to the strangeness of the...
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The Raven
In "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, there are many examples of romanticism. First of all, individualism as expressed by Romantics is clear as the poem is written in first person. One of the most...
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The Raven
The main message in “The Raven” is that we are haunted by our doubts, sorrows and fears. The poem depicts a young student trying to study on a dreary night. He can’t concentrate, because all he...
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The Raven
In the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, the author makes biblical references in relation to the raven. For instance, he calls the raven a prophet but is also not sure if the bird is a prophet...
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The Raven
In “The Raven,” the titular bird flies into the narrator’s chamber and speaks the word “nevermore” over and over again. This is the word that the narrator hopes is last spoken between them. Over...
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The Raven
The narrator in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” is meant to be an intellectual, given his fine speech, bust of Pallas over the door (Pallas being Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom), and the fact...
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The Raven
Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven begins with a sense of quiet, calm melancholy. The narrator is looking through a number of "curious volumes of forgotten lore" for some words of solace to relieve his...
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The Raven
Haunted by demons, Poe’s narrator is at the mental crossroads of nostalgia and melancholy. His resting awareness involves disturbed ruminations of lost love, personified by Poe’s iconic object of...
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The Raven
One would think that any narrator of a poem or other work in which the supernatural appears would by definition be "unreliable." However, with regard to works written in previous eras, this...
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The Raven
At the outset of the poem, the speaker is feeling a great deal of grief, sadness and loss at the passing of his beloved Lenore. This sadness he has tried to drown in books but he is still hoping...
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The Raven
The poet’s beloved was called Lenore, a name meaning “light” in Greek and therefore a contrast to the midnight setting of the poem and the blackness of the Raven. He first mentions her in the...
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The Raven
As stated before, the point of view is first person and the protagonist is expressing his sorrow while slipping into what the reader understands to be some sort of madness. The Raven is the...
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The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” which was published in Graham’s Magazine in April 1846. In the essay, Poe gives a detailed account of how he wrote his poem...
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The Raven
The second stanza is remarkably effective at highlighting the speaker's loneliness and sense of desolation. Recalling that strange night when the raven visited him, he refers to the "bleak...
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The Raven
The tortured speaker is completely loyal to the memory of his beloved Lenore. Since her tragic death, the speaker has eyes for no other woman, despite the immense emotional pain and suffering her...
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The Raven
Because the raven is a carrion bird, like the vulture, it is usually associated with death. Depending on cultural beliefs, it can also be a symbol of trickery or even the bringer of light into the...
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The Raven
You can find the answers to these two questions at the end of the poem -- the last two stanzas. In the next to last stanza, the narrator tells the raven to get out -- to get off the bust and leave...
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The Raven
The ending of this poem by Edgar Allan Poe expresses this sad conclusion. In the poem, the appearance of the raven of the title brings to the narrator the conviction that Lenore is truly lost. The...
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The Raven
In “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe uses motif to create the mood of melancholy and longing. A motif is a repetitious idea, sound, or image in a piece of literature. Poe repeats the sounds in the words...
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The Raven
To write a critical analysis of “The Raven” or any other poem, you need to find a place to focus. Some good areas to start are theme and literary devices. The theme of a poem is the meaning the...
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The Raven
It is a cold December evening, and the narrator has been reading, until upon the midnight hour he hears a tapping at his door. The book he has been reading was a reason for his needing to forget...
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The Raven
The narrator of this poem does a number of things as the story unfolds. It is a narrative poem which by definition tells a story. Therefore, the narrator is doing different things at different...
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The Raven
In several of his dialogues, Socrates suggests the idea that knowledge is a matter of recollection, not of observation, learning, or study. This philosophy parallels that of Poe's speaker in "The...
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The Raven
Silverman quoted Poe saying that the meaning of the Raven is "Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance", that is, a memory that will not go away and is stricken with grief. The protagonist is in...
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The Raven
The student’s question—what is a description of the power of landscapes in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven—can, perhaps, best be answered with reference to a broader examination of this particular...
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The Raven
One could argue that English language poetry has changed drastically in the years since 1845 when Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven," and that therefore this classic piece of American poetry should...
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The Raven
"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe opens with the narrator trying unsuccessfully to distract himself from thinking about how sad he is over the death of his beloved Lenore. He briefly smiles when he is...
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The Raven
Edgar Allen Poe's life was filled with the deaths of the women he loved most in his life. Not only did his mother die, his wife (and cousin) Virginia died from consumption (tuberculosis). Poe...
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The Raven
"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most famous poems in American literature, and arguably the star of the poem is a symbolic black raven who appears to a grieving man. We know that the...
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The Raven
"The Raven" is set in a darkly-lit house, on the edge of the ocean, during a windy night. One character is a speaking raven, who has appeared out of nowhere and seems to be answering the...
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The Raven
The first image that leads to the gloomy atmosphere of the poem appears in the first line, where the speaker describes a “midnight dreary.” Both words evoke gloom. Even the words “many a quaint...
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The Raven
One example of alliteration, the repetition of an initial consonant sound, occurs when the narrator says, "Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, / Doubting,...
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The Raven
This is a very interesting question, and the answer to it depends a lot on your own personal reading of the poem. My own theory is that the speaker of the poem is both protagonist and antagonist,...
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The Raven
Yes, the poem makes it clear that an actual raven does fly into the speaker's chamber. In the seventh stanza, lines 1 & 2, the speaker says, "Open here I flung the shutter, when, with...
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The Raven
The speaker was rather surprised and bemused. In the first two lines of the eighth stanza, he says, "Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling...By the grave and stern decorum...
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The Raven
Perhaps it doesn't. If you want to, you can definitely point out the various tragedies of Poe's real life, the struggles he endured that involved everything from gambling debts to drinking to...
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The Raven
It is entirely fitting that a poem that is about the effects of obsession on the human psyche should internally, in its rhyme and rhythm, repeatedly refer back to the focus of that obsession. In...
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The Raven
One way to interpret characters in poetry is to analyze them both with a literal eye as well as a figurative one. In Poe's "The Raven," a man sits grieving in his chamber over his lost love,...
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The Raven
Let's start by getting the overall mood of the poem before taking on how the setting contributes to that. Mood refers to the feelings that a text gives readers as they read a particular piece of...
