RAVEN, The. 'The by Edgar Allan Poe is the one of his poems which is most inseparably connected with his name in common recollection. It is entirely expressive of the dominant sentiment of his life, the long ing and regret for beauty which he had once known; it is an excellent example of his most popular qualities as a versifier ; and he him self has selected it as a means of explaining how a poet might develop his ideas into poetic form. Like. (Annabel Lee,' and others of Poe's best-known verse,'The is a recurrence of the thought of a •beautiful love early' known and early lost. In its 'fotmi it has all the quality of softness and sonorous•. ness, of repetition and refrain which 'will be found elsewhere in Poe. •In •(The•Philosophy. of Composition) Poe explains the steps byi which these elements were built up and com4 bind into the present poem. It is possibly that he tells exactly what took place own mind. He was, however, rather fond of hoaxing people; he was also fond of exact in-* tellectual manipulation; and it is very possible that his account is really an after-statement of what might have been. However that may be;
the poem is a wonderful example of the emo tional, even sentimental, lyric of the middle of the 19th century. It is a mistake to think of Poe's poetry as being more music than ,mean ing. (The Raven' has a very distinct meaning although not such as could easily be reduced to a systematic statement, In our own day such reveries and meditations seem sentimental and old-fashioned; a century ago they were the natural moods of hundreds of young men. And no poem in our literature better expresses lust the mood that in that post-Byronic day was so common, ant even anything by Byron himself: As an expression Of its author and its own time 'The Raven) is perfect. It realises an ideal of beauty which is rare to-day and which many to-day find it impossible to appreciate, but it is an ideal of beauty and it is realised.