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Edgar Allan Poe's most famous writing, "The Raven", in which he ends many of the stanzas with the gloomy "Quoth the raven nevermore" introduces the menacing black bird as a symbol of the tragedy of life's losses, especially when doomed young lovers die. In the poem, he cites "the rare and radiant maiden, the lost Lenore". He may have been referring to his first wife, Virginia, who had eloped with him when she was 15, and died a long, lingering death at 25. Although Poe married two more times, "The Raven" and many of his other dark poems and stories involved the tragedy of a man's loss of a beloved, ethereal girl.

Poe sets the dark mood of "The Raven" by placing his character in a gloomy, lonely room in December, when everything is bleak and cold, possibly in the spare little Philadelphia house that is now a historic site. When the one-word bird appears precisely at midnight, the writer-narrator is never quite sure whether it is a real bird or some imagined demon of doom. The pounding rhythms of Poe's poetry move the story forward like an approaching dirge of muffled drums, unstoppable and inevitable.

"But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door."

Poe is reported to have had longtime addictions to alcohol and opium, so the foreboding black bird could have come to the terrified author right out of one of Poe's personal memories. His frequent binges of excessive indulgence gave him vivid experiences with the typical horrors of the DTs (dementia tremens), including several hospitalizations throughout his short life.

The follow-up history is at least as sad as "The Raven" poem itself. Although the work, when first published, became instantly as popular then as a hit pop song would be today, Unfortunately, Poe had no way of copyrighting it, because the protective laws didn't yet exist. "The Raven" became an American literary classic, and was reprinted then and thereafter in books, magazines, movie scripts and other venues, but Poe never earned any money from it. By his late 30s, his already poverty-stricken, addicted life continued to deteriorate.

Just four years after "The Raven", Edgar Allan Poe was found drunk in a Baltimore street, suffering from the DTs and exposure. He died a few days later in a charity hospital at age 40. His reported last words, "Lord, help my poor soul" could have been a footnote to the sad tale of his terrified writer in "The Raven".

My experience with the memory of Edgar Allan Poe, as with every other schoolchild of my era, was required reading of his works. Additionally, was I spent 11 years in a Philadelphia boarding school for fatherless boys just four or five city blocks away from one of the houses where the famed writer of "The Raven" lived on Spring Garden Street. Now the little brick row house is called the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site. I remember visiting many times on class trips, and found it dark, gloomy and empty of any furniture. Just right for a suffering poet or artist. According to Philadelphia history, Poe wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" there, both made into Hollywood movies several times. I haven't been back to Philly in at least a dozen years, so perhaps I will see the Poe house nevermore.

Learn more about this author, Ted Sherman.
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