The eNotes Blog Quoth The Raven Its My Birthday! Poes Poem turns168

Quoth The Raven Its My Birthday! Poes Poem turns168 Yesterday marked the anniversary of   the publication Edgar Allan Poes classic, creepy poem The Raven. Although there is some dispute, the first publication of the work is generally attributed to  The New York Mirror.   The poem made Poe a star, but sadly, not a fortune. In the poem, a raven continuously visits a man who has been unlucky in love. The object of his affections, a woman named Lenore has been lost to him evermore. The poems internal rhymes and alliteration, along with its spooky, supernatural content made its lines easy to remember and it soon became incredibly popular. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore - While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Tis some visiter, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door - Only this and nothing more. The appeal to a broad audience was no accident. Poe deliberately constructed his lines for popular appreciation, but, as he explains in his essay, The Philosophy of Composition, he also sought critical praise. It is my design, he argues,   to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible [sic] either to accident or intuition - that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem  per se,  the circumstance - or say the necessity - which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing  a  poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste. Poes formula obviously worked, as it is still popular with both critics and the public alike to this day. Feeling like you want a little fright? Take a listen to the perennially  creepy Christopher Walken read the poem in its entirety: