Course:The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe is the only poem I've been influenced or inspired by that was written 1945 or earlier. Maybe this is a good indication that I should be reading some oldies. It's a narrative poem, with a heavy rhyming scheme, about a man who is haunted by a raven — all a metaphor for being haunted by the grief of his dead love.
I will come clean and admit that I first encountered The Raven on a Halloween Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons from 1990. I stumbled it upon it many years after it had originally aired, in 1999, one Halloween night after running around the neighbourhood begging for candy. What captivated my little brain was the booming voice of James Earl Jones as the narrator, the musicality of the poem, and, of course, the hilarious animation. Seeing Bart's head on a raven's body, tormenting a housecoat-donning Homer, was beyond comprehension and I loved it. I loved the episode so much I tried to memorize the poem, with Homer's freak-out bits and everything, but I couldn't handle the pressure. I did the next best thing and just kept yelling "Nevermore Lenore Quoth the Raven Nevermore Lenore!!!" over and over again until my parents patiently and lovingly (I'm sure) asked me to, for the love of God, stop.
It was a few years later, in the middle of my early teen "whoah is me" years, that I found The Raven once again, this time in a book (wow). I was shocked to learn that it was not a Simpson's original but a narrative poem written about love and loss and grief from a very pale, sad British guy in 1845. Being full of angst and in the middle of an embarrassing emo/goth phase (you'll never understand me, mom!) I was entranced. I was also haunted by a lost love, my crush who gave me a burned copy of the first Billy Talent CD that one time and who, rudely, also gave one to everybody else in the class. I thought I was special and then became distraught to find out that I was not. What got me through? The Raven. I even bought a copy from Chapters and thought it super metal and hardcore of me to look at illustrations of spooky ravens and a depressed dude staring out a tall, foreboding window, before I went to bed.
But The Raven, more importantly, was a poem that reinforced my then budding love of horror, all things death and gloom, the supernatural and spookies, which were all genres/topics that really got me into reading and storytelling in the first place. It showed me that poetry wasn't always about nature, and pretty things, which is what my experience with poetry had been prior — an experience that had lead me to believe that all poetry was about the happy, the positive, which at that stage in my development was super boring, but not The Raven! What I really loved about the poem was its rhyming. I want to attribute it as the poem that got me into sound. "Nevermore" is one of the most fun words to say and rhyming it with "Lenore" or "door" or "explore" or "more" or "shore" is just plain ecstasy.
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