12. Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

12. EDGAR ALLAN POE
THE RAVEN

• His life:

  • 1809-1849

  • They never settled down

  • He lived with a foster family – Allans, his parents (who were traveling actors) left him – father left, mother died of tuberculousis, same as his foster mother

  • When he found love of his life – his cousin Virginia, she died of tuberculousis, she was much younger

  • University of Virginia: literature, poetry, accumulated debt, he left because his foster dad didn’t want to pay for him

  • He was a soldier

  • Westpoint (famous school for soldiers): He was made to leave because of gambling – needed money for studying, because his foster father didn’t pay him anything. He didn’t mind leaving, because it was a school his foster dad picked for him. Poe wanted to write

  • He inclined to alcohol → found delirious at the street, died in a hospital shortly after this incident (alcohol, drugs, pub fight, ilness)

  • He was poor, he worked for newspapers to have a little money

  • Bipolar disorder

  • Kritic, story writer, editor

  • The beginnings of his literary work: Tamerlane and other poems (18yo, at University), Tales of the Gorestque (stories)

• The Raven

  • Theme: mourning fot the death of a lover (she was still alive tho, but dying), loss of hope for recovery

  • Form: a dialogue between the narrator (the main hero) and the raven, the language was simple, very melodical vs. „never more“ (an irritating negation), symbols

  • Charles Dickens was an inspiration for this

  • He inclined to the theme of death

  • Horror poem

  • “The Raven” takes place in the speaker’s chambers at midnight on a “bleak December” night as the speaker lapses between reading an old book and falling asleep. He is roused by a tapping sound that he presumes to come from a visitor outside of his room. He does not immediately answer; he is in a sorrowful mood because of the death of his lover, the “lost Lenore.” He snaps out of these sad thoughts and assures himself that the sound is that of a visitor. He addresses his unknown guest but finds no one there when he opens the door. Peering into the silent darkness, the young man whispers Lenore’s name to himself. When he returns to his room, however, the rapping sound resumes, louder than before. He now figures that the sounds are merely those of the wind beating on the shutters of his window.

When he opens the shutter, a “stately” raven appears. It flies to the top of the chamber door and perches upon a bust of Pallas (Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom). The speaker is initially amused by the raven’s “grave and stern” looks. He addresses the bird in lofty terms, and asks what its “lordly” name is. The raven responds with the single word “Nevermore.” The young man marvels at the winged intruder’s powers of speech; he hopes to hear more, but the raven’s vocabulary is...

• Whatever the main hero says, the raven negates it.

• 1. sadness, depression, 2. raven enters (7 verse, till then he is trying to figure out who is tapping on the window – is it Lenore, he is calling her, he thinks he is hallucinating, suspense), 3. Dialogue = „who are you“, 4. Dialogue = „is there any chance for me?“, 5. Get out!, 6. Desperation , Devastation, Loss of hope and sanity

• The fantastic = mixture of reality and imaginery, unrelaible narrator

• He wrote essay about The Raven – Philosophy of Composition

• Methaphores, symbols (raven = death, depression, bust = potemnění rozumu) , alliteration, repetition, trochee . - , důraz na první dobu, internal rhyme (rhyme within line), refrain (iritating, repetiting chorus), melodical, figures (= about syntantic character) and tropes (about the meaning)