100 Fun Facts About The Raven

Which Dickens pet raven, stuffed and now displayed in a Philadelphia library, helped inspire Poe's poem?

Grip died in 1841, possibly from eating lead paint, and Dickens had her stuffed and mounted above his study desk. Poe met Dickens in Philadelphia in 1842 and is said to have been delighted that the bird was real.

Poe wrote The Raven while his young wife Virginia was slowly dying of which disease?

Tuberculosis struck Virginia Poe in January 1842, three years before the poem appeared, and she lingered until 1847, so Poe was writing about a lost love while watching his own wife fade.

In which city, where Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, is the poet buried?

Baltimore later called its NFL team the Ravens after his poem, the landslide choice of fans in a newspaper phone poll.

Which actor narrated The Simpsons' 1990 Treehouse of Horror adaptation of The Raven?

James Earl Jones narrated the segment, whose writing credit pairs Sam Simon with Edgar Allan Poe himself, dead since 1849.

In The Simpsons' first Treehouse of Horror, which family member plays the raven?

Bart is the raven while Homer plays the narrator and Marge appears in a portrait as Lenore; the children shrug the stories off afterwards, but Homer lies awake and hides under his blankets when the Bart raven appears outside.

Which Batman film villain quotes The Raven's line 'Take thy beak from out my heart' to Vicki Vale?

The Joker says it in the 1989 film on finding Bruce Wayne in Vicki Vale's flat, just after sneering 'another rooster in the hen-house?', borrowing the narrator's furious farewell to the bird.

Which US president, sent a parody called 'The Pole-Cat' by a lawyer friend, went on to read and memorise The Raven?

Abraham Lincoln admitted to 'several hearty laughs' at the parody before he had read the original, which he later learned by heart. Other spoofs included 'The Craven', 'The Gazelle' and 'The Turkey'.

Which actor played Poe hunting a serial killer who copies his stories in the 2012 thriller The Raven?

John Cusack's Poe spends his last days on the case, the film's invented answer to a real mystery: the writer was found delirious in October 1849, died four days later, and nobody knows why.

Which future star played Peter Lorre's son in Roger Corman's 1963 comedy The Raven, alongside Boris Karloff?

Jack Nicholson played Rexford Bedlo in a film that casts Vincent Price, Lorre and Karloff as three rival sorcerers and is only loosely tied to the poem. Lorre's character spends much of it as a bird.

At what hour does The Raven's narrator sit 'weak and weary' over old books when the tapping begins?

Midnight opens the poem — 'Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary' — and the narrator is nodding, 'nearly napping', when the tapping jolts him awake.

Through what does the raven finally enter the narrator's chamber after two rounds of tapping in Poe's poem?

The window is where the second tapping really comes from: the narrator flings open the shutter and the bird steps in 'with many a flirt and flutter', not 'the least obeisance' made.

What does The Raven's narrator find when he first opens his chamber door to the tapping?

Only darkness greets him — 'Darkness there and nothing more' — and when he whispers 'Lenore?' into it, an echo murmurs the name back.

What does the narrator ask the raven that prompts its very first 'Nevermore' in Poe's poem?

Its name is the question — 'Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!' — and the reply baffles him, since no living person was ever 'blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door' so called.

How does The Raven's narrator first rationalise the bird's one-word vocabulary?

Caught from an unhappy master, he reasons — some owner whom 'unmerciful Disaster' followed until his songs bore a single burden. He keeps asking questions anyway, knowing the answer.

Midway through The Raven, the narrator senses the air perfumed by a censer swung by which beings?

Seraphim, whose footfalls 'tinkled on the tufted floor', make him hope God has sent respite from his memories — a hope the bird crushes with its next word.

In The Raven's final stanza, the narrator says his soul will be lifted 'nevermore' from what?

The bird's shadow on the floor, thrown by the lamplight streaming over it, is what his soul will never rise out of, because the raven 'still is sitting' above the door and never leaves.

The narrator says the raven came from 'the Night's Plutonian shore', casting it as a messenger from where?

The underworld is ruled by Pluto, the Roman god the adjective invokes; the narrator says it while still smiling at the bird's 'grave and stern decorum', long before he calls it a 'thing of evil'.

Poe's essay on writing the poem describes The Raven's unnamed narrator as which kind of person?

A student, Poe said, which is why the man pores over 'many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore' and keeps a classical bust above his door. The poem itself never says so.

In his essay on writing The Raven, Poe says which talking bird first suggested itself before he settled on a raven?

A parrot came to mind first, Poe wrote, but a raven was 'equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone'. He wanted a 'non-reasoning creature' to repeat one word.

Poe's essay on The Raven says every work of art should begin where?

At the end is where Poe said he first put pen to paper, drafting the climactic 'Prophet!' stanza before any other; the finished poem runs to 108 lines, eight more than he planned.

What did Poe's essay on The Raven call 'the most poetical topic in the world'?

The death of a beautiful woman, Poe reasoned, is best told by 'a bereaved lover', so he made his narrator one and gave him a bird whose single word could only deepen the grief.

According to Poe's essay, what made the word 'Nevermore' the ideal refrain for The Raven?

Its long o and r sounds — 'the most sonorous vowel' with 'the most producible consonant' — were what Poe said he wanted before he had even picked a word, and it was 'the very first' to come to him.

Why, in Poe's own account, does the bird come indoors at all in The Raven?

To shelter from a storm, Poe explained — the tempest of the 'bleak December' gives the bird a reason to seek the narrator's chamber, since he claimed nothing in the poem was accidental.

Poe's essay says he perched the raven on a pallid marble bust for what effect?

Contrast with the black bird was the point of the white marble, Poe wrote: the raven came first, and 'the bust was absolutely suggested by the bird'.

By The Raven's last line, Poe wrote, the bird should finally be seen as emblematic of what?

Never-ending remembrance, 'Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance' in Poe's phrase, is held back on purpose: until the closing stanzas, he wrote, everything stays 'within the limits of the accountable — of the real'.

Which 1846 Poe essay claims to explain, step by step, how he wrote The Raven?

The Philosophy of Composition claims the poem was built 'with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem', and it ran in Graham's Magazine, whose owner had turned the poem itself down.

Poe's essay on The Raven sets 'a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art' — what is it?

A single sitting is the limit, Poe argued, which is why he also ranked the short story above the novel and allowed only prose like Robinson Crusoe to overrun it.

Which French composer said in 1931 that Poe's essay on writing The Raven had influenced him more than any treatise?

Maurice Ravel said he was convinced Poe really did write the poem the way the essay describes, and scholars have argued that Boléro's relentless build follows its logic.

Poe borrowed The Raven's metre from whose 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship', then dedicated his 1845 collection to her?

Elizabeth Barrett, later Browning, was hailed as 'the Noblest of her Sex' in the dedication and wrote back that the poem had produced 'a fit o' horror' in England. Poe had also faulted her for repetitiveness.

Which Transcendentalist sage dismissed The Raven with the four words 'I see nothing in it'?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's shrug had history behind it: Poe mocked the Boston Transcendentalists as 'Frog-Pondians', after the pond on Boston Common, and Emerson is said to have called him 'the jingle man'.

Which British illustrator drew The Raven for an 1858 London edition of Poe's poems?

John Tenniel, who later illustrated Alice in Wonderland, drew it years after his father's fencing foil lost its protective tip and cost him the sight of his right eye.

Which French illustrator died before his lavish 1884 edition of The Raven was published?

Gustave Doré died of a heart attack in Paris in January 1883 while also at work on Shakespeare, and Harper & Brothers brought out his oversized Raven with 1884 on its title page.

Which French painter made the lithographs for Stéphane Mallarmé's 1875 translation of The Raven, titled Le Corbeau?

Édouard Manet made the lithographs for Mallarmé, who championed his work in print, and Manet in turn painted the poet's portrait.

The Raven's bird perches on a bust of Pallas, a name for which Greek goddess?

Athena, goddess of wisdom, was often called Pallas, and Poe said he picked her bust partly for 'the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself'.

Which Dickens novel features the talking raven that helped inspire Poe's poem?

Barnaby Rudge gives its simple-minded hero a chattering pet raven, and Poe's review grumbled that its croaking should have been 'prophetically heard' in the story, three years before he wrote The Raven.

Poe most likely wrote The Raven in 1844 while boarding at a farmhouse in which part of New York City?

Upper West Side plaques on West 84th Street mark the likely site of Patrick Brennan's farmhouse, where Poe lodged with his wife and mother-in-law, though the exact spot is disputed.

Which French poet, whose translations made Poe famous in France, was influenced by his account of writing The Raven?

Charles Baudelaire said he translated Poe so patiently because Poe resembled him: opening his books, he found subjects he had dreamed of and sentences he had already thought.

Writing as 'Outis', Greek for 'Nobody', a critic in the Evening Mirror made a mock charge of what against The Raven?

Plagiarism was a mock charge: Outis counted fifteen 'identities' with a poem called 'The Bird of the Dream' to answer Poe's own accusations against Longfellow. Some suspect Outis was Poe himself.

The Raven's long lines, five per stanza before a shorter sixth, are mostly in which metre?

Trochaic octameter means eight stressed-unstressed feet a line; Poe admitted that neither the rhythm nor the metre was new and claimed originality only for the way he combined the lines into a stanza.

Each six-line stanza of The Raven, with its end-rhymes on 'door' and the refrain, follows which rhyme scheme?

ABCBBB is the scheme, with every B line rhyming on 'nevermore' and cut short — catalectic — to throw weight on its final syllable. Internal rhymes thicken it further.

'Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before' shows which device The Raven leans on heavily?

Alliteration is part of the poem's pull of repeated sound, which Poe built on purpose: his essay says the pleasure of a refrain comes 'solely from the sense of identity — of repetition'.

In The Raven, the narrator begs to know whether there is balm in which biblical land?

Gilead's balm was a healing resin, and the line echoes Jeremiah 8:22, 'Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?' — the narrator is asking whether his grief can ever be cured.

The narrator longs to 'quaff this kind nepenthe' — a drug of forgetfulness that first appears in which ancient epic?

The Odyssey's fourth book has Helen slip nepenthe, a sorrow-banishing drug she was given in Egypt, into the wine so that her guests can stop grieving over the war.

Poe may have drawn on Norse myth, where Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn personify which two things?

Thought and memory are Huginn and Muninn, whom Odin sends out at dawn to fly over the whole world and report back by dinner-time, so that he hears of everything they see.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, a raven-lore source Poe may have used, Apollo turned the bird black as punishment for what?

Reporting a lover's infidelity cost the once-white raven its colour in Ovid's telling: Apollo killed the unfaithful Coronis in a rage, regretted it at once, and turned on the bird that had told him.

The Raven's influence is traced to which 1955 Vladimir Nabokov novel, alongside Malamud's 'The Jewbird'?

Lolita is counted among the poem's literary descendants, and its debt to Poe is open: Humbert's lost childhood love is named Annabel Leigh, after the poem 'Annabel Lee'.

Whose 2003 concept album The Raven, featuring David Bowie and Willem Dafoe, set Poe's stories and poems to song?

Lou Reed grew the album out of POEtry, an opera he co-wrote with Robert Wilson, and recut his own 'Perfect Day' for it alongside guests Steve Buscemi and Laurie Anderson.

Which studio band's 1976 debut Tales of Mystery and Imagination sang The Raven through an early EMI vocoder?

The Alan Parsons Project's track had Leonard Whiting on lead vocals, with Parsons' own voice run through a vocoder he called 'a very cumbersome thing' borrowed from Abbey Road.

In the 1935 Universal film The Raven, who played a Poe-obsessed surgeon with a torture cellar, opposite Boris Karloff?

Bela Lugosi's Dr Vollin builds devices inspired by 'The Pit and the Pendulum', and a dancer he is fixated on performs to a recitation of the poem. Karloff plays a fugitive whose face he disfigures.

Which director's 1982 stop-motion short Vincent, narrated by Vincent Price, ends with its boy hero quoting The Raven?

Tim Burton's seven-year-old Vincent Malloy, whose favourite author is Poe, recites the poem's final couplet as he seems to die. Price called the film 'immortality'.

In which month, called 'bleak' by the narrator, is Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven set?

December finds the narrator beside dying embers, trying to read away his grief. The year's longest nights suit a poem in which morning never seems to arrive.

In The Raven, the bird perches on a bust of Pallas, a name for which Greek goddess?

Athena is the goddess of wisdom, so a bird croaking one word from the top of her head sets mindless repetition above reason for the whole poem.

Which name does The Raven's narrator whisper at his open door, only to hear an echo murmur it back?

Lenore is the dead love he cannot stop mourning. Poe had already used the name as the title of an earlier poem, published two years before.

Where is the bird as The Raven closes, despite the narrator ordering it out into the night?

Still perched above the door is where the final stanza leaves it. The narrator tells that part in the present tense, so the visit has never actually ended.

Which Netflix series sends its heroine to Nevermore Academy, home of the annual Poe Cup boat race?

Wednesday packs the Addams daughter off to a private school for outcasts and monsters, whose name is the only word Poe's famous bird ever says.

An early draft of The Raven may have starred which other bird instead of the famous title character?

An owl may have had the part in an early draft. Poe is also said to have recited a version with a different ending two years before the poem was printed.

What did Poe reportedly do to the lamps before reciting The Raven to guests at literary salons?

Turned them down low, one listener recalled, until the room was almost dark. Poe then stood in the centre and recited so well that guests were afraid to draw breath.

In which 1994 film does a resurrected rock musician quote The Raven after smashing a pawnshop door?

The Crow has its undead hero recite Poe's lines about a gentle rapping at a chamber door, then ask the terrified pawnbroker whether he heard the knocking.

In Star Trek's 'Charlie X', which crew member is forced to recite the opening verse of The Raven?

Spock is made to declaim Poe by a teenager with strange powers, moments after the boy forces the first verse of William Blake's 'The Tyger' out of him.

Which 1960s sitcom had a wisecracking raven pop out of a cuckoo clock squawking 'Nevermore'?

The Munsters kept the clock bird, who called himself Charlie, as a comic foil for Herman. One of his voices was Mel Blanc, the man behind Bugs Bunny.

With which three words does Edgar Allan Poe open his poem The Raven?

'Once upon a' is how Poe begins, borrowing the storyteller's oldest opening and bending it at once toward a dreary night and a knock that nobody was expecting.

What colour are the silken curtains whose rustling fills The Raven's narrator with terror?

Purple curtains suit the richly furnished room Poe said he chose on purpose: a chamber made sacred to the mourner by memories of the one who used to visit it.

When the tapping comes again, louder than before, what does The Raven's narrator tell himself it must be?

The wind is his second excuse, after blaming the first knock on some late caller. Only when he goes to look does the real visitor step inside.

How does The Raven's narrator first react to the grave, stern look of the bird?

He smiles, because Poe wanted the entrance to be almost ludicrous. The mood turns only once the same reply keeps meeting more and more desperate questions.

How does The Raven's narrator address whoever is knocking, while apologising for napping?

Sir or Madam is his careful opening, since he has no idea who is out there. He begs forgiveness for being slow to answer, then pulls the door wide.

In the final stanza of The Raven, the bird's eyes are likened to those of which dreaming figure?

A demon that is dreaming is the last picture of the bird, a long way from the comic visitor of the early stanzas. Its fiery stare had already burned into the narrator's chest.

On what is The Raven's narrator resting when he realises his lost love will never press it again?

A velvet cushion with a violet lining, glowing in the lamplight, is what brings her back to mind. Until then he had been puzzling over the bird in silence.

Which title does The Raven's narrator twice hurl at the bird, along with 'thing of evil'?

Prophet is what he calls it, twice, while still unsure whether it is bird or devil. By then he is treating its one word as a real forecast of his future.

Before 'Nevermore' takes over, which phrase closes six of the first seven stanzas of The Raven?

'Nothing more' ends the calm early stanzas, each time shrugging the noises off. Poe keeps one closing rhyme all the way through, so the famous refrain arrives already prepared for.

What does the last, desperate question put to the bird in The Raven ask about?

Meeting his love in heaven is the last thing he has left to wish for. The bird's flat refusal tips him over, and he shrieks at it to get back out into the night.

On entering, the bird in The Raven makes 'not the least obeisance', meaning it skips which courtesy?

A respectful bow is what an obeisance is. The bird instead walks in with the bearing of a lord or lady and settles on its perch without stopping for a moment.

Which Old Testament figure from Gilead, a place named in The Raven, was fed by ravens in a drought?

Elijah hid by a brook east of the Jordan while ravens kept him fed, a Bible story that casts the bird as a rescuer and not as an omen of loss.

In Hebrew folklore linked to The Raven, a white raven was turned black for failing which patriarch?

Noah sent the bird out to check on the flood, and it was slow to come back with the news. Its punishment was black feathers and a diet of carrion for ever.

Poe pairs 'dreary' with 'weary' in The Raven's opening line, an example of which poetic device?

Internal rhyme gives the poem its chanting drive. Poe borrowed the intricate pattern of rhyme and rhythm from a poem by an English contemporary he admired.

Poe's essay on writing The Raven names which mood 'the most legitimate of all the poetical tones'?

Melancholy came early in his reckoning: he says he fixed the sad tone before he had a subject, a speaker or even a creature to deliver the refrain.

Poe's essay claims which part of The Raven was the first to be put down on paper?

A stanza near the end, holding the narrator's climactic question, came first so that no earlier verse could outdo it. Poe held that all works of art should begin there.

Poe's logical account of writing The Raven contrasts with the dream origin claimed for which poem?

Kubla Khan, by Coleridge's account, arrived spontaneously in a dream. Poe's essay claims the opposite extreme, and is so rigidly logical that some suspect a hoax.

Critics trace The Raven's narrator from weariness through grief and frenzy to which final state?

Madness is where the poem leaves him. He has worked out that the bird knows one word, yet keeps asking questions that make that word hurt more each time.

Poe's essay boasts that The Raven advanced step by step with the precision of what?

A mathematical problem was his model: he swore that no point in the poem owed anything to accident or intuition. His account is probably exaggerated.

Which pseudonym, borrowed from a 17th-century English poet, signed The Raven in The American Review?

Quarles was the byline in the February 1845 issue, a nod to the emblem poet Francis Quarles. A New York newspaper had already run the poem under Poe's real name.

Which Irish poet dismissed The Raven as 'insincere and vulgar', its execution 'a rhythmical trick'?

W. B. Yeats was among the poem's harshest critics, though writers such as Margaret Fuller praised it. Opinion on its literary standing has been split ever since.

Whose A Fable for Critics summed up Poe and 'his raven' as three-fifths genius, two-fifths fudge?

James Russell Lowell landed the jibe in a book-length verse satire of American writers. The same couplet teases Poe about the talking bird in a Dickens novel.

In which country did more than a dozen poets, Mihály Babits among them, each translate The Raven?

Hungary made the poem a favourite test piece for literary translators, and one writer there even retold the whole story from the bird's point of view.

Which relative of Poe was already ill with tuberculosis while he was writing The Raven?

His wife Virginia had fallen ill three years before the poem appeared and died of the disease at 24. Her long illness runs through much of what he wrote in those years.

In which New York spa town is Poe said to have recited an early version of The Raven in 1843?

Saratoga is where the early version, with a different ending, was heard. Guesses about how long Poe spent on the poem range from one day to ten years.

Which of these Poe poems sat beside the title piece in his collection The Raven and Other Poems?

The City in the Sea joined the hit in a slim volume whose preface shrugs the poems off as trifles. The other three here first saw print in 1849, the year Poe died.

Which Dickens novel, reviewed by Poe, features the talking raven that helped inspire The Raven?

Barnaby Rudge gave its simple hero a chatty pet raven. Poe's review said the bird deserved a more symbolic purpose, and a few years later he supplied one himself.

Which organisation presents both the Edgar Awards and the Raven Award, each a tribute to Poe?

Mystery Writers of America hands the Edgar, a small bust of Poe, to authors and keeps the Raven for non-writers and institutions that have served the genre.

Which I Am Legend novelist wrote Roger Corman's 1963 comedy The Raven, loosely built on Poe's poem?

Richard Matheson turned the poem into a feud between rival sorcerers. He adapted Poe for Corman several times, including House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum.

Which Post-Impressionist titled an 1897 Tahitian nude 'Nevermore' and set a watchful bird behind the bed?

Paul Gauguin knew the poem well: it had been recited at his farewell party before he left France. He described his painted bird as a 'bird of the devil' keeping watch.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, a wizard who 'thought he was funny' gave a talking raven which name?

Quoth travels with the Death of Rats as his translator, and warns new acquaintances that he will not say the one word everybody expects from a raven.

Altered Carbon gave its Raven Hotel an AI Poe after which rock star's estate refused a licence?

Jimi Hendrix themed the hotel in the original novel. His estate will not license his image for anything it considers violent, so the showrunner rebuilt the hotel around Poe.

Which band's 1995 hit 'Run-Around' opens with an allusion to the famous first line of The Raven?

Blues Traveler borrowed the poem's opening words to start the song, which went on to win the band its first Grammy the following year.

Georges Perec's novel A Void retells The Raven as 'Black Bird' without ever using which letter?

E, the most used letter of the alphabet, appears nowhere in the 300-page novel, so its version of the poem must manage without the bird's usual name or its reply.

Mike Keith's 'Near a Raven' rewrites Poe's poem so its word lengths spell out the digits of what?

The number pi runs through it for 740 digits, each word's letter count giving the next decimal. Its author later stretched the same trick across a much longer work.

Which comic strip's treasury included 'A Nauseous Nocturne', a poem modelled on The Raven?

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson wrote the poem as an original piece for a 1988 collection, clearly patterning its rhythm on Poe's.

Which humour magazine reprinted The Raven in full in 1954 with absurd illustrations by Will Elder?

Mad ran every stanza straight in only its ninth issue and let the drawings supply the jokes. Decades later it came back with a parody about Ronald Reagan.

Which author has a hero tell one of Odin's ravens to 'say Nevermore' in the novel American Gods?

Neil Gaiman has the bird reply with a curse instead of the famous word. His Sandman comics also feature a man reborn as a raven as an alternative to death.

What does The Raven's furious narrator demand the bird not leave behind as a token of its 'lie'?

A black plume, one stray feather, would prove the night had really happened. He wants every trace gone, beginning with the beak he says is lodged in his heart.

After The Raven made him famous, Poe wrote that he was 'as poor now as ever' except in what?

Hope, he added drily, 'is by no means bankable'. The poem turned him into a household name almost at once and brought him no real financial success.