50 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 was delighted to learn the bird was real.

How much did The American Review pay Poe for The Raven, the poem that made him famous almost overnight?

$9 was the fee, and Poe later lamented that he was 'as poor now as ever I was in my life — except in hope, which is by no means bankable'. The poem was reprinted, parodied and recited everywhere.

Which rival option shared the 1996 fan ballot that christened Baltimore's NFL team after Poe's poem?

Marauders, Americans and Bombers were all polled, but Ravens won over fans who liked the tie-in with the Orioles and could picture 'a tough, menacing black bird'. Poe is buried in the city.

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

James Earl Jones narrated the segment, written by Sam Simon, with Homer as the grieving scholar. Alf Clausen began scoring the show with this very episode.

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

Bart is the raven while Homer plays the narrator, Marge appears in a portrait as Lenore, and Lisa and Maggie are the angels. Bart complains in the treehouse that the poem is not scary.

Which villain in the 1989 Batman film quotes The Raven's line 'Take thy beak from out my heart' to Vicki Vale?

The Joker borrows the narrator's furious farewell to the bird, from the stanza that begins 'Be that word our sign of parting'. The Penguin would have been the more obvious bird-fancier.

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 played a fictionalised Poe in his final days in 1849 Baltimore, with Luke Evans as the detective Emmett Fields. James McTeigue of V for Vendetta directed.

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, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore'. Poe hinted the lore might be occult.

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, and when he whispers 'Lenore?' an echo murmurs the name back. The bird appears only once the tapping moves to the shutter.

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.

At the end of The Raven, the narrator says his soul will be lifted 'nevermore' from what?

The bird's shadow on the floor, thrown by the lamplight, is where his soul 'lies floating' in the final stanza, while the raven 'still is sitting' above the door.

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, which makes the bird a messenger from the afterlife and the 'devil bird' of folklore.

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 bird perches on a bust of the goddess of wisdom and the man pores over 'volumes of forgotten lore'. The poem itself never says so.

In The Philosophy of Composition, 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 wrote that he aimed at 'about one hundred lines' — how many does The Raven actually run to?

108 lines 'in fact', Poe admitted, having reasoned that the poem must excite 'the popular' taste without sinking below 'the critical' one. He was deliberately contrasting his method with Coleridge's dreamy account of Kubla Khan.

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

The death of a beautiful woman, Poe reasoned, is best voiced by 'the lips of a bereaved lover' — so his narrator had to be one. Many readers hear his dying wife Virginia behind the line.

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 claimed he perched the raven on a pallid white bust, rather than on furniture, for what effect?

Contrast with the black bird was the point of the white marble, Poe wrote, while choosing Pallas for the bust signalled the narrator's scholarship. Critics doubt the essay's tidy logic.

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 what the bird stands for, and he insisted the intention must not show until the final stanza.

Which Philadelphia monthly, whose owner had rejected The Raven, printed Poe's 1846 essay on composing it?

Graham's Magazine ran The Philosophy of Composition in April 1846; George Rex Graham had disliked the poem but gave Poe $15 as charity when he turned it 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 was matched decades later by W. B. Yeats, who called the poem 'insincere and vulgar ... its execution a rhythmical trick'. Margaret Fuller, by contrast, praised it.

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

John Tenniel illustrated the poem for The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, published in London by Sampson Low with an 'Original Memoir', years before his Alice pictures made him famous.

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

Gustave Doré was paid 30,000 francs by Harper & Brothers for the oversized edition in 1883, the year he died of a heart attack in Paris while working on Shakespeare.

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

Édouard Manet illustrated the bilingual edition, and Mallarmé was among the few critics, with Zola and Baudelaire, who championed him against the establishment.

What did Wiley and Putnam charge for The Raven and Other Poems, Poe's first poetry book in 14 years?

31 cents bought the 100-page volume, in whose preface Poe called the poems 'trifles' that had been altered without his permission as they made 'the rounds of the press'.

The mantelpiece from the room where Poe wrote The Raven is kept at which university's rare book library?

Columbia University received the 'Raven Mantel' before the farmhouse was demolished in 1888, and it now sits on the sixth floor of Butler Library. Poe had actually studied at Virginia.

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 editor hailed The Raven as 'unsurpassed in English poetry' when his Evening Mirror ran it under Poe's own byline?

Nathaniel Parker Willis printed it as an 'advance copy' in January 1845, predicting it 'will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it'. Within weeks it was reprinted across the country.

Writing as 'Outis' — Greek for 'Nobody' — a critic in the Evening Mirror accused Poe of what regarding The Raven?

Plagiarism of a poem called 'The Bird of the Dream' was the charge, listing 18 similarities, and it was payback for 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 — eight stressed-unstressed feet per line — is so rarely used that The Raven is its best-known example, ahead of Banjo Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow.

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 runs through the whole poem, and the poet Daniel Hoffman judged its structure so formulaic as to be artificial — yet conceded its 'mesmeric quality' wins out.

'Is there balm in Gilead?', the narrator begs the raven — a line echoing which book of the Bible?

Jeremiah 8:22 asks 'Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?', the balm being a medicinal resin — a healing the grieving narrator craves. Elijah, fed by ravens, also came from Gilead.

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

The Odyssey's fourth book introduces nepenthe, a sorrow-banishing drug said to come from Egypt, which also gave the carnivorous pitcher plants Nepenthes their name.

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

Thought and memory are what the two birds stand for, a neat fit for a poem about a grief that will not fade. Hebrew folklore gives the raven a darker role as Noah's dawdling scout.

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 got the once-white raven turned black, and Hebrew folklore likewise blackens Noah's raven for failing to return promptly with news of the receding flood.

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, with Bernard Malamud's 'The Jewbird' of 1963 and a 1976 Ray Bradbury story about a talkative bird that had met Hemingway.

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'.