The Raven Trivia
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100 free The Raven trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Poe's poem is one of the few that people can still quote without trying: a tapping at the door, a bird on a bust, and a single word that answers every question. It made Poe famous almost overnight and made him almost no money, and he followed it with an essay claiming he had built it as coldly as a mathematician. These 100 questions walk through the poem stanza by stanza, then widen out: the Dickens pet that inspired it, the metre Poe borrowed from an English poet, the critics who sneered, the illustrators who took it on, and the long afterlife that runs from a presidential fan to a Halloween cartoon and an NFL team. Most are pitched for a pub table or an English classroom, with a handful for people who know the essay as well as the poem. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a literature class, a Halloween quiz night or a Poe birthday.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Dickens pet raven, stuffed and now displayed in a Philadelphia library, helped inspire Poe's poem?
Grip
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.
Q 02Poe wrote The Raven while his young wife Virginia was slowly dying of which disease?
Tuberculosis
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.
Q 03In which city, where Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, is the poet buried?
Baltimore
Baltimore later called its NFL team the Ravens after his poem, the landslide choice of fans in a newspaper phone poll.
Q 04Which actor narrated The Simpsons' 1990 Treehouse of Horror adaptation of The Raven?
James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones narrated the segment, whose writing credit pairs Sam Simon with Edgar Allan Poe himself, dead since 1849.
Q 05In The Simpsons' first Treehouse of Horror, which family member plays the raven?
Bart
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.
Q 06Which Batman film villain quotes The Raven's line 'Take thy beak from out my heart' to Vicki Vale?
The Joker
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.
Q 07Which US president, sent a parody called 'The Pole-Cat' by a lawyer friend, went on to read and memorise The Raven?
Abraham Lincoln
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'.
Q 08Which actor played Poe hunting a serial killer who copies his stories in the 2012 thriller The Raven?
John Cusack
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.
Q 09Which future star played Peter Lorre's son in Roger Corman's 1963 comedy The Raven, alongside Boris Karloff?
Jack Nicholson
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.
Q 10At what hour does The Raven's narrator sit 'weak and weary' over old books when the tapping begins?
Midnight
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.
Q 11Through what does the raven finally enter the narrator's chamber after two rounds of tapping in Poe's poem?
The window
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.
Q 12What does The Raven's narrator find when he first opens his chamber door to the tapping?
Only darkness
Only darkness greets him — 'Darkness there and nothing more' — and when he whispers 'Lenore?' into it, an echo murmurs the name back.
Q 13What does the narrator ask the raven that prompts its very first 'Nevermore' in Poe's poem?
Its name
Q 21What did Poe's essay on The Raven call 'the most poetical topic in the world'?
The death of a beautiful woman
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.
Q 22According to Poe's essay, what made the word 'Nevermore' the ideal refrain for The Raven?
Its long o and r sounds
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.
Q 23Why, in Poe's own account, does the bird come indoors at all in The Raven?
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.
Q 14How does The Raven's narrator first rationalise the bird's one-word vocabulary?
Caught from an unhappy master
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.
Q 15Midway through The Raven, the narrator senses the air perfumed by a censer swung by which beings?
Seraphim
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.
Q 16In The Raven's final stanza, the narrator says his soul will be lifted 'nevermore' from what?
The bird's shadow on the floor
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.
Q 17The narrator says the raven came from 'the Night's Plutonian shore', casting it as a messenger from where?
The underworld
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'.
Q 18Poe's essay on writing the poem describes The Raven's unnamed narrator as which kind of person?
A student
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.
Q 19In his essay on writing The Raven, Poe says which talking bird first suggested itself before he settled on a raven?
A parrot
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.
Q 20Poe's essay on The Raven says every work of art should begin where?
At the end
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.
To shelter from a storm
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.
Q 24Poe's essay says he perched the raven on a pallid marble bust for what effect?
Contrast with the black bird
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'.
Q 25By The Raven's last line, Poe wrote, the bird should finally be seen as emblematic of what?
Never-ending remembrance
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'.
Q 26Which 1846 Poe essay claims to explain, step by step, how he wrote The Raven?
The Philosophy of Composition
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.
Q 27Poe's essay on The Raven sets 'a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art' — what is it?
A single sitting
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.
Q 28Which French composer said in 1931 that Poe's essay on writing The Raven had influenced him more than any treatise?
Maurice Ravel
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.
Q 29Poe borrowed The Raven's metre from whose 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship', then dedicated his 1845 collection to her?
Elizabeth Barrett
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.
Q 30Which Transcendentalist sage dismissed The Raven with the four words 'I see nothing in it'?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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'.