To many, Poe’s “The Raven” is the merely the most hackneyed poem in the English language. It has been parodied by The Simpsons and The Animaniacs, and Christopher Walken can be heard reciting it against a background of rain, thunder, and howling wind on YouTube.  In the English-speaking world, it has become synonymous with gothic cheapness.  The general perception of Poe as a 19th Century Stephen King was lately exemplified by the new film The Raven, in which Poe (John Cusack) must track down a murderer who is committing copycat crimes based on his stories.

The poem’s popularity shows no sign of abating.  And yet the deep-seated resistance to “The Raven” among English-speaking critics, combined with its excessive familiarity, keep us Americans from appreciating it at its true worth.  What makes “The Raven” a great poem is not its plot and its obvious symbolism, but the sheer beauty of its craftsmanship.  Its intricate sound effects are especially striking: Every single one of its eighteen stanzas is dominated by the “ore” sound (as in “Nevermore”), and it abounds in alliteration (“Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before.”)  Its heavy use of repetition (“From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore / For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore”) reflects the monotony of the speaker’s mournful, hopeless yearning.  Poe’s words are building blocks in a vast edifice of sound; he chooses words for their sonic qualities rather than their literal meaning, a technique that was relatively new in English poetry, and which was later adopted by the French and Russian symbolists who admired him so much

At home, the poem’s enormous popularity was instantaneous.  It made Poe, a beleaguered obscurity, into a household name, though it failed to make him wealthy.  “The Raven” also garnered some critical praise: Nathaniel Parker Willis, editor of the highbrow Evening Mirror — the first paper to publish the poem, in 1845, under Poe’s real name rather than a pseudonym — considered it “unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift.”  But even critics who liked the poem generally did not go this far, and not all critics liked it.  The Harbinger found the poem studied; Hunt’s Merchant Magazine thought it clever but facile; and The Knickerbocker lambasted it for total lack of substance, describing Poe’s poetry as “not a purpose, but a passion.”  Critics have flung the “beautiful but empty” charge at Poe’s work as incessantly as his raven utters “Nevermore.”

Whatever reputation Poe had while alive began to decline after his death in 1849.  Shortly after he died, a maligningobituary signed “Ludwig” appeared in the New York Tribune.  The piece ascribed the dark, morbid character of Poe’s work to the writer’s own supposedly psychotic nature: “He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers for the happiness of those who at that moment were objects of his idolatry, but never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned.”  This extravagant piece of caricature was the work of the evocatively named Rufus Griswold, a critic who bore a grudge against Poe and who had dedicated himself to the destruction of his enemy’s reputation.  Much of Griswold’s screed was later proven false, but the idea that Poe’s work was excessively morbid and perverse managed to stick.

And yet, not all 19th Century readers saw “The Raven” as a facile piece of tinsel.  Charles Baudelaire, whose literary credentials are now beyond dispute, claimed to offer morning prayers to God and Edgar Poe.  In Poe’s work, Baudelaire saw a legitimate and tragic worldview rather than the lurid ravings of a psychotic.  In his introduction to the French edition of “The Raven,” Baudelaire wrote, “It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible.”

Baudelaire’s Poe translations paved the way for a Poe cult in Europe that lasted well into the 20th Century.  Poe was taken up by Baudelaire’s disciples Mallarmé and Valéry, and his flair for sound effects was not lost on classical composers.  In his choral setting of “The Bells,”Rachmaninov’s ceaseless repetition of phrases exactly mirrors the effects of the poem; Ravel claimed to be more influenced by Poe than by any musician.  

In the English-speaking world, though, Poe’s reputation as a peddler of sensationalist shockers has never fully abated.  In his long essay “Inescapable Poe,” published in 1984, Harold Bloom attempted to toss Poe out of the canon, claiming, “Poe induced nasty and repetitious nightmares that linger even now” and warning his readers that “Poe’s survival raises perpetually the issue whether literary merit and canonical status go together.”  As he acknowledged in the essay itself, Poe was clearly here to stay by 1984.  But the very fact that such a prominent critic would mount an all-out assault on Poe indicated the relative fragility of the poet’s reputation in his own country.  For the American reader, Poe is merely the fodder for films like The Raven. One would never guess that the protagonist of The Raven was Baudelaire’s hero.