Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” was published in the New York Evening Mirror on this day in 1845. The poem was an immediate popular hit, and reprinted in a handful of publications across the country. The new fame brought many invitations, and until his death in 1849, Poe enjoyed celebrity status in the lecture halls and drawing rooms. As Twain in his last years would wear only white, Poe took to four-season black. Numerous letters and journal entries and newspaper reports from the time refer to the “electrifying” impression he made when he turned the lamps down low, chose a shadowy corner, and began: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary….”
The poem, like all things Poe, attracted the parodists. In his “Fable for Critics” (1848), James Russell Lowell attempts to score a triple-hit, taking aim at the idea that Poe had stolen his raven from Dickens, had a grandiloquent manner, and had a weakness for rhythm:
"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common-sense damn metres…."
Source:
http://goo.gl/VFMvDz
