Quoth The Raven - Poe Poetry Blog

One of the ambitious aims of this blog is to classify the 70 known poems of Edgar Allan Poe: first into three rough “classes”—call them bronze, silver and gold—to distinguish minor poems, above-average poems, and world-class poems; second, to rank every single poem in order, from least to best—though this poem-by-poem ranking is more subjective. [SILVER] [GOLD] We begin today with the “Class III” poems, the bottom 25, which constitute lesser known, lesser developed—and, in some case, fragmentary or incomplete—offerings. The links to the text are here thanks to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, who has put these all online. 70. “Poetry” It seems very fitting to begin with the earliest known poetic offering by Poe, written when he was just fifteen years old, it is just a couplet: “ Last night, with many cares & toils oppress’d/Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest ,” wrote the young Poe. Sit back and settle in for the ride! 69. “Spiritual Song” This completely f

“Lo! where lies/(Her casement open to the skies)/Irene, with her Destinies!” “The Triumph of Death, or the Three Fates” (ca. 1510-1520) Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sleeper” (1841) , is sort of the horror take on the legend of Sleeping Beauty. Claimed to be derived from such wide-ranging works as Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Cristabel” (1800) , William Rufus’ “Oh Lady Love, Awake!” (1826) , and John Wilson’s “Edderline’s Dream” (1829) , the poem blends Poe’s own interest in the death of a beautiful woman with folkloric and mythological elements that Poe appropriates and even appears to have some fun with in this dark humor-laced, macabre nocturne . [ 4 Listen to an audio of me reciting the poem at the bottom of this post ] The poem has three distinct movements, starting with opening verses that have been appropriately called a ‘Song of the Moon.’ If ever a poem had an “establishing shot” (in cinema, the first view of a scene, which explains its setting

The Entrance to a Wood , by Robert Walter Weir, 1836 The knock on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” (1847) was summed up by Aldous Huxley, who called it “a carapace of jeweled sound”—in other words a beautiful and ornate thing to hear, but a collection of words that do not convey a substantial message or meaning.   Huxley was right that the poem is a formidable construction of mesmerizing sound, but I strongly disagree that it’s lacking substance. The point of the poem is twofold: first, the “carapace” is important, and second the allegorical elements of the poem, including the mythical references and imagery, tell us a vivid and moving narrative. With respect to the sonic components of the poem, I include in this post a first for this blog: I have recorded myself reciting the poem, because it was written to be recited. You can play the sound file at the foot of this post. The poem was commissioned from Poe with the intention that he produce something with oratorical interest, and s

Photo Credit: Trip Advisor. Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage , built around the turn of the 19th Century and occupied by the American poet in the “lonesome latter years” of his life when its Fordham Manor locale was a bucolic corner in the periphery of New York, sits today in a gritty, predominantly African-American and Latino inner city area of the Bronx, surrounded by concrete playgrounds and housing projects. Some quick stats reveal the character of the neighborhood it’s now in: the median household income hovers over $30,000/year, 97% of residents rent (only 3% own), it has a high population density, with higher crime and incarceration rates than the rest of the city. In short, it may seem to the locals that the same tornado that picked up Dorothy’s house and dropped it in the land of Oz also picked up the Poe cottage and left it here. Poe apparently predicted that his neighborhood as he knew it would not last, and would eventually become unrecognizable. But I’d like to respond