This is what it said in Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature about The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe…
“…published in 1845 and collected in The Raven and Other Poems the same year. Poe achieved instant national fame with the publication of this melancholy evocation of lost love.
“On a stormy December midnight, a grieving student is visited by a raven who speaks but one word, ‘Nevermore.’ As the student laments his lost love Lenore, the raven’s insistent repetition of the word becomes an increasingly harrowing response to the student’s own fears and longings.
“Poe’s 1846 essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ describes his careful crafting of the poem.”
Edgar Allan Poe is buried in Westminster Presbyterian Cemetery at Fayette and Greene Streets in Baltimore alongside some rather curious company. Fifteen wartime generals are also interred there with him.
An American writer, Tom Tiede, in a newspaper article that was published by the Sun in the late 1970s, told of how one Civil War commander is said to sit on his stone and bemoans the fact that he killed so many Confederate countrymen.
Tiede describes the place in appropriate Hallowe’en fashion: “The church itself is spooky enough. It was built in the 1840s from red brick and is bounded by a high wall. Eventually, the wall gives way to an iron fence, the gates of which bang in the wind.”
Tom Tiede says that Poe’s grave is near an open gate, and people believe that his tortured soul rises from the tomb after sundown and walks between the stones and over-grown graves from time to time, even on Hallowe’en.
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Don Jackson
