The Raven, by Quarles

The story as it is told

There are two popular ways of telling how "The Raven" got written, and they sit about as far apart as two stories can.

In the first, Poe is broke and grieving, and the poem pours out of him in a fever. He is so sure of it that he stops a friend, William Ross Wallace, and says: "Wallace, I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written." He reads it aloud in his best way, and when Wallace says, "Poe, they are fine; uncommonly fine," Poe answers with contempt: "Fine? Is that all you can say for this poem?" He sells it for a pittance, about $9, to the American Review, where its editor, George Colton, reads it aloud in his ramshackle Nassau Street office and, at the last refrain, declares it amazing. It makes everyone else rich.

In the second, which comes from Poe himself, there is no fever at all. In his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition" he says he built the poem like a machine, so that "no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition" and the work proceeded "with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem." He tells how he looked for a refrain and "Nevermore" was "the very first which presented itself," how he judged "the death, then, of a beautiful woman" to be "the most poetical topic in the world," how he placed the lover in "a chamber rendered sacred to him by memories of her who had frequented it," and how he "made the night tempestuous, first, to account for the Raven's seeking admission." Many readers have taken that as a confession of how it was written, though some critics read the essay as partly a performance, which is an interpretation and not a fact.

What we can confirm

The poem's first appearance, on Wednesday, January 29, 1845, was on page 4 of the Evening Mirror, a New York daily, which said it was "permitted to copy (in advance of publication) from the 2d No. of the American Review, the following remarkable poem by EDGAR POE," and called it "the most effective single example of 'fugitive poetry' ever published in this country." The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore notes that the introduction is presumed to be by Poe's friend Nathaniel Parker Willis, who ran the paper and on whose staff Poe then worked, according to The Poe Log.

The magazine it was copied from, the American Review for February 1845, printed the poem as "THE RAVEN, BY [blank] QUARLES" (a printed dash stands where a first name would go), with an editor's note by George H. Colton praising the "unique rhyming." So the newspaper copy carried Poe's name, while the magazine that bought the poem gave it a pen name.

Which printing is technically first is an open question. The Poe Society points out that magazines of the time were often printed and sent out a week or more ahead of their cover month, and that a printed notice bound into a Philadelphia copy promised the February American Review "early in January." Its conclusion is that the Mirror may have come out just before the magazine, or that the magazine may already have been on the street by mid-January.

The Poe Log records that the poem was "an immediate sensation, reprinted by journals throughout the country and followed by numerous parodies," and that with it Poe "becomes a popular celebrity." Wiley and Putnam published The Raven and Other Poems on November 19, 1845.

As for the money, the Poe Society's page on Poe's earnings lists $9.00 for "The Raven" as an estimate attributed to Ostrom (spelled "Ostron" on the page; presumably the Poe scholar John Ward Ostrom, not confirmed). The same page records that, according to Mabbott, family tradition held that Poe received $15, that R. H. Stoddard wrote in 1877 that it was $10, based on the publisher's recollection, and that Thomas Dunn English said in 1896 that it was $30. No receipt is cited. Poe's own account of how he wrote the poem came 14 months after publication, in Graham's Magazine for April 1846.

What the record supports is a poem by Poe, sold to a new magazine that printed it under the name "Quarles," given his name by a friendly newspaper on January 29, 1845, and paid for at somewhere between $9 and $30 by different later accounts, with the $9 an estimate.

The facts

• Evening Mirror, Jan 29, 1845, vol. 1, no. 97, p. 4, col. 1; Willis-attributed intro quoted above; first-printing question. Poe Society, eapoe.org
• Jan 29 Mirror printing; Feb American Review byline "QUARLES" with Colton's note; reprints and parodies; Poe a celebrity; The Raven and Other Poems Nov 19, 1845; Poe on Willis's Mirror staff until late Feb 1845. The Poe Log (Thomas and Jackson, 1987), ch. 8, Poe Society, eapoe.org
• The Jan 29 Mirror issue item list ("technically, the first printing"). Poe Society, Poe's writings in the Evening Mirror, eapoe.org
• Payment: $9 (Ostrom's estimate, per the page), $15 (family tradition, Mabbott), $10 (Stoddard 1877), $30 (English 1896). Poe Society, Poe and money, eapoe.org
• "Philosophy of Composition," Graham's Magazine, vol. 28, no. 4, April 1846, pp. 163 to 167; quotes above. Poe Society, eapoe.org

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