Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” For this spooky Halloween edition of StoryWeb, I’m featuring Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Everyone knows this haunting poem – but less well known is Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he explains how he quite methodically wrote the poem. Now “The Raven,” you have to understand, made a splash. Poe was a relatively unknown writer when he published the poem in January 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror and again the next month in The American Review. Almost overnight, he became a huge literary sensation, though he didn’t make much money from it or his other writing. Readers just couldn’t get over the macabre poem. Poe decided to ride the wave of the poem’s instant popularity, and a year later, he published “The Philosophy of Composition” in Graham’s Magazine. His account of how he wrote “The Raven” step by step is likely exaggerated – he makes it almost seem as if he was completing a paint-by-number artwork. Do this, do that – and v