The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

The Romantic Story, the Raven Surprising enough, the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe, the Raven, is a Romantic poem. Poe was a poet during the Romantic period, making him a romantic writer/poet. Actually he was a dark romantic poet, which makes a little more sense. The Raven typifies Romanticism in many ways, especially when it comes to their connection with God. Also Poe reveals many emotions throughout this poem. Romantics loved and cherished the natural world. They would rather be in the woods than in the city, and they also escaped to nature to find a more emotional and intellectual awakening.

When it comes to God and spiritual beliefs, they place faith in inner experience and the power of imagination, everything including humans is a reflection of the divine soul, physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual world, intuition allows people to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls. Dark Romantics explored the conflict between good and evil, the effects of guilt and sin, and the destructive underside of appearances. They also explored the madness in the human psyche as well as the humor of evil. The Raven mainly demonstrates connections to God.

The Romantics believe that their imagination is of great importance in your life and in the Raven the narrators imagination got the best of him and he put faith in his imagination in thinking that his dead wife came back to life. The narrator hears something very quietly tapping on his door. He finally decides to go and answer the door, “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,/Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;/But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,/And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore! /This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore! ‘/Merely this and nothing more” (Poe). In his imagination he saw Lenore, his wife who died and he believed it which shows the importance of the imagination. Romantics also believe that everything is a reflection of the divine soul and in the Raven the raven is a demon or a reflection of the devil. The narrator says “And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,” which shows that he believes the raven is a demon and that the raven will take his soul to hell when he dies (Poe). The main emotions that Poe stressed are morning, grief and sadness.

The narrator is morning the loss of his wife Lenore and he is depressed about it. The narrator was reading late at night to suppress the “sorrow for the lost Lenore” and he was sad and then he thought he saw her come back to life and come to the door (Poe). Poe also shows a few different emotions about how the narrator feels about the raven. He at first is cautious and even scared of the raven, especially since it could talk. He then became amused by the raven and develops a respect for the bird because he came in like he owned the place and started talking, well at least saying one word.

Then by the end of the poem Poe does not like the bird at all and describes him as an “ungainly fowl” (Poe). The Dark Romantic Poet does a wonderful job at typifying Romanticism and expressing many emotions through his poem, the Raven. He shows how much the Romantics valued the imagination by the narrator thinking his dead wife came back to life and also how everything is a reflection of the divine soul by the narrator thinking that the raven is a demon. Poe also mainly stresses how the narrator is morning the loss of his wife and how he is depressed. The Raven is a perfect example of a typical Romantic poem.