Book Review #13

I'm going to make you read something this time. This is a poem by Edgar Allen Poe which is both fantastic to read alone or out loud around a campfire. It is parodied often, my favorite being the Simpson Pardoy (funny because someone taped this off the TV) in which Bart is the Raven and Homer is the Narrator.

Yes, The Raven, which you can and should read in full here. It is probably the post popular thing Poe ever wrote, and partly the coolest because he decidedly wrote the entire work in a specific and complicated rhyme scheme (partly why it is so much fun to say out loud).

(I found this image here)

I don't know if many of you knew this, but Poe had a pretty crappy life. He lost his family at a very young age, his work was often being stolen or he was unpaid for it, his wife died of consumption at a young age, and he was a big-time alcoholic and died in the streets. You can read about more of his life on wiki or go to the library and check out one of the many biographical books dedicated to Poe's life.I think it is safe to say that there were a lot of negative things in his life that influenced his writing.

Poe dealt with a lot of loss: family, wife, work, his own life. This sense of loss is what The Raven is all about. The narrator has just lost his love, Lenore, and can not deal with the loss. Through his questions to a raven a contradiction is revealed in which we find that the narrator wishes to simultaneously forget and remember his dear Lenore. I imagine that to be what Poe's life was like.

Oh, Lenore.

My friend Meghan looks like a Lenore: