"The Raven" and "The Raven": Another Source of Poe's Poem

Abstract

EVER WILL CRITICS and scholars, very likely, be able to agree on the relative amounts of fact and fancy in The Philosophy of Composition. Most believe that at least some fancy is involved, perhaps with a conscious intention of mystifying the reader. On one side of the case we are obliged to assume that the author deliberately misrepresented his own mental processes, merely to gain prestige or notoriety; on the other, that he selected and marshaled his recollections of these processes, as on a stage, probably with much the same eye to a dramatic effect upon the reader but without wilful distortion or disarrangement. Is there any plausible ground at all for assuming that the main lines of development for The Raven were correctly described, and that the account has been merely oversystematized and streamlined? With Poe, we can never be sure. More information, however, about possible sources for The Raven might help us a little with this puzzling question. British inspiration for The Raven has long been taken for granted. Poe read and reviewed (in I841) Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, in which a pet raven figures prominently, and Lowell's couplet in A Fable for Critics has lent continuing sanction to Dickens as primary source: