Mar 6– “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe (1845)

 The James Earl Jones version gets the most love, but I'm partial the Christopher Lee.

Mar 6– “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe (1845)

Summary: A creepy raven crashes a dude's reading session and reminds him of his dead girlfriend. 

Commentary: I will, again, lament the choice of The Poetic Principle instead of Philosophy of Composition, especially since The Raven is the model text for it. 

Beyond that, it's "The Raven." You've probably already read it, and I don't know that I have any criticism to share that hasn't already been written 1000 times. 

I've enjoyed "The Raven" for as long as I remember. I've said before how I don't like most poems, but I do enjoy a lot of narrative/epic poetry, and I think Poe's "Unity of Effect" might be the simplest way to explain it. If the ideal for a piece of art (Poe specifies mostly poetry, but I think it's broadly applicable across mediums and genres) is to convey something, then it would be foolish to casually discard any aspect of that art without good reason. But that's exactly what "traditional" poetry does. You wouldn't (without a specific good reason) try to write a prose story without a plot or dialogue, anymore than you'd try to make a painting without any straight lines. Yet it's "normal" for poetry to almost completely remove plot, dialogue, and often severely turn down character, in the hopes that the artist will somehow convey something via pretty word choice alone.