In what year was 'The Raven' first published?

“The Raven” was first published in 1845. Its earliest appearance was an advance copy in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845, making that year the standard answer.

The poem tells of a grieving narrator visited at midnight by a raven that repeatedly says “Nevermore.” Its musical rhythm, internal rhyme, dark imagery, and supernatural mood quickly made it Poe’s most famous poem. The speaker mourns Lenore, a lost love, while the bird’s repeated word seems to confirm that his sorrow will never end.

Publication history can cause confusion because “The Raven” appeared in more than one periodical during 1845. The American Review printed it in a February issue under the pseudonym “Quarles,” while the Evening Mirror published the earlier advance copy under Poe’s name. Later that year, Wiley and Putnam included it in the collection “The Raven and Other Poems.”

Poe later described the poem’s construction in his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition.” He claimed to have built it logically, though scholars debate how literally that account should be taken. The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in Charles Dickens’s novel “Barnaby Rudge.”