The lost love in Edgar Allan Poe's poem “The Raven” is Lenore.
The poem's unnamed narrator is mourning Lenore when a raven enters his chamber on a bleak December night. The bird perches above the door and repeatedly answers the narrator's questions with “Nevermore,” turning his grief into an increasingly intense psychological confrontation.
Lenore is presented as the narrator's dead beloved, but Poe gives few biographical details about her. Her identity is best understood as part of the poem's symbolic world of bereavement, memory and the inability to escape loss. Poe also used the name Lenore in a separate poem, which can make the two works seem more directly connected than the text establishes.
Readers sometimes confuse Lenore with Annabel Lee, another lost woman in Poe's poetry. Annabel Lee belongs to the poem of that name, while Lenore is the beloved remembered by the narrator in “The Raven,” first published in 1845.