Which American poet wrote 'The Raven'?

The American poet who wrote “The Raven” was Edgar Allan Poe. His narrative poem first appeared in January 1845 and became the work most closely associated with Poe during his lifetime.

The poem follows a grieving narrator whose midnight solitude is interrupted by a mysterious raven. The bird repeatedly answers his questions with “Nevermore,” intensifying his despair over the death of Lenore. Poe used internal rhyme, alliteration, a highly regular musical pattern, and supernatural imagery to create the poem’s hypnotic atmosphere.

Poe later described his method of composition in the 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” presenting the poem as a carefully engineered work rather than a purely spontaneous outpouring. A common mix-up is to treat the raven as the narrator or assume that “Lenore” is a documented biography of Poe’s wife; the poem is a crafted literary fiction, although grief and loss recur throughout Poe’s writing.