Who wrote the poem 'The Raven'?

The poem “The Raven” was written by Edgar Allan Poe. First published in January 1845, it is a narrative poem about a grieving speaker whose midnight visitor—a mysterious raven—repeatedly says “Nevermore.”

The speaker is mourning Lenore, a lost love, and the bird’s apparently simple repetition becomes increasingly tormenting. Poe builds the poem’s hypnotic effect through musical meter, internal rhyme, repetition, and a dark supernatural atmosphere. The raven’s perch on a bust of Pallas, the Greek goddess of wisdom, adds a classical detail that contrasts with the speaker’s emotional collapse.

Poe carefully promoted the poem’s dramatic and musical qualities, helping it become one of the best-known works in American literature. It first appeared in the New York Evening Mirror and was soon reprinted widely. Readers sometimes confuse Poe with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, another nineteenth-century American poet known for narrative verse. Poe, however, is the author of “The Raven,” as well as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”