SOURCE: Freedman, William. “Poe's ‘Raven’: The Word That Is an Answer ‘Nevermore.’” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History Theory, Interpretation 31, no. 1, 2 (1998): 23-31.

In the following essay, Freedman conducts an analysis of structure and symbolism in “The Raven.”

In an otherwise uninspired 1845 notice of “The Raven” and Other Poems, the anonymous reviewer for the Broadway Journal wisely observes that “the impression of a very studied effect is always uppermost after reading [Poe]. And you have to study him to understand him.”¹ It seems a safe enough observation, but most recent criticism of Poe's poetry and fiction has arrived at the rather different conclusion that you have to study Poe to realize that in the end you cannot understand him—or, more precisely, that to understand him properly you must recognize that his poems and tales are perversely or meaningfully resistant to coherent interpretation. “The Raven,” which I will fix on...