SOURCE: Jones, Joseph. “‘The Raven’ and ‘The Raven’: Another Source of Poe's Poem.” American Literature 30, no. 2 (May 1958): 185-93.

In the following essay, Jones argues that “The Raven; or The Power of Conscience,” a poem that appeared in 1839, may have been an inspiration for Poe's similarly titled poem of 1945.

Never will critics and scholars, very likely, be able to agree on the relative amounts of fact and fancy in “The Philosophy of Composition.” Most believe that at least some fancy is involved, perhaps with a conscious intention of mystifying the reader. On one side of the case we are obliged to assume that the author deliberately misrepresented his own mental processes, merely to gain prestige or notoriety; on the other, that he selected and marshaled his recollections of these processes, as on a stage, probably with much the same eye to a dramatic effect upon the reader but without...