SOURCE: Wardrop, Daneen. “Quoting the Signifier ‘Nevermore’: Fort! Da!, Pallas, and Desire in Language.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 44, no. 4 (1998): 274-99.

In the following essay, Wardrop offers a critical examination of symbols and language in “The Raven.”

We twentieth-century American readers have long seen Edgar Allan Poe's “Raven” as glumly recounting one more variation on his reaction to the death of a beautiful woman. There has endured, however, a Poe who offers in the poem a dramatic and exciting scenario of the desire that occurs in language formation. Perhaps modern scorn partly can be traced to an overstrong focus on the mathematician in Poe, the algebraic poet in “The Philosophy of Composition” who dryly proffers the metrical scaffolding of “The Raven,” as if a computer had composed it. Such (purported) calculation is anathema to the American sense of individual passion and spontaneity and the romantic tradition...