Poe's "The Raven" Takes Flight
On this day · 29 January 1845
A single gloomy poem about a talking bird turned a struggling critic into America's most famous writer overnight.
On January 29, 1845, the New York Evening Mirror ran a poem credited to Edgar Allan Poe: a brooding, hypnotic ballad about a grieving man and a bird that answers every question with one word, “Nevermore.” The piece had been slated for the February 1845 American Review, but the Mirror printed it first as an advance copy, and the effect was immediate.
“On January 29, 1845, American author Edgar Allan Poe’s famously eerie poem ‘The Raven’ was published.”
Poe was nearly 36 and had spent years scraping by as an editor and critic. Almost overnight, “The Raven” made his name a household word across the United States and England, recited, parodied, and reprinted everywhere.
The fame, however, paid little. Poe reportedly earned only a tiny sum for the poem, and he died poor just four years later in 1849. Yet his musical, melancholy verse endured, cementing him as a founding voice of American Gothic literature and one of the most quoted poets in the language.
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