Text: Kathleen Brown, “ ‘Evermore!,’ a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Poe's “The Raven’,” April 24, 1995 (a paper written for a class on Media Rhetoric and Aesthetics)

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On April 8, 1995, the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and the University of Baltimore sponsored “Evermore!,” a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Poe's “The Raven.” About 150 people (the number was planned), teachers, students, and scholars, met in Poe's Publick House, a cafe/dining room in the basement of the U of B Law Library. Large round tables, each seating 10 people, were covered with black tablecloths and decorated with black feathers. Many of the old-timers in the Poe Society wore black capes. Aside from the fact that there was no air conditioning and the room soon became soporifically hot, the event was wonderful.

The morning began with a “round raven” reading of the poem. Readers had been chosen ahead of time, and the 18 stanzas were “muttered” or “cried” with all the expression befitting a poem of such, as the program notes remind us, “poetic, intellectual, cultural, symbolic — even mythic” value. When we get to “The Raven” in American Literature, I ask for an impromptu class reading and, except for the inevitable stumbling over “nepenthe,” all usually goes well. But I think that if I ask the students to prepare ahead, as the readers did here, the time will be even better spent.

Next came an hour of “reconnoitering and reiteration,” where those seated at each table had a chance to discuss what the poem meant to them, what their earliest memories of it were, etc. I was a discussion leader for quite a mixed group of folks — several poets, a Margaret Fuller scholar, a retired professor (suitably becaped), one of my students, and several teachers. One of

the teachers wanted to talk about whether the poem is a “good poem” (he clearly thinks it isn’t), and some of us reminded him that from a different critical perspective (he seemed to be a pretty strict New Critic), such as Reader-Response, for example, he would perhaps come to a different conclusion. This man was highly gratified later, however, when Christopher [page 2:] Butler, a visiting Oxford don, compared “The Raven” to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta — everybody knows the words but nobody will admit that the art is really any good — and John Irwin likened the rhyme to that in any number of Cole Porter songs. I wanted to talk about how the poem has been mediated through the years. One participant remembered seeing it satirized by Mad Magazine, and I pointed out that many children today no doubt have had their first exposure through “The Simpsons,” where Homer is the narrator, Marge is Lenore (we see her picture) and Bart is the raven who not only echoes “nevermore” but also “eat my shorts.” The discussion was lively, and we all took notes with our black-feather pens.

After 15 minutes of “feather ruffling,” during which everybody raced to find cold drinks, a panel of high school teachers gave a presentation called “Daring Students to Dream: Innovative Approaches to Poe and ‘The Raven’ in High School.” Two high school students from Baltimore City College joined their teacher and told us what they liked about Poe in general and “The Raven” in particular. Both students pointed out that teenagers love literature where the forces of evil, the dark forces of the universe, the powers of death and melancholy, triumph. Both had memorized the poem.

The second panel, “‘The Raven’: American Artifact and Icon in Changing Perspective,” followed. John T. Irwin from Johns Hopkins, John Rose from Goucher, and Christopher Butler from Oxford presented short, amusing papers on their responses to the poem. Professor Irwin, who has done considerable work on Poe but more recently has concentrated on Borges, told of taking Borges to the Poe House. Borges was blind, and in a second floor bedroom where he sat down to rest, someone in the group handed him the large, stuffed [page 3:] raven that sits in the window. Borges immediately began to recite the poem and would have recited it to completion if they had not urged him to continue with his itinerary. Professor Irwin also pointed out two problems in the poem. In stanza 13, lines 3 and 4 read, “This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining / On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er.” How, he asked, can the lamp-light shine on the cushion's lining? Here, the need for rhyme obviously dictated the content, albeit nonsensically.* The second problem is in the last stanza. If the Raven “still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above [the] chamber door / And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor,” then where is this lamp? Over the door behind him? The image is realistically impossible. Professor Irwin ended his presentation by reading three poems: Borges's favorite, “A Dream Within a Dream,” Crane's favorite, “To Helen,” and his own favorite, “Silence.”

Professor Butler talked about the “weird ambivalence” in the poem in terms of just how we are to interpret this bird — is it a “thing of evil” or a guardian angel? He also pointed out how strange it is that the narrator calls the bird “Sir” or “Madam.” Actually in stanza 4, the narrator does not yet know that it is a raven at the door, but no one called Professor Butler on this error. He kept referring to the poem as “your poem,” meaning that it belongs to Americans, not to the British, and he compared it to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Nonetheless, his incredibly likeable personality (very debonair, very good at repartee) made us all forgive him.

John Rose is a philosopher and so he could begin his talk by denying that [page 4:] he knows anything at all about poetry. Of course he proceeded to eloquently deconstruct the poem by pointing out its “structural reversals” — the narrator expects to find someone and there's no one; he expects to find meaning and there is none; he expects not to find meaning and he finds some; the word “nevermore” denies future occurrences but guarantees a future. Also, the narrator claims that Lenore shall be “Nameless here for evermore” and yet he goes on to name her 8 times, a strategy that is akin to trying to remember to forget. He concluded by likening the idea of the poem to Nietzsche's “eternal recurrence of the same,” where the eternal return can be either a demon or a blessing.

By now it was 1:00 (we had been going strong since 9 a.m.), and it was time for the “Relaxed Reception and a Poetic Reckoning: Rating the Raven.” Tony Tsendeas, a Poe imitator, dressed in full Poe garb, read “The Raven” as we imagined Poe himself would have read it. Then, we were treated to a video. Scrolling up a black screen were the words (in white) of famous people who had addressed themselves to Poe and his poem. I didn’t count them, but I would guess that Neil Kleinman, the Director for the Institute for Language, Technology, and Publications Design at U of B, had included 30-40 samples. For example, we saw and heard through voice-over the words of Auden — “I myself cannot remember hearing any poetry before hearing ‘The Raven’ and ‘The Bells’; and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ was one of the first short stories I ever read” and Yeats — “I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound. The rest of him seems to me vulgar and commonplace, and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and ‘The Raven’ do not seem to me to have permanent literary value of any kind.” While these quotations were scrolling up, the words to “The Raven,” in larger [page 6:] and dimmer print, were silently traveling across the bottom of the screen, from left to right. Although there was no music and no Images were superimposed, the video definitely worked — the audience laughed out loud sometimes and smiled or nodded at other times. The success of this starkness caused me to rethink my garbing video's beginning, where I had originally laid in images from a film version of “Gawain” behind the words of the poem. After I saw the “Rating the Raven” video, it seemed to me that these images would prevent the audience from paying attention to the words, forming Images in their minds, and noticing the correlations between the modern English voice-over and the middle English on the screen. Knowing that there would not be time to make yet another change, I removed the images.

At 1:30 we went upstairs to the lobby of the Law Library where a large cake was being served. We toasted Poe (Tony Tsendeas acted as stand-in) with fruit juice, I bought my student (Beth) and my son some T-shirts to commemorate the occasion, and then Beth and I adjourned to a nearby bar for a real toast and some lunch. She had never been to anything at all like this before, and her delight made it a particularly lovely day.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 3:]

*Several of my sofa cushions have an embroidered side and a plain side. Could it be that in the 19th century people rested their heads on the plain side-the “lining” side-in order to save the “good” side for show?