Posted on 10/15/2015 5:11:32 PM PDT by Mr. K
Nevermore
I once taught a class of 5th graders as a substitute.
For some reason, we were discussing “The Raven”. I was a bit shocked that none of them were familiar with it. I told them I would read it to them but did not have a copy.
One of the students suggested that the library would have it. I told him to go see. He came back with a book of poems almost immediately.
I read it to them, trying to do so in a dramatic way.
When I finished, to my surprise, the whole class began applauding. They really liked it.
The Raven.
I supposed it’s a poem.
Maybe there’s a better classification.
Whatever.
Yes, whatever.
It’s the best of all time, whatever we call it.
bump
My favorite by Omni. It’s put to song. Probably close to what was in his mind when he wrote it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCF2pson54s
We read that in high school. - Midnight dreary. Weak and
weary. Volume of forgotten lore. Quoth the raven -
Nevermore! - If a raven shows up out here, the cat’ll
git him for her supper. . or else the buzzards.
Related trivia:
(From:
“A Literary Meeting:
Dickens and Poe in Philadelphia”
By Herb Moskovitz
http://charlesdickenspage.com/dickens_and_poe.html)
“in 1841 Poe was reading Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens.
“As was typical of Dickens’s works, the novel was published in installments. Barnaby Rudge has a double murder mystery as a central plot point and the editor of the Saturday Evening Post challenged Poe as the creator of the detective story, as well as an expert cryptogram solver, to solve the murder mystery when less than a fifth of the book had been published. Poe’s solution, which was basically correct, was published in the Post on May 1, 1841. Dickens was shown Poe’s solution before he had finished writing the end of the novel and said, “He must be possessed of the devil.”
...
“Dickens (whose own name means “devil”) did have a devilish character in Barnaby Rudge [finished in1842]. Barnaby is a simpleton who owns a pet raven named Grip. Dickens himself got a raven to study, so he would portray the fictional raven properly. Dickens also named the real raven Grip and the phrases the fictional Grip said were based on what the real Grip said. One of his favorite expressions was, “I’m a devil, I’m a devil.”
...
“Despite these successes, Poe would not become a household name until the publication of The Raven in 1845 when he was living in New York.
“Poe scholars almost universally agree that Dickens’s Grip was a major inspiration for Poe. When reviewing Barnaby Rudge for Graham’s Magazine Poe said, “the raven . . . intensely amusing as it is, might have been made, more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic Barnaby. Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.”
“There is another clue that Poe was influenced by Dickens. At the end of chapter five of Barnaby Rudge, there is a noise and Varden, thinking it was Grip, says,(Varden): “What was that – him tapping at the door?” The response is, (Barnaby’s mother) “’Tis someone knocking softly at the shutter.”
“James Russell Lowell saw the connection when he wrote in a poem about poets:
“There comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”
...
“A short story by Dickens in Master Humphrey’s Clock is pretty much the same story as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “The Black Cat.” “A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second” [by Dickens] has the narrator telling us of his being unsettled by the gaze of his nephew, his killing the child and burying the body in his garden and then inviting some of the soldiers looking for the child to sit with him, their chairs unknowingly over the grave. And while they are there similar events lead to the discovery of the body. Poe wrote a very positive review of this story and said of it, “a paper of remarkable Power, truly original in conception, and worked out with great ability.”
“Poe told Frederick W. Thomas that the ultimate inspiration for “The Bells” was Dickens’s Christmas story, The Chimes. Scholars have demonstrated how Dickens’s motifs and repetitions are similar to parts of Poe’s poem, as well as similar rhetorical and repetitive structure, even some grotesque elements are seen in stanzas 3 and 4.”
Very Intersting!
Thank you for that
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