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“The Raven” is not a tragedy in the conventional sense, but the drama of the poem possesses a genuinely tragic element. The speaker does not turn away from the horrifying void.

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Indeed, the conclusion of “The Raven” stands as one of the most harrowing moments in American poetry—a vision of psychological, emotional, and spiritual paralysis and despair. The gothic decor and high rhetoric do not disguise the emotional authenticity of the final tableau. As Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarméë, and the other Symbolists understood, “The Raven” is the signature work of un poête maudit, “a cursed poet.” They honored Poe as a brilliant artist who was destroyed by his very gifts of heightened perception. Like its author, the poem's protagonist is an aesthete and intellectual whose mental gifts provide no protection against tragedy. The depth of his love for the lost Lenore only makes his suffering more intense and enduring.

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The linear structure of the poem corresponds to the poet's desire to frame the poem in a plot, to close it within the principles of compositional unity but it is also a deliberate device used for the creation of the required mood

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The careful precision and ingenuity of the design express a desire for control over the material of language and planning equal to that of the architect with a vision rather than a simple craft of a builder. The choice of the bird and setting, the growth of suspense in the narrative line of the poem, the menacing irrevocability of the refrain and strong sonorous sounds stress the importance of emotion and point to the mind's irrational powers.

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Despite its compositional lavishness, the poem nevertheless tells its story very successfully and equally well serves Poe's poetic purpose.

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However, though Poe tells us explicitly, in 'The Raven,' the reveries played a part in the poem's composition, we are not justified in immediately accepting this statement to the exclusion of the accounts he gives us elsewhere. In some way or other the matter must be put to the only test we are able to apply--Which of all the contrasting theories of the composition of 'The Raven' can be supported by the evidence of the poem itself?

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However, just like in "The Raven", the mixture of the colors created by the imagination is threatened by the encroachment of the menacing outer darkness bringing fear, enhanced further by the cry of the birds; in the first case--the raven; in the latter-

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In "The Raven", the romantic poet seeks a total disjunction between the real and the imagined world

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The collocation of 'violet' and 'velvet' is not peculiar to 'The Raven.' It should be noted here that for Poe colours appear to have a great deal of meaning: evidence of this is to be found scattered through all his work, though especially in 'The Philosophy of Furniture' and 'The Masque of the Red Death.

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Its croakings should through repetition have become more and more convincing, their meaning more and more definite--as the white hairs on the breast of the black cat6shaped themselves into the form of a gallows. The raven, too, as a feeder on carrion, is naturally associated with death, and this association is far more satisfactory than that which Poe has to establish in the story between the dead woman and the cat, by means of an event which strains a reader's credulity.

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The 'beautiful, dead woman' is mentioned for the first time in 'The Raven,' in the second stanza, when Poe speaks of 'sorrow for the lost Lenore.' In the fifth stanza, too, he describes himself as whispering the word 'Lenore' and hearing it repeated as an echo in the silent room. But in these five stanzas, as in others which follow, there is no hint of the process described as 'linking fancy unto fancy.' Rather, this section of the poem is the careful and deliberate, detailed description of the stage upon which the drama will presently unfold itself ... and this drama is the confrontation of the poet with the raven.

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'Linking fancy unto fancy, thinking ...' would be difficult to better as a description of reverie, day-dreaming, or 'undirected thinking.' We know that Poe was given to reveries, and there is reason to believe that in passive mental processes his stories and poems were incubated, however much they may have been worked over subsequently.

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Poe has himself pointed out to us, in his tales of ratiocination, that the situation which presents a number of bizarre characters to us is really more simple of solution than another which has no outstanding characters. If the statement be true, as within limits it undoubtedly is, the asthetic problems presented by Poe's writings should be more easy of solution than those which are offered by the work of Longfellow or Tennyson