The Raven and Its Analysis of Edgar Allen Poe as an Anti-Transcendentalism

Analysis ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe as an anti-transcendentalism

Accordingly, Edgar Allan Poe considered by many critics as one famous Anti-Transcendentalist for his prevalence of human depravity through all his works (RTA). However, the works of him are noticeably coherent with his personal aesthetic beliefs and judgments. The thematic tales of Poe are commonly connected with fear and terror where they present the elemental aspects and emergence of ‘American Gothicism’.

“The Raven” is opening with an exhaled of ‘Ah’ and agitated emotions of the narrator on a cruel day of December, with the bitter coldness, and lifeless isolated house, where the atmosphere is so dark death-like and so horrifying. Poe starts:

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow; – vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Lenore –

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore –

Nameless here for evermore. 

It is assumed that the narrator to be a scholar, who might be Edgar Allen Poe himself. The narrator is sitting alone at this night lamenting and trying to read volumes alone forgetting the death of love the gloominess of love the struggle between remembrance of love and forgetting. Here, he is trying to forget to deny living, as nothing happened to overwhelm oneself with books and reading to pass the time to take the mind of problems. As the Poetic tale continues the landscape quickly broadens with fear and uncertainty in where the poet in the prison catastrophic richly furniture room heard a gentle tapping on his chamber door. Filled with excitement and fear, the poet decided to open the door as the essayist Dana Gioia assumed:

He thinks at first it is a late night visitor, but opening the door, he finds only “Darkness there, and nothing more.” (This initial glimpse into black nothingness will prove prophetic of his ultimate fate.) Half afraid, half wishful, the speaker whispers the name of his dead lover. Irrationally he hopes the visitor is her ghost. There comes no reply, however, except the echo of his voice. Soon the tapping resumes-now at his window, Opening the shutter, he finds a Raven. 

The next stanza hold up more anti-transcendental portions shown clearly on the Gothic atmosphere, and once the narrator began to have a hysteric thought about his love; he is so moved by remembering her, his Lenore! Poe wrote:

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!’

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!’

Merely this and nothing more.  

He whispered her name he is wishing that the late mid-night visitor will be his Lenore. He fears he wonders and he still loves. He is living in hopes and dreams of everlasting love. The Raven the omen of bad things or the angel from heaven might be seeking shelter from the coldness of winter into the room with the dead amber. Yet, the Raven might represent nothing maybe it is all inside the mind of the narrator the images he seeks or desire the most.

The narrator now is in a situation that can’t be described he is in a state of hysteric to madness. He first thought the bird as a messenger from heaven as a ghost of his passed lover as a joyous memory later in the second half of the poems his mind swung completely as he now think of the eternal vision of nothingness or as bad omen. Once again on what Dana Gioia supposed:

A devil sent to claim the speaker for the underworld. The speaker’s dawning awareness of his hellish doom is reflected in the poem’s changing refrain, which begins as “nothing more” and “Evermore,” but darkens once the bird speaks his prophetic “Nevermore” By the poem’s last line, the narrator has accepted the bird’s dire prophecy. Echoing his shadowy tormentor, he declares his soul “Shall be lifted-nevermore.”  

 The poem’s weakness, though, is that the bald fact of death is not used to generate any new understanding. Grief is an honest, basic response to death, but Poe does not take it anywhere. The speaker does not think about his own death or life, nor about what his time with Lenore was like or whether her life was full and significant in the short time she did have: he just grieves and grieves and grieves. It is a characteristic of Romanticism, the literary movement that Poe is associated with, to stretch a human emotion beyond the shape that we are familiar with in real life: beauties are stunning and unforgettable beauties, suffering is agony, and grief is uncontrollable. Death is one of the few things that cannot be fixed or reversed, and the enormity of it is therefore entirely appropriate for the exaggerated emotions in Poe’s work.

He was the bird’s

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster

Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore

Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore

Of ‘Never-nevermore.'”

A harsh master treated the bird just like his harsh experiences deprived Poe of all faith in man or woman. It might suggest that he was a hard worker and not being appreciated by society and getting low wages and money for his great works. On the other hand some critic like Dave Smith said that:

Poe is the narrator himself the lonely gloomy figure who permits the witness to Some close to his creature and yet keep safe, a glimpsed but not engaged threat. Still, having summoned the raven, Poe cannot so easily deny or repress it: he tells us the bird sits in the forever of that last stanza, a curse neither expiated nor escaped. Poe loved women who died, often violently, diseased. His mother went first; he was two and an orphan. He was taken in and raised as ward of John Allan and his wife Frances, a sickly woman who would die on him, but first there would be Jane Standard, on whom he had a fourteen-year-old’s crush. She was thirty-one when she died insane. Poe suffered the death of three women before he finished being a moody teenaged boy. 

To sum up, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the major influences of Dark Romanticism. As an anti-transcendentalist he not only addressed the central question of nineteenth-century romantic symbolism, or that of reality over illusion or the power of the imagination (Gale 31). Indeed, Poe in his narrative “The Raven” transported Romantic symbolism to new heights, and envisioned the Dark side of Nature as pessimistic, evil and dark mystery if not centers on the Death as a main premise.

 

See the whole poem of "The Raven" here

Source: (https://aalaamj.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/edgar-allen-poe%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cthe-raven%E2%80%9D-as-an-anti-transcendental-poem-2/)

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