SOURCE: “Guiomar's Poetics of Death in ‘The Raven,’” in Poe Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, December, 1982, pp. 38-40.

In the following excerpt, Baguley offers a reading of “The Raven” based on Michael Guiomar's Principes d'une esthétique de la mort. According to Baguley, the raven becomes “a harbinger … of irretrievable, even Diabolical or Infernal, destruction” in Poe's poem.

Few groups of English-speaking critics are more thoroughly informed about critical developments in their field in France than Poe specialists.¹ The primary purpose of this article is to make a modest contribution to that long-standing tradition by bringing to the attention of Poe critics and readers a book of which I have found no mention in connection with Poe studies, namely Michael Guiomar's Principes d'une esthétique de la mort.² Admittedly, even though this book does contain numerous references to the American writer, it does not deal directly with Poe and would...