SOURCE: Smith, Dave. “Edgar Allan Poe and the Nightmare Ode.” Southern Humanities Review 29, no. 1 (winter 1995): 1-10.

In the following essay, Smith examines “The Raven” as an expression of Poe's despair as an orphan and an outcast.

When I left home for college at the University of Virginia, I must have imagined history was something confined to textbooks and roadside commemorative markers, which occur in Virginia nearly as often as azaleas and daffodils. Among the splendid benefits of college nothing outweighs awakening to the presence of the past as it shapes and changes one's life. In 1963, for example, I lived in a cottage next door to James Southall Wilson, the founder of the Virginia Quarterly Review and a Poe scholar. He was also husband to the formidable granddaughter of President Tyler. He seemed to me, and I think he was, in accent, courtesy, rose gardening, and tales about Poe...