SOURCE: Erkkila, Betsy. “The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary.” In Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, pp. 60-7. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Erkkila explores the racial overtones of Poe's use of black and white, dark and light, in “The Raven.”

The Croak of the Raven and the Poetic Principle

“The croak of the raven is conveniently supposed to be purely lyric,” wrote Hervey Allen in 1927 of the contemporary lack of concern with “what Mr. Poe had to say of democracy, science, and unimaginative literature” (xi). While recent critics have turned with renewed attention to the historical and specifically Southern contexts of Poe's writing, there is still a tendency to pass over Poe's poems as sources of “purely lyric” expression. And yet, as I have been trying to suggest, whether they...