The Solitude of Poe's "The Raven"

Solitude of Poe's "The Raven"

On July 2, 1844 Edgar Allan Poe wrote a letter to James R. Lowell. In this letter, he states, "You speak of 'an estimate of my life'-, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things...My life has been whim-impulse-passion-a longing for solitude-a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future" (Poe 1: 257). Here, Poe states that he has been too conscious of the uncertainty of this life and the tendency of secular things to vanish, and therefore, he longs for a life of impulse, passion, and more importantly, solitude. By reading Poe's "The Raven," however, one can find that if one lives in solitude, he or she will become solitude, as seen in the progression of the speaker's imagination becoming reality.