did-you-know:‘The Raven’ was almost ‘The Parrot’. When Edgar Allen Poe first conceived of the poem,
did-you-know:‘The Raven’ was almost ‘The Parrot’. When Edgar Allen Poe first conceived of the poem, he wanted a ‘melancholy’ feel and planned to use ‘nevermore’ as a refrain. Deciding that a talking, non- reasoning animal would be the best way to repeat the word, Poe first thought of a parrot - until he realized ravens are ‘equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.’(Source, Source 2)These sources both reference “The Philosophy of Composition,” which is a satirical essay that Poe wrote in which he outlined a weird backwards way that he claimed to have written “The Raven” by starting with the sound he wanted the repeated word to have and working from there. It’s a fun essay but I’m pretty sure that he never actually intended to have a parrot—he was using that as an example of how odd it would be to focus so much on function and so little on atmosphere. -- source link
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