The Raven: Illustrated by Gustave Doré

by Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Doré (Illustrator)

This Top Five Classics illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

• All 25 illustrations by Gustave Doré from the 1884 Harper & Bros. edition
• An informative introduction
• A detailed biography of Edgar Allan Poe
• An illustrated version and a text-only version of the poem

No poem has ever received the kind of immediate and overwhelming response that Poe's "The Raven" did when it was first published in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. It made Poe a household name overnight, and (though his great fame never brought much wealth) his powerful and haunting elegy to lost love remains to this day one of the most beloved and recognizable works in the English language.

The illustrations that accompany this edition were created by renowned French artist Gustave Doré for Harper & Brothers' 1884 release of The Raven . Doré completed his steel-plate engravings just before passing away in January 1883. His posthumously published illustrations became famous in their own right, evoking as they do the lyrical and mystical air of Poe's masterpiece.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Classics

63 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2013

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Ivonne Rovira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don’t think of it as a poem, even though “The Raven” made Edgar Allen Poe famous nearly overnight; with this edition of The Raven: Illustrated by Gustave Doré, think of it as a work of art. French artist Gustave Doré contributed the engravings for the 1884 edition of The Raven, (Sadly Doré died before the edition was released.) Nearly 150 years later, Doré’s haunting engravings prove as captivating as ever. I’m so glad that Top Five Classics has reissued this gem.

[Koray · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;
Darkness there and nothing more..."

"...Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word,
“Lenore!” Merely this and nothing more..."

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have I listened to Christopher Lee reading The Raven multiple times this week? Yes, yes I have.
Is it the perfect October poem? Yes, yes it is.

This particular edition only gets 4 stars because of some unfortunate editorial decisions. (It has the complete poem in the front, and then pages and pages of illustrations, each accompanied by a single, out-of-context line from the poem.) Despite that, the poem is fabulous and the illustrations fascinating.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice (Kindle) edition of this Poe classic.
It contains an illustrated version followed by a text version of The Raven. The poem is followed by an informative biography of Edgar Allan Poe which gives an overview of his personal and professional life.
The last 20% of this Kindle edition is a catalog of Top Five Classics books.

[Jaime Portillo De la O · Rating 5 out of 5]

The illustrations for this must-read truly add to the imagination's atmosphere.