Bird of Prosody: Poe's 'The Raven' and Baudelaire's 'Le Corbeau

Subject: The impact of translation on literary reception; English to French translation; Edgar

Allan Poe; Charles Baudelaire

Title: Bird of Prosody: Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Le Corbeau’

Author: Vanessa Weller, MA Cultural Translation, American University of Paris

[email protected]

Abstract: Are all translations created equal? In poetry, can a translation ever be a substitute

for the original? Translation necessitates the consideration of language as medium, and of

whether or not all languages are capable of saying more or less the same thing. America’s

favourite dark Romantic, Edgar Allan Poe, enjoys an exuberant reputation in France, thanks

to his early translator, none other than flâneur and composer of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles

Baudelaire. This paper explores the meaning behind why and for whom translation occurs.

Paper appeared in the Norwich Papers, Vol. 22: Voice and Silence in Translation, University

of East Anglia, Norwich, England, UK

A translation can be an affront to the original, even a treasonous act: the old Italian

axiom traduttore/traditore implies that translation inevitably involves treachery. Careful

thought is put into the crafting of literature, and to change even one word may ruin the effect

of a work, or deny it a certain function and feeling. Above all, in poetry, where style and

rhythm are paramount, it is easy to alter, even destroy effect through translation. Claims of the

“untranslatability” of poetry are made loudly and often. To one making such an argument,

what is sublime, poetic or artistic needs also to be original: substitutions and facsimiles will

not do; thus a translation, which is nothing but a facsimile in another language, is not poetry.

“The belief that the poeticalness of poetry is just that relationship between sound and sense is

widespread in the teaching of English and other modern languages. However, it doesn’t

necessarily follow that once a poem is translated it has lost its poeticalness” (Bellos

2011:150). “Poeticalness” has far less to do with verse and rhyme than is commonly assumed.

Henri Meschonnic famously argued that the Modernist sloughing off of rhymed verse proved

that intrinsic qualities of the poem exist beyond its meter and rhyme. His example of Marina

Tsvetaeva’s stance on poetry as language in a letter to Rilke elucidates how a word’s meaning

mailto:[email protected]

Weller—Bird of Prosody: Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Le Corbeau’—4,383

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and its sense can be completely arbitrary: “To write a poem is already to translate from one’s

mother tongue into another; it is of little importance whether it be a question for French or

German. No language is a mother tongue.” 1 If the poet’s task, conjuring the universal

language of poetry, mirrors the translator’s, what is the translator’s task?

The translator in many respects has a duty to the author. Faithfulness and neutrality

have less to do with this duty than coherence and presentation. A translation and an original

are rarely read side by side with equal fervour and understanding. Pedagogical situations, such

as language learning, discourage the reading of a translation, making it acceptable only as a

study aid. The translation appears to have no intrinsic literary value in such a case, its

purposes being relegated to that of a utensil; function reigns over form. Thus, the question to

ask is: Can the translation be substituted for the original? Certainly, this happens quite often

in circumstances where the reader has no knowledge of the language of the original work, but

is this ultimately acceptable to a literarily ethical aesthetic? Does not the author deserve an

unfiltered, unfettered representation that can only exist in the intended form originated by said

author?

Translation necessitates the consideration of language as medium, and of whether or

not all languages are capable of saying more or less the same thing. In the case of Edgar Allan

Poe, the refusal of translation would mean near obsolescence, for he made many an enemy in

the literary world through his often scathing literary critiques, and scandalized the puritanical

sensibilities of the American public with his so-called sordid subjects.2 This, combined with

the deceitful “Memoir” penned by Poe’s enemy in life and estate executor in death, Rufus

Griswold, in which he depicts Poe in a very negative light, besmirched Poe’s reputation in his

home country. His most famous works seem suitable for recitation at a Halloween party, not

1 From her letter dated 6 July 1926, as quoted by Meschonnic in “Rhyme and Life,” Critical Inquiry, 1988, p. 99. 2 See Buranelli (1961), Levine (1972) and Ransome (1972) for further discussion.


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worthy of extensive scholarly research. He does not fare much better in other English-

speaking countries, either, due to later criticism written by Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot,

among others, who have called his work puerile and vulgar. This reputation, which has much

more to do with politics than literary merit, has marginalised Poe’s work. Poe’s reception is

heavily reliant upon the personal taste of those who make such decisions; thus, Poe’s place in

the literary canon is more fluid than that of most authors of his generation, as he is propelled

upward by a small contingent of fans, mostly outside the Anglophone world.

In spite of this, Poe receives high praise in France, in particular; this is due in part to

translation. Charles Baudelaire, in choosing not only to translate Poe, but to praise, even

emulate him in a way that secured Poe’s reputation in French literature, shows the power a

translator may wield, especially one who is also a poet with an established literary reputation.

Thanks to Baudelaire, Poe’s works, as translated into French not long after his death, secured

his place in the French literary canon, and his reputation among French symbolist poets in

particular. Where Poe’s rivals in America decimated his reputation, Baudelaire augmented it

across the Atlantic. The high regard for Poe in France often surprises Americans who

encounter him only in a high school classroom, who accept the sordid biographical

description proffered by the teacher, who read into his sinister and often unhinged characters

an unhinged self-portrait. Hack or genius, overrated drunkard or underrated prophet, Poe’s

duality is one not only of language, but of culture. His subject matter, style and philosophy

appeal to a French audience in a way that they simply could not have done to an American

one. What is now considered Baudelairean, the morose intellectual caged within his own

dissatisfaction, taking solace in drink to calm his poète maudit compulsions, was in fact an

imitation of Poe’s “imp of the perverse.”3 Baudelaire indeed inspired Mallarmé and

subsequent generations of Symbolist poets to return to Poe and produce their own translations

3 See Ransome (1972) and Lawler (1989) for further discussion.


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to fully understand Poe’s metaphysical and poetic aspirations, which were “as near perfection

as his nature would permit” (Ransome 1972:80). Poe’s dangerous reputation hindered him in

the United States, but it proved his saving grace in France.

Baudelaire identified with Poe as a fellow poet and a misunderstood genius; Poe’s

previous experimentations gave credence to Baudelaire’s own style and philosophy. The

Baudelaire-Poe relationship could be considered symbiotic, in that the works of each writer

rely quite heavily on those of the other, to the point where it could be argued that neither

would fully exist autonomously. In the realm of translation, the influence of the translator

over the author is an important aspect to consider. This essay will focus on one moment in the

intertwined literary lives of Baudelaire and Poe: the translation from English into French of

‘The Raven’. In considering this poem, this point in the history of translation, my aim is to

refute the idea that a translation is not a substitute for an original work; proof to the contrary

is that the French version of the poem is, by way of its subtlety, more poetic: both more

linguistically balanced and more attuned to the poetic styles of the time than the original.

Thus, with this improved version of ‘The Raven’, the French have a sense of Poe which those

in Anglophone countries, particularly the United States, do not; the substitution of ‘Le

Corbeau’ for ‘The Raven’ is one of artistic presence on the page. The balance necessary to

poetry, so that one element does not overshadow the other, exists in ‘Le Corbeau’ where it

does not to the same extent in ‘The Raven’. Thus the French version surpasses the English

poem in respect of the following: first, that the linguistic weaknesses of Poe’s seminal poem

are excised in Baudelaire’s choice to translate into prose rather than to retain verse; second,

that despite Poe’s insistence on his sincerity in writing The Philosophy of Composition,

Baudelaire took the treatise as a post-factum justification of the poem, which influenced his

translation decision; and third, that Baudelaire’s profound identification with Poe as an artist

gave Baudelaire the ability and desire to do justice to Poe’s work as well as to his legacy.


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The problem with Poe the poet is that, frankly, he wasn’t much of one. Poe’s main

innovations and contributions to literature are his short stories and his criticism, but his poems

are plagued by what T.S. Eliot (1949) called “slipshod writing” and “puerile thinking

unsupported by wide reading or profound scholarship” (p. 327). While I believe Eliot takes

Poe to task in an unjustified manner by taking him out of his nineteenth century context,

where melodrama reigned, the contemporary reader can nonetheless see Eliot’s point upon

first glance at ‘The Raven’. It has the markings of a literary joke due to the constant internal

rhyme, frequent use of feminine rhyme, and the excessive use of alliteration. The musical

quality of the poem’s prosody has an attractive aspect to a point. At the same time, such

devices, when used all at once, are typically reserved for satire. Were it not for The

Philosophy of Composition, the intentions of ‘The Raven’ would be as cryptic as the bird

itself. The first line’s internal, feminine rhyme of “dreary” and “weary” sets the stage, but the

second stanza reduces the poem’s impact by creating a comical effect:

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Nameless here for evermore (lines 7-12).

The internal, feminine rhymes of “remember,” “December,” and “ember” and “morrow,”

“borrow” and “sorrow” (repeated) along with the end rhymes of “floor,” “Lenore” and

“evermore” clang and rattle in a sing-song way that sounds like a parody. Even Byron’s Don

Juan is not so heavily plodding. Further along, in stanza three, more alliteration: “And the


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silken, sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain/Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic

terrors never felt before” (lines 13-14). God forbid that someone with a stutter or lisp should

have to recite ‘The Raven’ in front of an audience! It is little wonder that Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Poe’s direct poetic and philosophic rival, came up with the pejorative designation of

“Jingle Man.”

Poe’s affected use of language, particularly, “your forgiveness I implore” (line 19),

calling the raven an “ungainly fowl” (line 37) and a “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or

devil” (line 91) come across as unnecessary, bizarre, and almost un-English: the inversion of

subject and predicate in the first instance and the hyperbolic address to the bird give a

foreignness to the diction, but this move away from standard English is not used to its best

effect. Furthermore, Poe’s classical allusions: “the Night’s Plutonian shore (line 46); “pallid

bust of Pallas” (line 104) seem unwarranted. The bird’s demonization, and the subsequent

contrast of its plumage to the whiteness of the narrator’s marble bust with—to use Eliot’s

word—slipshod alliteration, delivers a comic effect that appears wholly unintentional. The use

of the word “pallid” in describing the Greek goddess of wisdom is mock-heroic, certainly out

of place in the solemn context of the poem, and likely used for its sound, with meaning of

only secondary concern. As Eliot pointed out, using the example of Ulalume, Poe had the bad

habit of using words for their “page presence” rather than their aptness (p. 332). The talking

raven, a standard in fables and children’s stories, seems out of place as well. The raven as a

bird of ill-omen, a portent of doom, is by no means a unique metaphor, but it does fit Poe’s

sombre mood. The decision to give it human words to recite is little more than a device, one

he admits to borrowing from Charles Dickens.4

4 Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, in which a talking bird also appears, is mentioned in Poe’s essay (1846).


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Was Poe’s Raven a serious endeavour? It seems so.5 After the publication of ‘The

Raven’ in 1845, he published his companion essay, The Philosophy of Composition in 1846,

in which he delineates the decisions made and the creative method used in the composition of

his most famous poem. The essay is an excellent explanation of artistic composition, and one

of the cornerstones upon which Baudelaire and the French Symbolists built their admiration

and eventual original compositions; more importantly, it is an innovative explanation of a

more mathematical creative method to oppose the Romantic ideal of intuitive inspiration as

the only way to write poetry.6 The Philosophy of Composition is, according to Arthur

Ransome (1972), symptomatically self-conscious, markedly Poe in its exhaustive analysis –

an approach to writing that breaks down every nuance of ‘The Raven’, “a profound piece of

technique [which] is scarcely as profound, and certainly not as surprising, as the Philosophy

of Composition” (p. 65). Baudelaire refutes Poe’s claim that ‘The Raven’ was built around the

refrain of Nevermore which was chosen specifically for the sonority of the letters “o” and

“r”—he stops short of calling Poe’s Philosophy hogwash: “après tout un peu de charlatanerie

est toujours permis au génie, et même ne lui messied pas, [after all, a genius is allowed a bit

of charlatanry; it even befits him]” (cited in Ransome 1972: 65).7 René Wellek (1966) goes

even further, stating that the essay is an “a posteriori stunt (if not a hoax) and should not be

taken seriously” (cited in Kopcewicz 1968: 5). Baudelaire, Wellek and I are in agreement as

to the true nature of The Philosophy of Composition. Poe did successfully execute the 1844

“Balloon-Hoax”, so he could have had any number of tricks up his sleeve. The essay is a

device, but it is no chicanery. Here, I will be kinder than Eliot, who calls the Philosophy of

Composition either a hoax, or “a piece of self-deception in setting down the way in which he

5 Critics fall into two camps on the subject: Ransome and Eliot on one side, who consider The Philosophy of

Composition sincere; and Wellek on the other side, who maintains the essay was a hoax. 6 Poe states in paragraph five of The Philosophy of Composition that most poets seem to work on “ecstatic

intuition – and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes”. 7 My translation.


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wanted to think that he had written it” (p. 333). Rather than the essay being unconscious self-

justification for superficial verse, it is Poe covering his tracks after enduring ridicule from

Emerson. The populist aesthetic plagued Poe, much as it still abounds in our time as popular

fiction “cash cows” are favoured by publishing houses. Poe consciously attempted popular

writing for financial reasons, and with ‘The Raven’, it is my view that he sought not universal

truths, but something to cause a sensation. He may have delighted the little old ladies at

drawing room tea parties with his scary black bird, but the literati of the day—Emerson in

particular—knew better.8 The poem’s prosody is simply overkill. It detracts from the intended

tone of melancholy, the imagery of a forlorn lover remembering his beloved on a dreary

December night, and the power of the raven as a symbol of obsession, “Nevermore” being a

mantra repeated incessantly as if to soothe, which ultimately enrages and destroys the

narrator.

With so much thought put into the composition of ‘The Raven’, the poem should be

better. It is a bad poem because it is a poem for the masses. Populist works generally embody

a certain zeitgeist, which by definition cannot be simultaneously universal. ‘The Raven’ is bad

because Poe mocks popular sentiment in his Philosophy of Composition, yet at the same time

he needs popular approval to earn his living. His most famous poem is his least successful:

“‘The Raven’, for example, a tour de force…of technique is a well-shaped body that never

had a soul to lose.” (Ransome, p. 143) Poe treats the subjects of loss and the all-consuming

obsession that goes with it more profoundly in other works. ‘The Oval Portrait’ and ‘Ligeia’

are two such examples—both short stories—where Poe is in his element, and neither of them

features a talking bird. The poem’s symbolism is its greatest strength; its universality and

power invoking the need to transcend the traumatic experience of loss by confronting it, or its

8 Garmon’s “Emerson’s ‘Moral Sentiment’ and Poe’s ‘Poetic Sentiment’ A Reconsideration” (1973) explains the

moral objections the Transcendental poets, namely Emerson, had with Poe and their impact on the reception of

his work, pp.19-21.


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metaphorical incarnation, as the narrator does with the raven. However, the poem’s execution

lacks subtlety and finesse. By choosing form over substance, Poe doomed his English-

language poem to mediocrity.

The solution for improvement of ‘The Raven’ lies in a new perspective: a change in

language, which simultaneously heralds a change in culture. Baudelaire’s translation carries

the poem from one context and language into another, in which it feels much more at home.

The adaptation of the poem into prose allows for a wholly different sonority in the poem’s

execution; poetic cadence is maintained in the prose translation without overburdening the ear

(or eye) of the audience. For the sake of comparison, the same stanza as quoted above reads in

the French:

Ah! distinctement je me souviens que c’était dans le glacial décembre, et

chaque tison brodait à son tour le plancher du reflet de son agonie. Ardemment

je désirais le matin ; en vain m’étais-je efforcé de tirer de mes livres un sursis à

ma tristesse, ma tristesse pour ma Lénore perdue, pour la précieuse et

rayonnante fille que les anges nomment Lénore—et qu’ici on ne nommera

jamais plus.

Here, there is an overall fluidity and syllabic assonance which, though it does not rhyme, is

still poetic; moreover, the peculiarities of Poe can still be felt: the ghosts of fireplace embers,

the sorrow the narrator feels for his lost love. Baudelaire’s translation appears faithful to the

original sense of the words. Despite this, certain loose translation choices have been made:

“glacial” for “bleak” instead of the more obvious “sombre” or “désespéré”; “brodait à son

tour le plancher” for “wrought upon the floor” rather than “battait contre le plancher” or

“ouvrageait sur le sol” as Mallarmé translated it. Why is the December freezing in

Baudelaire’s version? Why does each ember embroider the floor? Baudelaire may, like Poe,

have chosen certain words for their sonority.


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It is also possible that, as has been levelled against him, Baudelaire’s understanding of

English was unsophisticated, that he was indeed unequal to the task of translating Poe, and

that this has led to Poe’s (mis)representation in France. Anne Garrait-Bourrier (2002)

believes that “Baudelaire loved the English language and used it in an instinctive way,

whereas translation requires technicity [sic] and precision, a full understanding of both the

source and the target language which he certainly lacked” (p. 5). She goes on to cite a letter

from Baudelaire to Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, in which (she claims) he incorrectly

uses the term “goodness” and creates the neologism “godness” out of sheer ignorance of the

language. The assumption that Baudelaire did not know what he was doing, and that this

alone led to Poe’s canonisation by the French Symbolists, disregards later, independent work

by Mallarmé, Valéry, Rabbe and others. Were Poe to have no literary merit, his quick ascent

to literary stardom would have been followed by an even quicker fall; Poe’s reputation would

be equally dismal around the world if his work had no merit. His canonisation by the

Symbolists proves that his work has resonance—a place in world literature, even if contested.

Though it is interesting to note how Baudelaire’s sometimes unorthodox choices are

illuminated by the idea that his English skills were deficient, its veracity is far from proved.

This approach to translation implies that all non-literal translations are somehow inferior. The

eschewing of inventiveness in translation, that is, detachment from strictly synonymic

interpretation, by strict regulation of word definition, ultimately denies the poetic nature of

language, which is not purely semiotic. To consider the above example: Decembers can be

cold as well as bleak, and the secondary definition of “wrought” is (surprise!) “embroidered.”

Opinion varies on how much English Baudelaire knew, but even that is beside the point.

“Knowing two languages extremely well is generally thought to be the prerequisite for being

able to translate, but in numerous domains that is not actually the case” (Bellos 2011, p. 64).


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Even without the skills of a bilingual, Baudelaire had enough innate talent to figure out a

process for his oeuvre, no doubt with the aid of a dictionary.

Regardless of whether or not Baudelaire’s English was “good enough” for him to

translate Poe, he did it; in doing so, he greatly magnified Poe’s French reputation. Certain of

Baudelaire’s turns of phrase are without a doubt more beautiful than Poe’s originals. The

“silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” becomes “le soyeux, triste et vague

bruissement des rideaux pourprés [the silken, sad and melancholy rustling of purple curtains]”

which cuts up the over-alliteration without changing meaning. The next line, “Thrilled me—

filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before” is translated as: “me pénétrait, me

remplissait de terreurs fantastiques, inconnues pour moi jusqu’à ce jour [penetrated me, filled

me with fantastic terrors unknown to me until that day]” and this rendering is more genuine,

more personal and more immediate. The use of “thrill” in the English can refer to either of

two overwhelming, yet opposite emotions: “I’m thrilled” (joy) and a “thriller” (fear); the

French “pénétrer,” in this case, lends a deeper meaning, one that is ultimately more

appropriate; fear is felt more profoundly due to the connotation of infiltration, of being

consumed by terror. The idea of immediacy is supported by the personal pronoun and

reflexive references: “me pénétrait, me remplissait…inconnues pour moi jusqu’à ce jour”

which remain distanced and impersonal in the English version. The residual strangeness in

Poe’s English seems to disappear in the French. “The fact that Poe reads better in French than

in English is due to…certain linguistic quirks in his style, to the grammatical and sound

systems of the two languages in question, and to Baudelaire’s devotion and talent” (Faber

1989:254). Through Baudelaire, Poe’s work has sloughed off flaw in favour of perfection;

language that is rarefied in English is less abstruse in French; much of this has to do with his

syntax and choice of adjectives, more evident in ‘The Raven’ than in any other of his works:

“Deep into the darkness peering” (line 25) and “Open here I flung the shutter” (line 49) stand


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out as instances of bizarre English. The French reads much more naturally, Poe’s syntax

inverted to “Scrutant profondément ces ténèbres” and “Je poussai alors le volet” respectively.

Much of the strangeness of the word order in the original has again to do with the obligation

to the rhyme scheme with which Poe has burdened himself in ‘The Raven’. The expectations

of poetry vary from language to language based on this arbitrariness, not on an innate sense of

the words themselves. The ingenuity of poetry derives from its positioning of words; after all,

as Marina Tsvetaieva has told us, “No language is a mother tongue.” (Meschonnic, 1988, p.

99) Language cannot be owned but borrowed. Therefore, the poet is a borrower of language,

and the translator is a borrower of the poem.

Critics have gone so far as to call Poe un-American (Levine 1972:172). These critics

would refer to Poe as a displaced European, more closely following the English tradition of

Wordsworth and Coleridge than striking out into new territory like Emerson or, more

appropriately, Whitman. Poe’s themes are not uniquely American, and as a dark Romantic,

the influence of Gothic traditions upon him is certainly evident. Because of Poe’s alienating

sentence structure, his often Latinate and archaic diction, and the fact that he was educated in

England during his childhood, a case can be made for his European-ness; however, the

originality of Poe has nothing to do with nationality or upbringing. Poe was born in the

United States, he wrote in American, and was highly successfully in the short story form,

which, it could be argued, is still today considered quintessentially American. He would likely

not have called himself anything other than an American, unless to specify: a Bostonian, or a

Virginian, as he sometimes identified himself. Simply going by Poe’s reputation, it is easy to

identify him as someone born in the wrong country, and to presume he would have been much

happier in France, since France is where he became famous. This is doubtful. Baudelaire,

finding affinity with Poe, and using the same themes, had a difficult time with censorship, as

in the case of Les Fleurs du Mal.


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Baudelaire’s translation is masterful, and his own work echoes the themes and theories

gleaned from Poe. His Spleen de Paris (1869) can be seen as directly influenced by his

arduous and dedicated translations of Poe. Baudelaire’s prose poem from the collection, ‘Le

Fou et la Vénus’ (‘Venus and the Motley Fool’), for example, uses the imagery of sounds and

silences, much like Poe does in ‘The Raven’: “L'extase universelle des choses ne s'exprime

par aucun bruit; les eaux elles-mêmes sont comme endormies. Bien différente des fêtes

humaines, c'est ici une orgie silencieuse. [Not a sound gives voice to the universal ecstasy of

things; even the waters seem to be asleep. Quite unlike human holidays, this is an orgy of

silence.] ”9 His character as well is grief-stricken: “Cependant, dans cette jouissance

universelle, j'ai aperçu un être affligé. [Yet in the midst of all this universal joy I caught sight

of a grief-stricken soul].”10 And Baudelaire bears the mark of classical Antiquity, giving the

page to Venus, goddess of beauty and love to convey his symbolism, rather than Poe’s

proffered Pallas: “Mais l'implacable Vénus regarde au loin je ne sais quoi avec ses yeux de

marbre. [But the implacable Goddess with her marble eyes continued to gaze into the distance

with her marble eyes.]11” The poem’s court jester, like Poe’s narrator, is isolated and

misunderstood; he, too, attempts to find solace for his grief in an unattainable woman—the

statue of Venus—only to be shunned, for she is only a statue.

Poe and Baudelaire, each considered amoral by contemporaries, are two sides of the

same coin. Each poet dreads popularity yet needs recognition of his talents; each dies in

poverty, victim of his own genius. By emulating Poe, Baudelaire attempted not only to align

himself with a writer whom he admired, but to safeguard the reputation of another, worthy

and like-minded poet when he felt his own reputation was beyond rescue. Baudelaire’s love

for Poe the man, and for his work, produced the French Poe, an incarnation distinct from the

9 English translation by Louise Varèse, Paris Spleen: 1869. New York: New Dierctions, 1970, p. 10. 10Ibid. 11 Ibid.


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American Poe – both the man he was in life, and the man whose reputation preceded him. The

French Poe is a fiction, a figment of Baudelaire’s imagination, though a heroic and wishful

figment. His assignation of poète maudit status to Poe gave the American a new life in

another literary tradition, which is justified by Poe’s avant-gardist themes and symbols, his

prophetic theoretical contributions.


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Documents

Bird of Prosody: Poe's 'The Raven' and Baudelaire's 'Le Corbeau