Graham’s Magazine

We cannot know for sure if, as Weiss maintained, The Raven had been written intermittently over a period of ten years - or, as R W. Thomas asserted so improbably, in a day. We cannot know for sure what form the poem took when Poe apparendy recited it near Saratoga, New York (now the Yaddo Artists Colony), in 1843, or when he apparently submitted it to Graham s Magazine in Philadelphia, also in 1843. However, we can be reasonably sure that, as Poe says in The Philosophy of Composition, he wanted to write a popular and critically successful poem, he wished the poem to be readable at a single sitting, and he intended the work to elevate the soul of the reader. Probably, in its earlier versions, the poem already concerned the most poetical topic in the world the death... of a beautiful woman (E R, 19). 

Life in Death (later, The Oval Portrait ) and The Masque of the Red Death appear in Graham s, yet Poe resigns from the magazine partway through the year. The Pit and the Pendulum appears in The Gift and the first two installments of The Mystery of Marie Roger appear in Snowden s Ladies Companion the last two months of the year. 

Graham, J. (September 2001) Specialty grease boosts corrugator s productivity. Machinery Lubrication Magazine. 

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