Through the industry of Poe's successive biographers, the hit made by _The
Raven_ has become an oft-told tale. The poet's young wife, Virginia, was
fading before his eyes, but lingered for another year within death's
shadow. The long, low chamber in the house near the Bloomingdale Road is
as famous as the room where Rouget de l'Isle composed the Marseillaise.
All have heard that the poem, signed "Quarles," appeared in the "American
Review," with a pseudo-editorial comment on its form; that Poe received ten
dollars for it; that Willis, the kindest and least envious of fashionable
arbiters, reprinted it with a eulogy that instantly made it town-talk. All
doubt of its authorship was dispelled when Poe recited it himself at a
literary gathering, and for a time he was the most marked of American
authors. The hit stimulated and encouraged him. Like another and prouder
satirist, he too found "something of summer" even "in the hum of insects."
Sorrowfully enough, but three years elapsed,--a period of influence, pride,
anguish, yet always of imaginative or critical labor,--before the final
defeat, before the curtain dropped on a life that for him was in truth a
tragedy, and he yielded to "the Conqueror Worm."
"The American Review: A Whig Journal" was a creditable magazine for the
time, double-columned, printed on good paper with clear type, and
illustrated by mezzotint portraits.
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