g, but it simply
makes the reader feel a certain effect. When you read "The Raven" you
hardly know what the poet is saying; but you feel the ghostly scene,
and it makes you shudder; and there is a strange fascination about it
that makes you like it, even if it is horrible.

He goes on to say that he decided to have a refrain at the end of each
stanza, the single word "Nevermore." At first he thought he would have
a parrot utter it; but a raven can talk as well as a parrot, and is
more picturesque. The most striking subject he could think of was the
death of a beautiful woman--this he felt to be so because of his own
impressions concerning the approaching death of his sweet wife.

Besides this, Poe said that poetry and music are much alike, and he
tried to have his poem produce the effect of solemn music. All his
best poetry is very much like music.

With these materials at his command, he now turned his attention to
the construction of the poem. He would ask questions, and the raven
would always reply by croaking "Nevermore." As an answer to some
questions, this would sound very terrible. Says he: "I first
established in my mind the climax, or concluding query,--that query in
reply to which the word 'nevermore' should involve the utmost
conceivable amount of sorrow and despair. Here, then, the poem may be
said to have its beginning--at the end, where all works of art should
begin--for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I
first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza:--

"'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!
By the heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore!--
Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore,--
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.'
Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'"

This principle of beginning at the end or climax to write a poem or
story was one so important that Poe insisted on it at great length. In
the "Murders in the Rue Morgue" the author necessarily began at the
end, imagined the solution of the mystery, and gradually worked back
to the beginning, bringing in his detective after everything had been
carefully constructed for him, though to the ordinary reader of the
story it seems as if the detective came to a real mystery.

It may be observed that all of Poe's stories and poems are built up
about some