hich part of his life serves as a blueprint. His perfect illustration of the prison-like environment, on top of the inner turmoil of the narrator, creates a detailed, terrifying picture for the reader. At first glance, it is easy to see that Poe wrote this poem in reference to someone he truly loved. The problem is to know exactly who that person, Lenore, is, because without having that information, it would be impossible to understand the four points Poe is trying to make.By looking at the obvious, anybody can decide that Lenore was no longer part of the real-human-world. And if we accept that fact, we could rule out Virginia Poe, Edgar’s wife, and Elmira Royster, to whom Poe was engaged in 1826, because they were both alive when “The Raven” was being composed in 1844. Since that leaves us with Poe’s mother and foster mother whom he dearly loved, it would seem appropriate to say that Lenore was a nickname Edgar used to represent one of his dead mothers. But there are more problems to this equation. First of all, Poe’s real mother died when he was only two years old and for him to feel that much pain because of her death seems ridiculous. Second, his foster mother died in 1829; why would he wait fifteen years to express his feelings? And third, in a poem titled “Lenore,” which Edgar wrote around the same time as “The Raven,” he made it clear that Lenore was young when she passed away or when she was about to pass away: “That did to death the innocence that died and died so young” (Poe 12). The fact that neither his mother, nor his foster mother was young when she gave up the soul, forces one to go back to Poe’s biography and try to find the missing piece of the puzzle. By doing so, one will learn that “in 1842 Virginia burst a blood vessel while singing, and hovered on the verge of death. She entered a terrible spiral of recovery and illness, and ...
