In preparation for this paper I read over many different types and genres of texts, trying endlessly to find a text that I did not understand, but also one that intrigued me. Nothing that I read caught my attention and grabbed me from the first line. That is until I came to Edgar Allen Poe. This infamous American writer grabs the reader's attention from the first line and does not let go. His dark, morbid views on life are original and have not been replicated yet. Edgar Allen Poe wrote with all his heart and soul. In his poems, every word counts; there is a meaning in every stanza. As most writers do he intertwined his life experiences with his characters fictional existences. When I decided that I was going to write this paper on Edgar Allen Poe, I then had to decide which one of his texts I was going to write this paper over. I read many of his short stories and his poems. They all were laced with underlying meaning and packed with mood and style, but I finally de!
             cided on one of his most famous passages, "The Raven."
             Since the entire poem of "The Raven" is well over two pages, I decided to write this paper over the first seven stanzas. The poem in itself is a modern day masterpiece; it is saturated in dark mood and overflows with metaphors. This poem was written in the average speech of the middle eighteenth century, this turned out to be a problem because of the fact that, he used words that are no longer used or that are extinct from modern American speech. I also found that it was hard to relate to a person that lived in the nineteenth century, because I am living in the twenty and twenty- first century. The difficult wording and the gothic writing style are one of the reasons that drew me towards Edgar Allen Poe for this paper. I have always been intrigued by the dark mind of Poe, but I never looked beyond the words of the stories. I now have a new challenge, to go past the ritualistic eyeball scan...