“The Raven” on YouTube

Anna (YouTube user name ‘Annaconda1984′) compiled a video recitation of Edgar Allen Poe’s Poem “The Raven,” featuring herself and 18 others, with each participant reading one stanza:

“The Raven by Poe presented by 18 Youtubers”

There are other readings of “The Raven” on YouTube (Christopher Walken delivering it in classic Christopher Walken style; Vincent Price delivering in classic Vincent Price style; John Astin, aka Gomez Addams, reciting it in E.A. Poe get-up), but I find this the most interesting in terms of the variety of styles with which the poem is recited.

The video has garnered a huge number of comments, some of which are very disparaging about the ‘terrible’ (read: ‘overwrought’) delivery of the reciters. But the poem itself is overwrought. I don’t see how Poe’s poem cannot be delivered melodramatically: it’s pure melodrama, and its popularity as a recitation piece lies in its inflated rhetoric and its potential to be exploited for histrionic effect:

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee —
by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite — respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

The poem, after all, is about an unbalanced man obsessed with a dead woman who totally overreacts to a lost raven trained to say ‘Nevermore.’ One might want to regard of “The Raven” as a work of subtle psychological realism or as a masterpiece of terrifying horror, but it is also a very effective piece of 19th-century poetic schlock, which explains why it was so popular as a recitation piece.