Edgar Allan Poe’s Mechanical Imagination

“And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting/ On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.”

Like its titular character, Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven has lurked in the minds of readers since 1845. Just as the poem’s narrator ponders over the meaning of “nevermore,” readers might be puzzled by the poem’s meaning. If you listen to Poe, however, the poem’s purpose was simple: to create a creeping melancholy when reading its rhythmic rhymes.

In an...