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happyinsmallways t1_jcrhao1 wrote

Reply to comment by Important_Collar_36 in TIL Charles Dickens had a talking pet raven named Grip, who terrorized his dog, buried valuables in the yard, and died eating "a pound or two" of lead paint. As a character in one of his novels, Grip is believed to have inspired Poe's famous poem, and is on display in a Philadelphia public library by jableshables

I watched an old lecture on Poe and the speaker suggests that when Poe realized that there had been a death in the Dickens family and that it was a raven he was THRILLED lol he was obsessed with death. According to this lecturer anyway, but his body of work does support that lol

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Important_Collar_36 t1_jcrimbn wrote

I was always taught that he was equal parts fascinated and repulsed by death, a truly "morbid curiosity". So he was freaked out by the bird but couldn't get it off his mind and wrote a strange, twisted horror-poem about it.

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happyinsmallways t1_jcriru1 wrote

Makes sense to me! He was surrounded by death growing up so I can imagine there were complicated feelings there

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