The Forum on Literary Criticism and the Forum on CLCS: Romantic and 19th C are pleased to work together to offer this collaborative session titled "Poetry Criticism in Practice: Re-reading "The Raven." Our CFP
invited scholars to revisit Edgar Allan Poe’s classic 1845 poem, "The Raven." We sought comparative, formalist, theoretical, and intermedial readings across languages and regions, and we encouraged critics to engage with Poe's famous text of poetics, "The Philosophy of Composition," which features "The Raven" as the prime example. Our forums decided to invite readings of the same text after finding that this format worked well at sessions at MLA 2025 (e.g., the panel on P. B. Shelley's "Mont Blanc" sponsored by the Forum on English Romanticism). This format has the value of bringing speakers and audience members together in a more focused and intimate conversation that is anchored in a common text. We are pleased to be able to revisit "The Raven" as a poem that operates on the edge of literary canonicity and mass reproduction, that can shed new light on that relationship in 2025-6, and to include among our panelists the author of a major new book on Poe's global and intermedial reception.
The panel will consist of a 5-minute introduction, 15-minute presentations by each of the three speakers, and 20-25 minutes of discussion afterwards.
1. Elmer, "Poe and Hosokawa"
Elmer will examine contemporary Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa’s composition, “The Raven” (2012), a challenging piece for voice and chamber orchestra. Hosokawa claims to have read Poe’s poem through the prism of Japanese Noh drama, a form which reserves such central roles for otherworldly beings, especially animals. “The Raven” is also the first composition Hosokawa completed after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a fact important to our understanding of Hosokawa’s claim to be challenging the rationalism of modernity in this composition.
Beyond thematic and generic issues lies the complex topic of how one devises a critical language capable of being nuanced about the relation between music and poetry. As Vladimir Jankélévitch argues, music is essentially beyond linguistic meaning, is “ineffable” (a view Poe shared). Elmer will argue that Hosokawa picks up on Poe’s innovative understanding of poetry and its role in the production of sonic atmosphere that lies between musical and poetic forms.
2. Yamaguchi, "Mallarmé's Poe"
In his 1864 translation of Poe's "Philosophy of Composition," Charles Baudelaire rendered Poe's "accident or intuition" – those spurious elements that could not possibly be left responsible for poetic composition – into French as "au hasard ou à l'intuition” (to chance or intuition). Baudelaire's preference for "chance" over "accident" makes it easy to see what in Baudelaire's Poe sparked the interest of Stéphane Mallarmé: Namely, that all chance must be banished from the modern work ("À savoir que tout hasard doit etre banni de l'œuvre moderne," ŒC II, 772). Tracing the term and the technique it involves through Mallarmé’s translations of Poe’s “The Raven,” this paper will explore what the famous "Hasard" of Mallarmé’s 1897 poem Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard owes to Poe's "accident”—and the accidents of translation.
3. Othoniel Rosa, "The Raven in the Tropics – Imperial Decadence and 'pie forzado'"
The reading of Poe in Latin America borders on obsession. Translated by iconic Latin American writers, a different Poe emerges in each of the key literary generations from the “modernistas” to the present, from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean. We aim to explore this obsession as a symptom. On one hand, poetic appropriation is compelled in a region shaped by colonization. On the other, Poe’s unique portrayal of modernity as a gothic puzzle is particularly appealing to Latin American writers, who are constantly looking beyond the foundational opposition between civilization and barbarism to examine the darkness at the heart of the Enlightenment project. After a reading of the translation choices in the iconic refrain of the poem ("nevermore") in three translations—by great writers Machado de Assis (Brazil), Fernando Pessoa (Portugal), and Julio Cortázar (Argentina)—we will focus on the fascinating story behind the first major edition of Poe’s complete works, commissioned by the University of Puerto Rico in 1953 and entrusted to a young Julio Cortázar. Through this case study, we will reflect on the poetic concept of the “pie forzado,” which holds significant importance in Puerto Rican folk poetry and music, as well as how Poe’s aestheticization of the decadence of Empire became so appealing.
This panel brings together scholars of different genders and ethnicities working on three languages, across four continents.
