Lindsey Graham

In January 1845, Poe became the assistant editor of the Broadway Journal, a highbrow literary magazine.

That same month, he published The Raven, the poem that would make him famous.

It depicted a man sinking into madness and despair while talking to a raven that reminds him of a lost lover.

Poe wrote the poem to appeal to popular tastes.

He insisted that nothing about it was accidental, and later described the choice of subject, declaring, The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

The raven in the story repeats the word nevermore because Poe liked the combination of the long O and R sounds, calling them the most sonorous vowel and the most producible consonant.

The Raven was an overnight sensation.

Though he only earned nine dollars from the sale of the poem, it made him a household name and the toast of fashionable New York literary salons.

Poe gave dramatic public readings, dressing in raven black and turning down lamps to suit the poem's moody atmosphere.

Audiences were mesmerized.

But at the very moment he achieved his greatest success, Poe fell back to his old self-destructive habits.

In March 1845, he launched a series of unprovoked attacks on the revered poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, unjustly accusing him of plagiarism.

Poe resented Longfellow's financial stability, and he considered his poetry shallow and overly sentimental.

The attacks did little to change the public opinion of Longfellow, but they damaged Poe's reputation.

That summer, Poe began binge drinking again, after abstaining from alcohol for 18 months.

Then in October, he was offered $50 to compose an original poem and perform it at the Boston Lyceum.

Poe hated Boston's literary elite, believing their work to be pretentious and preachy.

But Poe accepted the offer, deciding against composing a new poem.

Instead, he recited Al-Araf, a long and unintelligible work he said he wrote when he was just ten years old.

The audience was baffled, and the press denounced him.