"The Raven"

The New York Public Library | ... | Report of Information Division (October 22, 1962)

The New York Public Library

Thomas Ollive Mabbott

Printed Stationery, Typescript

Response from the New York Public Library's Information Division to Mabbott regarding a research query. Mabbott appears to have been searching for a reference that John Patterson made in 1897 about the similarity between the first line of Poe's "The Raven" and the first line of Anacreon's Ode 33. As Mabbott states in the first footnote of his introduction, the direct translation of the original Greek line is closer to the first line of "The Raven" than Thomas Moore's translation of the first line of Anacreon's Ode 33, which would have been Poe's English-language source (had he needed Moore's translation). This response from the NYPL confirmed the similarity between a direct translation from Anacreon's Greek and the first line of "The Raven."

Thomas Ollive Mabbott's Research Files for the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Papers of Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries; “The Raven,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. I: Poems, ed. T.O. Mabbott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 350-374.