a historic crisis in romantic artistic creation. In hardly more than a moment, wherein the Raven symbolized for the imagination its reach toward a further understanding of the illusion of reality and the painful awareness of nothing on the 'other side' of reality, the symbolic perspective opened. (...) Then, all suddenly, the moment was gone; and Poe ended the poem (...) The symbol had, for a moment, been able to transform reality. Then the sensible world remained resistant; reality was very real (...) Between the jocular first question, 'Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore,' and the last question, the poetic imagination had caught fire and expressed the terror of self and even of non-being. But the factual world remained fact and chaos; and the shaping spirit had nothing more to do.
(Edward Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, 91-92)
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