Edgar Allen Poe faced immense trauma and death throughout his life, with the loss of his wife and family, leaving him as a drunken author with no meaning to life. His poems represented his experiences and thoughts through these terrible events. Writing poems like The Raven gave him little sanctuary from his decaying world. He used writing techniques like repetition and anthropomorphism to represent the constant grief of the repeated loss of everyone he knew. The repetition in his life ate him up inside and he wrote in a way to express that to the reader.

In The Raven, Poe references a bust of Pallas and the raven landing on it. While the reader may easily look over this detail, it contrasts the story, in the form of conflict between rational and irrational thought. The narrator asks the raven questions about whether his wife is in heaven and if he will go to heaven himself, and in response, the raven says "nevermore" every time. This gives little answer, and the narrator only takes in the answer he wanted: there was a heaven and all his loved ones are in it. Pallas, or Athena, is the Greek goddess of wisdom, so she represents rationality in the situation. A true and correct answer to his questions would be that nobody can know whether there is an afterlife and it's pointless to remain in grief just thinking about it. Poe, or the narrator, is not completely right in the head and would not take this answer, as he wants to end the thought and get a straight answer.

This moment shows Poe's emotion by expressing a longing that can never be quenched. He wants to believe his loved ones are in a better place, but the uncertainty and horror of the death he experienced was tearing him up inside. The thought of heaven made him feel better because he could believe they were at peace and he soon would be.

Poe used onomatopoeias often in this poem when there is a mystery. When the narrator doesn't know what will happen next, he adds "sound effects" to enhance the reader's want for precognition. For example, in the first stanza, Poe adds "Rapping" and "Tapping" to give the scene mystery as to what is behind the door. The purpose of the onomatopoeias is to give the story an eerie feeling and add suspense to make the reader want to know what will happen next. Poe was clearly at a low point in his life when he wrote this, so the mystery that the readers are feeling at the beginning of the story is probably similar to what he was going through. With everyone he loved dead, he had no clue what his future would be like and the mystery likely haunted him.