The Raven: The Speaker's Attitude Towards The Raven

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At the start of Poe’s tragic poem, the speaker’s attitude towards the Raven (then the unknown knocker) was one of fear. Poe demonstrates this through his word choice in the lines “-filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;/So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating” (15-16). The speaker tries to convince himself that his fears aren’t real, that it’s just a random person knocking at his door, nothing more than that. Poe uses words like “fantastic” and “to still the beating of my heart” to create the speaker’s tone of sheer terror. These words help convey the fact of how terrified the depressed narrator is, which is why Poe used them. Poe uses more than just word choice to illustrate the speaker’s fearful tone

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