Use Of Ethos In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

“The Raven” is a poem about a man, who after losing several loved ones, finds himself having a conversation late at night with a raven. This poem was written in 1845 by Edgar Allan Poe to show his feelings towards the loss of someone he loved dearly and was influenced by his traumatizing childhood where he suffered many tragedies growing up. Poe uses pathos in this poem to show fear, paranoia, and hopelessness, while using ethos when he uses his feelings to connect to his audience, making the story relatable. Poe wrote this for the people who want to ignore their past but just can't let go. He ends the poem with, "And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/ Shall be lifted - nevermore." Here he is saying that there is nothing you can gain if you let your past haunt you, and I believe that applies to logos in the way that he knows how his audience feels and that last line is him telling them the truth from his personal experience because he is trying to help them.

Pathos relates to emotional appeal and it is present throughout the whole poem to invoke sympathy from an audience …show more content…
In a way, he wrote this poem for the people who are in his situation that have suffered from the loss of loved ones. The raven repeats the word "nevermore" multiple times, which represents the feeling of not being able to get something out of your head. What he is doing there is trying to relate to the audience because when something that tragic happens, it affects you mentally to the point where it haunts you. Logos begins to apply here because it’s logical that it is not easy to get over the fact that you lost someone of great meaning to you. When you lose someone, in the author’s case, his mother and wife, your state of mind begins to change from the sorrow you feel, and as for him, he began going a little insane in that point of his life where he wrote this