For poets it is essential that they write about what they know and what they feel, for the substance of what what they reveal will improve their work and ultimately attract the audience. Edgar Allan Poe is a poet whose personal efforts can be extracted from his poems. His works such as The Raven, Annabel-Lee, and Ulalume are just some of his most famous poems that reflect various aspects of Poe's life. Poe's recurring themes of death, love, the subconscious self, and ambiguity have inspired audiences to become fascinated with his work (Spark Notes, 2014). Alongside these intriguing themes is the way Poe's personal life was inexplicitly perceived in his poems, particularly The Raven. Poe's life is reflected throughPoe uses the device of trochaic octameter, which means that the trochee begins with a stressed syllable followed by a weak (unstressed) syllable (Study Institution, 2013). The general goal of using trochaic octameter is to exaggerate stressed words, thereby creating hyperbole. Using as an example the first two lines of the first stanza: “It was a dreary night, while I pondered, weak and weary, many picturesque and curious volumes of forgotten knowledge…” it is obvious that each pair of words is a trochee, a set of stressed and unstressed syllables (Dictionary.com, 2015). When hyperbole is apparent, it also enhances alliteration. In the fourteenth stanza, the first two lines show these two devices working together: “Then I thought the air became denser, the scent of an invisible censer, swayed by seraphim whose footsteps tinkled on the tuft. For Poe, the hyperbole of his life was that his father abandoned him and his mother died when he was only two years old. As Poe lived with the wealthy John and Frances Allan, he knew them as his parents, even though their relationship was not biological. He had a close bond with Frances but not with John (The Biography, 2015). By Poe's late teens, the Allans provided him with only a third of the money he needed to continue his college education, leaving him in debt and forcing him to drop out in less than a year (Poe Stories, 2005). In The Raven, it is evident in the second stanza that the narrator feels very alone, that he has no one left for him, which is perpendicular to Poe because he was practically abandoned by the family that fostered him practically all his life. The feelings of abandonment accentuated by the trochaic octameter and hyperbole create a definite association between Poe's individual feelings of abandonment from his younger years, which could recall the impending loss of his wife.