Now is a good time, this being National Poetry Month, to look at the world’s creepiest poem.

The title (“The Raven”), the poet (Edgar Allan Poe), and the opening line (“Once upon a midnight dreary,”) tell the reader that the poem is probably not about daffodils and butterflies.

“The Raven” has been analyzed every which way from Sunday, and thousands of essays have been written about it. What the poem is about (or said to be about by a myriad of interpreters) interests me less than does this: how did Poe manage to write those unusual and effectively creepy 18 stanzas.

In 1846, Poe wrote an essay entitled “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he focused on “The Raven,” describing how he created it. What he had to say surprised me. I thought he’d claim to have heard it in a dream. Or to have written the first line and the rest just came. Or to have seen a bust of Pallas and imagined a raven standing on it. Or to have seen the word nevermore in a book and was inspired by it. But no.

In the essay, Poe dismisses the idea that good writers write from artistic intuition or inspiration, but rather from a methodical, analytical approach.

In preparing to write “The Raven” (the title of which he didn’t have at the beginning), he considered three things beforehand: length, the desired effect the writing would have, and the form the stanzas would take.

To Poe, the ideal length is that which can be read in one sitting. This is important, he said, not just in poetry, but in fiction, too. Which is why Poe considered short stories to be superior to novels.

So before he started “The Raven,” he planned to write something substantial, but not so long as to take more than a single sitting to read.

As to the impression or effect of the poem, he wanted to write about beauty and sadness. The two combined suggested a poem about the loss of beauty. The death of a beautiful and beloved woman seemed the perfect embodiment of his selected effect.

Before writing a single line, he decided upon the poetic rhythm the lines would have. He wanted to create something unusual, so he selected a seldom-used meter, trochaic octameter. Trochaic means there is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, such as in the word ponder. Octameter means there would be eight of these, as can be heard in “ONCE up-ON a MID-night DREAR-y, AS I PON-dered WEAK and WEAR-y.”

He also decided to have a shorter, one-line refrain at the end of each stanza. He thought that long O was the most sonorous vowel, and R the best consonant to couple with it. It didn’t take long in considering words with these two letters for him to hit upon nevermore as the most fitting to end each refrain.

Only after all this cold calculation did Poe begin the actual writing of “The Raven.”

Next week, I’ll discuss why a raven is creepier than a crow.

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