Obviously, Poe chose to use "Nevermore" or a variation of it in order to create a deep sense of despair and doom. Poe also utilizes what is known as onomatopoeia which refers to a word or several words that imitate a particular sound, in this case being tapping and rapping ("Suddenly there came a tapping/as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door"), although not as much as in his later poem the Bells. One other important aspect of the Raven deals with the question of whether "the sorrow of the poet was described objectively by Poe or whether he was dramatizing a real love" (Quinn, 442), meaning that Poe might have been describing a real person via "Lenore" which could have been his wife Virginia Clemm Poe who in 1845 was extremely ill from consumption or tuberculosis. As Arthur Hobson Quinn relates, Poe's personal dread "of the loss of Virginia... had become a spiritual offspring" and his primary inspiration "was the abstract love of a beautiful woman," but...

The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 1 Poems. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1979.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: D. Appleton-

Century Company, Inc., 1941.

The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. New York: Scribner's, 2001.