Who is "The Raven" addressed to?

If
"" is addressed specifically to anyone, it would be to people such as Poe himself
whose mental world inhabits a region that's a mixture of fact and dream, of the world and a
fantasy that partakes of both heaven and hell.

The speaker is a man who,
probably like Poe himself and perhaps most other writers and artists in general, lives primarily
in the night. While studying, pondering at midnight instead of sleeping, the raven intrudes upon
him from the realm of dreams. He is already reveling in "fantastic terrors," and
moreover seems in a trance-like state, repeating the strangely musical words over and over
again. The raven initially offers hope. The speaker has been utterly alone in his murmuring form
of insomnia; the visitor appears at the door and speaks to him, but only, of course, with the
now-famous answer "nevermore."

Those to whom Poe addresses the poem
are the ones who themselves feel they can answer nothing, beyond that cryptic word, to their own
existential questions. The fate of the "lost ," and a possible reunion with her is
unknown. The fate of the speaker's own psyche is unknown as well, except for his conviction that
it will be perpetually in darkness:

And my soul from out
that shadow that lies floating on the floor,

Shall be
lifted--Nevermore!

As always in Poe, the mere sound of
the words has an importance that rivals their meaning. The reader is caught in a web of music, a
jingling sound that in the hands of a lesser poet might descend into doggerel. So finally I
would suggest that the verses are directed to the reader susceptible to this kind of
extra-linguistic feature of Poe, to a kind of musical mesmerism that seeks to soothe and terrify
in the same moment.