Poe was not the author of "The Raven"

I have been researching the life of Mathew Franklin Whittier, younger brother of poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and over the past decade I have realized that it was he, not Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote "The Raven." I explain my results in this YouTube video, which I just posted a couple of days ago:

https://youtu.be/dgoGmZaV5-w

I can't even get all the evidence, no less the extensive background, into a half-hour video. But it will give you a pretty good idea of what really happened. Mathew wrote that poem in grief for his wife Abby Poyen, who had died in March of 1841. He must have shared it--along with "Annabel Lee" and "Some Words with a Mummy"--with Poe in late 1842, or early 1843. By Jan. 1845, Mathew was living in NYC, writing reviews for the NY "Tribune" on a freelance basis. The rumor went around that it was Margaret Fuller (the literary editor) writing these, but it wasn't, it was Mathew. He submitted "The Raven" to the Feb. (second) edition of "American Review." Poe, being a critic for the "Evening Mirror," got an advance copy. Because he already had the poem in manuscript form--given to him in confidence by Mathew 2-3 years earlier--he was able to convince his editor on the "Mirror" that he had written the poem, and had permission to "scoop" his own poem in the "American Review." Mathew was doing dangerous anti-slavery undercover work at the time, and couldn't defend his work publicly. But he made snide remarks in his own publications, which put Poe, and posterity, on-notice. He couldn't go public because it would be like a CIA agent, today, getting identified.

Poe was a con-artist who made up an entire story about how he supposedly wrote the poem, to fool people. But if you study Mathew's life and personal history in as much depth as I have, you see it's a much, much better fit for him than it is for Poe.

We have all been indoctrinated since childhood to believe that Poe wrote "The Raven." It's very hard to think outside the box when we are so strongly conditioned to believe something is true.