The American football team the Baltimore Ravens are named in honor of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem ‘The Raven’.

This is the sole instance of a major sports franchise bearing the name of a piece of literature. Poe's well-known poem "The Raven" was influenced by the works of two Victorian authors: (for its meter) Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" and the talking raven Grip in Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge (1841).

It is perhaps his most well-known piece of art. There is evidence that Poe intended for a parrot, not a raven, to speak the refrain "Nevermore" in the poem. In his "Philosophy of Composition," Poe stated that the idea of a non-reasoning creature with speech first came to him. "And very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was immediately superseded by a Raven," he wrote, as equally capable of speech.

Whether Poe was merely retrospectively having us on, or whether he was being genuine here, cannot be known for sure; but we have no greater authority in this instance than Poe’s own words, and, as he says, the parrot seems the natural choice for a bird capable of mimicking human speech.