It’s obviously outside the scope of the poem, but Poe also wrote another poem, titled “Lenore”, in which the woman in question is absolutely, positively dead.
It should be noted that Poe wrote “The Raven” while Virginia was near death. Given his situation and his state of mind, he may have been writing this requiem for a dead love, but still not quite willing to use the word “dead,” preferring to hold onto merely “lost” for the time being. Certainly, the experience of watching her waste away and eventually die informed many of his works.
So…have we concluded that she’s dead or not?
Dunno, figure we oughta open the box and see? 
Yep. Rube E. Tuesday pretty well placed the final nail in the coffin in post #6.
RR
What about ex-ravens?
Lovely plumage.
Pinin’ for the moors?
They shoot eyebeams and heal instantly.
If it hadn’t been nailed to the bust it would have been pushin’ up daisies.
Its total lack of movement is due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged Gothic poem.
It’s rung up the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
To give that nail one final whack, I quote a passage later in Poe’s essay where he summarizes the beginning of the poem.
So she’s not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.
I wondered about that name “Lenore” quite a bit, because it seemed to come up often, and with an expectation that we would know who or what she was.
Imagine my surprise to learn that “Lenore” was a ballad about a vampire/ghost of that name:
I suspect Poe knew about this, or at least about the weird aspects of the name, when he chose to use it here and in other works of his.
Actually in Poe’s ill-received sequel, “Raven II: The Phantom Pallas,” it turned out that Lenore faked her own death and escaped to San Francisco, where she solved mysteries with the aid of her faithful sidekick, an orangutan named Rhadamanthus.
At some point in my education, it was theorized that not only was Lenore dead, but the “quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” was actually a book of necromancy, and the narrator was fixin’ to resurrect his beloved.
This is what was taught in my Poe class.
Okay, it says lost Lenore. The only possible explanation is that Poe and Lenore were walking out in the woods, taking the same crap Alice took, suddenly they saw some freaky shit (“dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before”), like Angels who kept calling out to Lenore (“whom the angels named Lenore”). This scared them and they got separated. Eventually, he came across the Mad Hatter and March Hare and was asked “Why is a Raven like a writing desk?” He thought the question was interesting and went home to figure it out, unfortunately once the drugs wore off he only remembered something about darkness, angels, Lenore, and ravens and riffed off that. She’s fine.