Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “Preface to Raven and Other Poems - Headnote,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 51-52 (This material is protected by copyright)

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Although in his “Letter to B———.” (1831) Poe had satirized passages from Wordsworth's “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” he plainly was impressed by it and still had it in mind in 1845 as he looked back thoughtfully at his own poetic production. Once one passes the complaints about editors’ “improvements” of his poems, Poe's single paragraph seems at first perhaps the familiar sort of modest author's disclaimer. But it might be instead an honest cry from the heart by a man who knew that he had the gift and knew, too, that he had never been able to nurture it, that great poetry would not come from a career as harried as his. And so he took from Wordsworth's “Essay” the language and images — poetry as passion; poetry as incompatible with pressures, social or commercial — which he needed to express his own estimate of his poetic career.

Authors far more secure in their artistry than Poe have doubts about the quality of their work. To some extent, confessions of that self-doubt are written in the hope that readers and critics will correct them, that the works will be shown to be much better than the artists feared. Suggesting that Poe's apology was sincere does not rule out his hope-against-hope that the future would make a different judgment.

The passage also serves to protect Poe and to project sophistication. Poe said that his poems were not of great value and wanted readers to know that he had the “taste” to see that himself.

His compelling verse has been influential, but in disparate places. On the one hand, it has provided spectacular introductions for school children to the elements of sound and rhythm; on the other, it has been of immeasurable influence in France, Spain, and Latin America. Among the English-speaking nations its value seems less clear, in part because there, critics, scholars, and poets have tended not to take its mysticism as seriously as do the French, in part because the poems seem to many experienced readers to be just what Poe's “Preface” says they are. Poetry, as Poe explained in “The Philosophy of Composition,” must involve passion [page 52:] and inspiration, but great poetry also requires discipline, planning, backstage prop shifting and scene painting, and the tranquility to meditate, as Poe's poet-sleuth Dupin does in Poe's detective tales. Poe rarely was as leisured as his character.

Poe's “Preface” should not be thought of as a satire on Wordsworth nor as an echo. Its message is different. It is rather a parallel statement, at once rueful and playful, open and covert. Understand this single paragraph and one understands much of Poe.

The opening of Wordsworth's “Essay” should be quoted: “With the young of both sexes, Poetry is, like love, a passion; but, for much the greater part of those who have been proud of its power over their minds, a necessity soon arises of breaking the pleasing bondage; or it relaxes of itself; — the thoughts being occupied in domestic cares, or the time engrossed by business.”

A Note on the Text

As printed in 1845 at the front of The Raven and Other Poems, this paragraph was different in several small ways from the revised (“Lorimer copy”) text that we follow. The first sentence read, “while going at random ‘the rounds of the press.’ ” The second sentence read, “If what I have written is to circulate at all, I am naturally anxious that it should circulate as I wrote it.” When he transposed, “I am naturally anxious that,” Poe neglected to remove the capital from the “i” in “If.” In the third sentence, he changed “incumbent upon” to “incumbent on” and removed a comma after “say.” In the final sentence Poe added the comma after “excited.” Poe made the changes with an eye to a revised printing; the copy of the book with his revisions written in has survived and is the authority for accepting the alteration in word order. The text in Complete Works notes just one of Poe's changes, silently follows several others, and omits the comma.

The “Lorimer copy,” bearing Poe's corrections, carries Rufus Griswold's signature and the note, “Poe's Private copy.” It is available in a facsimile edition edited by T. O. Mabbott.