Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “Philosophy of Composition - Notes,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 70-76 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 70, continued:]

Notes

1

Charles Dickens ... done: The relevant portion of Dickens's letter to Poe of March 6, 1842, actually reads,

examination ... of “Barnaby Rudge”: Poe's first article on Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1840-41) ran in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post for May 1, 1841, while Dickens's tale was still appearing serially: Poe predicted the dénouement of the murder mystery. He got the right murderer but muffed several other predictions. In a long review of the novel in the February 1842, Graham's, he bragged about his “solution.”

Godwin ... backwards: William Godwin's preface to Caleb Williams (1832) contains this passage: “I formed a conception of a book of fictitious adventure, that should in some way be distinguished by a very powerful interest. Pursuing this idea, I invented first the third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first” (349).

2

what he ... acknowledges ... idea: See-the preceding paragraph and note. Poe's “Dickens” said volume two came first; Godwin said volume three. But Dickens merely said “the last Volume.”

3

story: Poe's essay is on how he wrote “The Raven,” but it seems important that he blends fiction and poetry, this despite his efforts in “Letter to B———.” and some subsequent criticism to define the difference between poetry and other art forms. The poetic spirit for Poe can operate in any number of fields. See his unusual tale “The Domain of Arnheim” (1842, 1845) (Thirty-Two Stories, 200-15; Short Fiction, 3-14, 32-35; Collected Works, 3:1266-85), for example, where he explains that landscape gardening provides unusually pure opportunity for poetic creativity.

5

fine frenzy: See A Midsummer Night's Dream V, i, 12. The context is appropriately comical. The close relationship between one part of Poe's criticism and the next is suggested not only by the recurrence of ideas but also by the recurrence of allusions and quotations. Poe used “fine frenzy” in “The Rationale of Verse” (1843-48), too. [page 72:]

histrio: Poe has in mind the author as a performer: he has just compared a writer's wiles to those of an actor. Poe used versions of the Latin proverb Totum mundum agit histrio — (An actor deals with the whole world —) a number of times. It is present in a letter to his stepfather, dated December 22, 1828, in which he begged John Allan to help him get out of the U.S. Army. Young Poe wrote, “I only beg you to remember that you yourself cherished the cause of my leaving your family — Ambition. If it has not taken the channel you wished it, it is not the less certain of its object. Richmond & the U. States were too narrow a sphere & the world shall be my theatre — “ (quoted in Thomas and Jackson, [[The]] Poe Log, 87). The proverb recurs — Poe reuses material constantly — in his review “Drake's Culprit Fay” (the “Drake-Halleck Review,” it is usually called) of 1836, in the “Exordium” in Graham's Magazine (1842) (“as if the world at large were not the only proper stage for the literary histrio”), and elsewhere (TOM). Poe was solidly influenced by theatrical experience. He was conscious of his parents’ theater background; certainly he was a theatergoer. See his story “The Spectacles” (1844; Short Fiction, 323-24, 333-47, 348-50; Collected Works, 3:883-919) for an example of his use of a theater as setting. In “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842; Thirty-Two Stories, 181-87; Short Fiction, 454-55, 461-64, 469-70; Collected Works, 2:667-78) Poe makes obvious use of stage effects of the sort popular in productions in American cities, New York in particular, in his era.

7

a mathematical problem: In “The Purloined Letter” (1844), Poe has his narrator say, about the daring and conspiratorial government minister who has stolen and hidden the letter, “He is a mathematician, and no poet.” Poe's detective, Dupin, corrects him: “You are mistaken; I know him well: he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.” Poe's tales of ratiocination are close in spirit, style, and even language to “The Philosophy of Composition.” And the idea of the creative artist manipulating the world in which his work operates seems to Peter Thoms a central concept in the stories involving Dupin. In his view the detective's power, indeed, seems almost sinister (“Poe's Dupin and the Power of Detection”). Well, there is a terrible line from American Transcendentalism to evil. Nietzsche admired Emerson; Hitler read Nietzsche.

10

unity of impression ... unity ... of effect: Scholars note Poe's continuing use of ideas that he absorbed from Augustus William Schlegel and continued to develop throughout his career as critic. “Unity” — of impression, of effect, of interest — seems to be the most important of them. Poe knew very little German, but A. W. Schlegel was readily available in translations in the United States in Poe's era (Wilson, “Poe's Philosophy of Composition”; Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel”; and others). As often in Poe, one can reconstruct lines of thought and association. In reviewing Longfellow in 1842 (see “a long poem” below) Poe had again thought of Schlegel in a paragraph that also discusses the length of a poem. Poe there speaks of “what is rightly termed by Schlegel the unity or totality of interest” (Poe's italics). Wilson quotes the translation Poe likely knew: “De la Motte, a French author, who wrote against the unities in general, would substitute for Unity of action, the Unity of interest. If the term be not confined to the interest in the destinies of some single personage, but is taken to mean in [page 73:] general the direction which the mind takes at the sight of an event, this explanation, so understood, seems most satisfactory and very near the truth” (683).

ceteris paribus: Other things being equal.

a long poem: Poe's concern for the effect of a work on its reader led him to similar statements in a number of essays. He applied the idea to fiction as well as poetry: “I hold that a long poem does not exist” (“The Poetic Principle,” posthumous); “All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about” (“Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales” review, 1842). Again, “In poems of magnitude the mind of the reader is not, at all times, enabled to include, in one comprehensive survey, the proportions and proper adjustment of the whole. He is pleased, if at all, with particular passages” (“Longfellow's Ballads” review, 1842). All are in the Prescott edition of Poe, Selections. See “unity of impression” above for more on ties between the present essay and the Longfellow review; see also our note to ¶13.

13

upon which I have commented: In the “Longfellow's Ballads” review (see above) Poe wrote, “we would define ... Poetry ... as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. “He went on, “Beyond the limits of Beauty its province does not extend.” He repeated the principle in any number of critical essays. It is possible that A. W. Schlegel affected his thinking on the subject; Schlegel speaks of “Poetry, the power of creating what is beautiful” (Lubell, “Poe and A. W. Schlegel,” 7). One should be cautious, however. The idea could have come from any number of sources, and Poe's definition is not as close to Schlegel as are some of Poe's other formulations.

14

Melancholy: “Poe may have got the idea from A. W. Schlegel: ‘Several inquirers ... have placed the essence of the northern poetry in melancholy’ ” (Prescott's edition of Poe, Selections, xxxi). Plainly, Schlegel or some reflector of Schlegel was in Poe's mind as he wrote this piece and much of his other criticism, so such speculation is not unreasonable, even when, as here, the resemblance is not very strong. Melancholy, moreover, is so common a tone in writers of his era that one hardly needs to cite a source. A perceptive editorial consultant for our volume suggests quoting Poe's lines from “Introduction” (Poems ... Second Edition [New York, 1831], in Collected Works, 1:155-59, 157): “And so, being young and dipt in folly / I fell in love with melancholy.” Bear in mind, however, Poe's practice of learning from secondary and tertiary sources — from his favorite British magazines, for example, or from books such as Isaac Disraeli's Curosities [[Curiosities]] of Literature (1791-), publications from which he mined ideas repeatedly.

18

absolutely impossible ... “Nevermore”: This paragraph and the preceding are for many readers the strongest evidence that “The Philosophy of Composition,” whatever its other purposes, is whimsical, playful, even satirical.

20

the death ... of a beautiful woman: A leitmotif in Poe, not only in his poetry but also in much of his major fiction. See, for example, “Berenice” (1835), “Morella” (1835), “Ligeia” (1838), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “Eleanora” (1841), and “The Power of Words” (1845). Psychological critics use it as evidence of an unwholesome substitution: death becomes a surrogate for sex. But if Poe was “sick” in this sense so was his age, for the theme was absolutely [page 74:] ubiquitous in Romantic art: witness the troops of heroines in Italian opera who expire beautifully or the even more unwholesome concept of leibestod in Wagnerian opera. Literature was so filled with the glorification of “beauty heightened in dissolution” (Poe's phrase, from his review “Drake's Culprit Fay” [1836]) that it inspired satire, as in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, or protest, notably in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), where the death of a beautiful — and gifted — woman is shown for what it is, a waste, bitter, and deeply ugly.

24

no man: Since Poe knew perfectly well that at least one poet had experimented with a very similar verse form, his no man may be a private joke. If no man had, certainly at least one woman whose work he knew well had. See the second item in our notes to ¶25.

25

octameter acatalectic ... heptameter catalectic: What Poe is trying to say is that the second, fourth, and fifth lines of each stanza in “The Raven” have one less syllable than the first and third. He misuses terms, however; a line of heptameter has seven feet, and Poe's shorter lines scan out to eight to our ears and to those of other readers. He could have said that the poem was in “octameter acatalectic, alternating with octameter catalectic repeated.” Poe's “less pedantic” explanation that follows repeats the error. Most readers feel eight strong pulses in both the sixteen- and the fifteen-syllable line. Poe likely learned the “pedantic” terms from Goold Brown, The institutes of English grammar (New York, 1823), which he is known to have read and which he used heavily in “The Rationale of Verse.” See the notes to that essay. The relevant passage follows: “Scanning is the dividing of verses into the feet which compose them / [indented] OBS. — When a syllable is wanting, the verse is said to be catalectic; when the measure is exact, the line is acatalectic.”

nothing even remotely ... attempted: Poe is never to be trusted when he discusses originality or plagiarism. “The Raven” is very original so far as is known, but it is apparently strongly influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “Lady Geraldine's Courtship” (1844). Shortly after joining the staff of the Evening Mirror in the fall of 1844 as a “mechanical paragraphist” — a sort of editorial handyman (Thomas and Jackson, The Poe Log, 473) — Poe discussed Browning in that periodical. But Poe wrote also a long review of Browning's The Drama of Exile, and Other Poems, in which “Lady Geraldine's Courtship” is included, for the January 4 and 21, 1845, numbers of the Broadway Journal. (In both Evening Mirror and the Broadway Journal Poe shortly later published “The Raven.”) Poe speaks of the Browning poem again in number 35 of his “Fifty Suggestions,” a set of brief paragraphs he ran in the May and June 1845 [[1849]] issues of Graham's Magazine — but this time he accuses Browning of heavy borrowing, complaining that her poem is “a palpable imitation” of Tennyson's “Locksley Hall”! Prescott (Poe, Selections, 336) suggests comparing these stanzas of the Browning poem to “The Raven”:

“As in The Raven, the first and third lines have internal feminine rhyme at the fourth foot, and the second and fourth masculine rhyme with what Poe calls ‘caesura.’ It is hard to believe that Poe, fresh from reading Mrs. Browning, was unconscious of the resemblance, or that he is justified in saying that ‘nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted’ ” (Prescott, in Poe, Selections, 336n).

originality of combination: In Poe's notable review of J. F. Dalton's Peter Snook in the October 1836 Southern Literary Messenger he wrote, “There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate, is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine” (noted by Prescott in Poe, Selections, 335).

27

richly furnished: Poe expounded his ideas on furnishing a room in “The Philosophy of Furniture” (1840).

31

a moment: Poe tinkered with this point (in line 39) in his poem. Some of the versions published in his lifetime here read “a minute”; others, which he also authorized, read “an instant” (Stovall, ed., Poe, Poems). This excerpt is the only place in which Poe wrote “a moment” (TOM). The rest of his quotations from his poem follow the text of his 1845 book The Raven and Other Poems, with his italics added to help illustrate the argument of his prose.

35

So far ... real: Poe's reasoning throughout this essay should be compared in detail with what is said in his detective stories. Portions of “The Philosophy of Composition” sound very much like “The Gold-Bug” (1843; Short Fiction, 151, 155-75, 244; Thirty-Two Stories, 221-47; Collected Works, 3:799-847), particularly those passages in which Legrand explains how he proceeded to decipher the coded message. The present paragraph reminds one, as does much of the essay, of M. Dupin's explanations in the tales in which he appears, but it also suggests how similar in detail “The Raven” is to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841; Short Fiction, 153, 175-97, 244-46; Thirty-Two Stories, 130-58; Collected Works, 2:521-74). A mystery is solved when a character realizes that an animal coming in a window was the cause of a puzzling phenomenon. In both cases the animal has escaped from its owner. In each there is subsequent analysis of the reasons for the animal's behavior.

36

suggestiveness: See Poe's use of Wordsworth's idea of indefiniteness in “Letter to B——.” Many of Poe's aesthetic principles appear fully developed early in his career, to be repeated and recombined in later work.

under-current: Poe's way of associating the same ideas, images, and language even when what is being said is different or contradictory is nicely illustrated by [page 76:] this passage. In his review “Moore's Alciphron” (1840) Poe has a paragraph on how “strongly mystic” passages in poetry, “remarkable for [their] ... suggestive character,” are fine “examples of the purely ideal.” That is not exactly what Poe says here in “The Philosophy of Composition” when he warns against confusing suggestiveness with ideality. But the paragraph from the review and the essay are close in several other ways; even the image of several layers of water (“upper current” in the review) recurs. Upper- and under-current (this time with the hyphen lacking in Graham's) flow again in the review of “Longfellow's Ballads,” already shown to be closely linked to “The Philosophy of Composition.” Poe himself ties the Moore and Longfellow reviews together by referring to one in the other. The same material is applied to prose fiction in Poe's important review “Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales” (1842): “a strong under-current of suggestion runs continuously beneath the upper stream of the tranquil thesis.”

so called poetry ... transcendentalists: A very important confession: Poe says in effect that his goals and beliefs are the same as those of the Transcendentalists but that he tries to be a better poet by not spelling out the connection between the emblem and its spiritual significance.

38

emblematical: Another example of repeated connections and associations in Poe's mind. In the January 29, 1845, Evening Mirror, “The Raven” appeared as “By —— Quarles” (TOM). The allusion is to Francis Quarles (1592-1644), the popular royalist poet whose best-remembered work is the 1635 Emblems, a derivative but enormously successful work still in print, popular, and influential in Poe's time. The long poem consists of seventy-five symbolic pictures or “emblems,” which Quarles then interprets in verse of a peculiarly quaint, devout, and simple manner that made Emblems especially moving to Puritans (whom Quarles, of course, despised). “Emblem” used to mean what twentieth-century critics call “symbol”; it appears in that sense especially in Hawthorne, whose work, of course, Poe knew and sometimes warmly praised.