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Edgar Allan PoeThe Philosophy of Composition
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1846A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Creative Process
Poe describes the creative process he claims he followed writing “The Raven.” Regardless of whether his account is exact, Poe’s explanation is relevant because it provides an image of the artist or writer, and of the creative process in general, that dispels notions popularized by Romanticism, some of which persist even today.
In Poe’s depiction, the poet’s point of departure is the desired effect on the reader. Once the writer decides on the effect, he must employ his analytical skills and consider the various alternatives that will allow him to produce that effect. According to Poe, the writer will at times reason deductively, progressing from a general idea or principle to a particular conclusion. This may be seen when, after establishing that the highest tone for poetry is sadness, he concludes that the most poetic topic is the death of a beloved woman. At other points, Poe reasons inductively, such as when he reflects on the utility of having a refrain or when he considers which vowel and consonant combination will highlight the mournful tone that he wants to achieve.
Poe’s view of the writer as someone who uses his rationality to create connections between cause and effect when selecting the formal and thematic elements of the text contrasts with the view held by the British and German Romantics. For them, the act of writing poetry involved, as Wordsworth put it, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions” (Wordsworth, William. “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. London, 1800). In Romantic mythology, the artist or poet expresses feelings or ideas that come to him spontaneously, and he cannot provide a rational explanation of the process. He is a visionary, someone deeply sensitive to the reality that surrounds him, someone who can experience the profound emotions that the poem captures.
In contrast, Poe describes the creative process without any reference to ideas such as “intuition” or “inspiration” and maintains that analysis is at the center of the creative process. He agrees with the Romantics in thinking that poetry is related to emotion, but he is more interested in how this happens in the reader rather than the writer. The writer, in his view, is not so much someone overwhelmed by emotions but rather a skilled craftsman who knows how to produce them in the reader.
The Purpose of Beauty in Poetry
Beauty is central not only to “The Philosophy of Composition” but to Poe’s aesthetics in general. Poe’s discussion of beauty in the essay gives evidence of his assumptions about the relationship between beauty and art and the purpose of poetry.
Poe argues that a poem must evoke a feeling of the beautiful in the reader. His statement that “beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem” (546) suggests that only topics that are beautiful, or that bring the reader closer to beauty, are acceptable subjects for poetry. It also assigns poetry a function that is specifically aesthetic and not, for instance, educational or political.
Poe is not alone in considering beauty a central element of poetry. The preoccupation with the relationship between beauty and poetry, or art in general, is characteristic of modern aesthetics beginning with the works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Edmund Burke. After them, the Romantic movement considered the search for beauty the highest expression of the human spirit. The Romantics believed that the experience of beauty is something that ennobles humans and that the search for beauty, which is the task of the artist, is good and even sacred.
For Poe, contact with beauty produces pleasure but not of a sensual kind. Rather, Poe describes it as a spiritual event, as when he states that beauty “elevates the soul” (546). This implies that poetry that bring readers closer to beauty has a beneficial effect on humankind. Beauty is an ideal that can be perceived thanks to the work of art, through an experience that Poe describes as elevating, pure, and intense. The intensity of the experience implies that contact with beauty can only be brief.
Poe states that when he wrote “The Raven” his goal was to create an effect that he connects with having an experience of beauty. His choice of topic and the details of the story are directly related to achieving this effect. Beyond this poem, however, the theme of the search for beauty appears in many of Poe’s short stories as well. Stories such as “Ligeia” and “The Oval Portrait” deal with the theme of the artist’s search for beauty and can be read as extended metaphors of the search for a beauty that can only be perceived in an intense and passing way.
Death
Death is a recurrent theme in Poe’s work. He discusses it in this essay, but it also appears in his short stories and poems. The preoccupation with death, often portrayed in a gruesome and frightening manner, makes Poe a representative of the Gothic style and the horror genre. The plots of his stories are frequently terrifying, as they sometimes involve violent deaths or the appearance of ghosts.
In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe explains his preoccupation with death, and it goes beyond the desire to frighten the reader. He claims that, when writing “The Raven,” he chose the details of the plot to achieve an effect that was connected to beauty. Poe argues that the decision to create a character who is mourning the death of his beloved, and the insinuation that the raven is a messenger from the world of the dead, are the result of his interest in beauty.
Poe states death was a necessary element to reach the effect he desired. If beauty is the realm of poetry, and if the experience of beauty is intense but brief, he takes it as a consequence that a poem that is beautiful and appealing will have to consider the topic of death. The death of the beloved woman appears to him as the best way to unite the notions of beauty and death.
In the poem, however, the death of the beloved has more than a symbolic meaning. The theme of death also helps create an emotion of fear. The protagonist is influenced by his sadness surrounding the death of his beloved and interprets the arrival of the raven and his refrain as a message from another world. Poe plays with the insinuation that a ghost may be knocking on the lover’s door, or that the bird is a messenger who brings a bad omen from the world of the dead. The theme of death in “The Raven,” as Poe explains in his essay, has both a symbolic meaning (a reference to the brief and fleeting encounter with beauty) and a literal meaning (a narrative device common to horror stories). Poe’s poem plays with both levels.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
