"The Raven" is Poe's most famous poem
and was immediately popular in his own day,
and he liked to tell everybody about it all the time.
He wrote it allegedly, to suit at once the critical
and the popular taste.
And history has so far shown that he
accomplished this dual purpose.
I'm going to read an extremely truncated version of it
to get us started on "The Raven."
It's better when James Earl Jones does it.
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary
over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there
came a tapping as if someone gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor, I muttered, tapping at my chamber door."
OK, now I'm going to jump ahead.
The bird comes in, says, nevermore, and we resume.
"But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust,
spoke only that one word, as if his soul
in that one word did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered.
Not a feather then he fluttered.
Till I scarcely more than muttered,
other friends have flown before.
And on the morrow he will leave me
as my hopes have flown before.
Then the bird said, 'nevermore.'"
We're going to jump ahead.
Again, the speaker asks questions
about whether he will see Lenore again
or whether he will forget her.
And every time, the bird answers in the negative.
And this brings us to the last three stanzas.
"'Prophet,' said I, "thing of evil, prophet still,
if bird or devil.
By that Heaven that bends above us, by that God we both adore,
tell this soul with sorrow laden if within the distant Aidenn,
it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore.
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore.'
Quoth the Raven, 'nevermore.'
'Be that word our sign of parting bird or fiend,' I
shrieked, upstarting, 'get thee back into the tempest
and the night's Plutonian shore.
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul
hath spoken.
Leave my loneliness unbroken.
Quit the bust above my door.
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off
my door.'
Quoth the Raven, 'nevermore.'
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still
is sitting on the pallid bust of Pallas
just above my chamber door.
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that
is dreaming and the lamplight o'er him streaming,
throws his shadow on the floor.
And my soul from out of that shadow that
lies floating on the floor, shall be lifted nevermore."
OK, hopefully all of us know this poem.
But what many people do not know is that Poe wrote a sequel.
He followed up this poem with an article entitled,
"The Philosophy of Composition," published
a year later that purports to reveal
how he wrote "The Raven."
It is like nothing else.
In it, he proclaims that, "it is my design
to render it manifest that no one point in it's--"
and this is "The Raven's"-- "composition
is referable either to accident or intuition.
That the work preceded step by step
to its conclusion with the precision
and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."
Such a display, in Poe's mind might dispel a myth.
"Many writers, poets in especial,
prefer having it understood that they
compose by a species of fine frenzy, an ecstatic intuition,
and would positively shudder at letting the public take
a peek behind the scenes at the elaborate
and vacillating crudities of thought.
And, in a word, at the wheels and pinions,
the tackle for scene shifting, the stepladders and demon
traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint
and the black patches, which in 99 cases out of the 100,
constitute the properties of the literary histrio."
So in order to achieve this, Poe deconstructs
"The Raven," showing it through a question and answer process
to be completely mechanical, just wheels and pinions.
Nothing there, nothing, nothing there at all.
The question is how long should--
the first question for him is how long should my poem be?
Poe discusses how a poem should be long enough
to give a steady impression, but short enough
to be read in a single sitting.
Thus, he reasons, quote, "I reached at once what
I conceived the proper length of my intended poem,
a length of about 100 lines.
It is in fact 108."
The next question was, what effect should my poem convey?
After considering truth and passion
as being unsuited for poetry, Poe lands upon beauty.
"Regarding then beauty as my province,
my next question referred to the tone
of its highest manifestation.
And all experience has shown that this tone
is one of sadness.
Melancholy is, thus, the most legitimate
of all the poetical tones."
It keeps going.
After concluding that he must have a refrain, that
takes some time, Poe deduces what word that refrain must be.
Poe says that it must be, "sonorous and susceptible
of protracted emphasis.
And these considerations inevitably
led me to consider-- led me to the long O as the most sonorous
vowel, and in connection with R as the most
produceable consonant."
He thought of the sounds first, and then
was like, what words will meet these sounds?
And he lands upon "nevermore."
This goes on.
He discovers he can't use a human for this refrain
because it would seem ridiculous a person just constantly saying
"nevermore" over and over again.
So he thinks of animals, an animal, right?
Parrot, but then he discards the parrot
for the idea of the raven.
As quote, "equally capable of speech and infinitely more
in keeping with the intended tone."
One of the essay's more surprising claims
is how Poe gets to the, quote, "most poetical topic
in the world.
I had now gone so far as the conception
of a Raven, the bird of ill omen,
monotonously repeating the one word
nevermore at the conclusion of each stanza
in a poem of melancholy tone and in length of about 100 lines.
Now, I asked myself, of all melancholy topics
what, according to the universal understanding of mankind,
is the most melancholy?
Death was the obvious reply.
And when, I said, is this most melancholy
of topics most poetical?
From what I have already explained at some length,
the answer here also, is obvious, when it most closely
allies itself to beauty.
The death then of a beautiful woman
is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."
So most readers-- most scholars find Poe's essay specious,
as I'm sure many of you might be inclined to do.
Poe makes every facet of the poem
seem like it proceeded from rigid consequence,
but only insofar as he hides the fact
that he knew what the answer--
he knew the answer he wanted before he even
asked the question.
For instance, where is the genius
of calculating that the best poem is around 100 lines
when you know already that the poem is 108?
If "The Raven" were 200 lines, I'm
sure Poe's calculation would have been adjusted accordingly.
This leads most scholars to consider
"The Philosophy of Composition" as an elaborate hoax
and curiosity.
But just because it is faked, doesn't mean it isn't profound.
Remember, that in "The Raven," the Raven speaks a single word,
nevermore.
And the meaning of nevermore changes as the speaker
varies his questions.
What is so dark and disturbing about the poem, which
some readers miss, is that this dialogue is actually
a monologue.
As Poe puts it in the essay, quote, "at length,
the lover experiences a frenzied pleasure
in so modeling his questions as to receive
from the expected nevermore the most delicious
because the most intolerable of sorrow."
In other words, the speaker knows
the answer ahead of time and frames his question
in order to get the answer that he wants.
The power of the poem is not that the bird brings tidings
of doom and never ending sorrow, but rather
that the speaker uses the bird as a sounding board
for the doom and never ending sorrow in his heart.
That is, the bird is just squawking,
and he turns the squawk into a confirmation
of what he most deeply fears.
But where have we heard this before?
In "The Philosophy of Composition"
Poe frames every question in such a way to get the answer
he knew he wanted from the start.
He knows the poem will say 100 lines,
and thus, frames his question so that 100 lines is the answer.
He knows the answer is nevermore,
and so designs his questions to get O and R.
And in the passage above, Poe literally
falls into a question and answer dialogue with himself
like the speaker and the raven.
What I'm getting at is that both the poem and the essay
work in the same way.
So to dismiss the poem as legitimate and the essay
as a hoax is to miss the point.
Rather, once we see the connection,
we get that the essay is another version
of the poem, a companion piece that in unraveling it,
unravels itself.
It draws attention to the way that the lack of significance
in a sound, in the bird, or in the poem
enables the critic to give it meaning.
But in giving it meaning, the meaning
that is finally produced is one of never ending
melancholy for eternal loss.
Criticism ends up finding what it is looking for,
but that is not presence or meaning or significance,
but rather absence and emptiness.
What Poe seems to be showing is that literature and criticism
work together in a deconstructive manner that
shows that at the heart of literary feeling
is a kind of loss or absence that
is more than simply nothing.
In other words, the pairing of "The Raven" and "The Philosophy
of Composition" suggests that criticism
itself can produce feeling.
In this complex performance, it isn't clear
where art stops and criticism begins.
Art shows itself to be both a set of simple rules
and something much deeper, more paradoxical and richer.
That is, Poe's essay seems to reduce poetry
to a series of levers, pulleys, and paint.
But it raises criticism to show how
that emptiness itself could be a more true feeling,
a neverending melancholy that, as Poe says,
is the most legitimate of poetical tones.