Text, Part 3 -- The Philosophy of Composition.
Edgar Allan Poe scholar Paul Hurh.
A hand-written draft of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."
A printed page of "The Philosophy of Composition" by Edgar A. Poe.
A magnified section of the essay. Text, I select "The Raven," as the most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition -- that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.
Another section of the essay. Text, Most 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 peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought -- at the true purposes seized only at the last moment -- at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view -- at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable -- at the cautious selections and rejections -- at the painful erasures and interpolations -- in a word, at the wheels and pinions -- the tackle for scene-shifting -- the step-ladders and demon-traps -- the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
Paul Hurh playfully shrugs.
Another section of the essay. Text, 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 one hundred lines. Now, never losing the sight of the object supremeness, or perfection, at all points, 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 -- and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover."