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Edgar Allan Poe : Essays and Reviews : Theory of Poetry / Reviews of British and Continental Authors / Reviews of American Authors and American Literature / Magazines and Criticism / The Literary & Social Scene / Articles and Marginalia (Library of America)

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I highly recommend this book! It is Poe in his own words. This book is a brilliant answer to many off-the-wall interpretations of his theories and life. This book is essential to any serious study of Poe, and certainly for any journalist or writer who wants to read a master at work! Poe was not just a fiction writer. He was the first artist as critic in America's history. This book will allow you to see Poe as a man.

I'll confess that I am only about 200 pages into this very lengthy book (but have skipped ahead occasionally to find his reviews of favorite authors), but I can say without hesitation that those pages alone have been worth the price. And with every paragraph I actually wish the book were longer. Anyone who truly appreciates the depth and soul of Poe's fiction and poetry, and the tragic life behind their creation, could not help but relish the man's words on any subject. Poe biographies are fine, but nothing can touch his own voice. His reviews of well-known writers like Hawthorne, Coleridge and Longfellow, among so many others, are gems of knowledge, humor and biting honesty that may surprise those who have as yet only been held in cherished suspense by his fiction. And his critiques of lesser known authors will probably serve to make a curious reader search out their work, even when he brutalizes it, as he often does! This book is a huge body of Poe's non-fiction, and the writing proves captivating, irreverently witty and beyond impressive in its scholarship. Above all, it shows the man as undeniably brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

In both "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" Edgar Allan Poe sets out his theories about how one ought to write poetry. Both essays were partly based on his opposition to the then widespread belief that the ability to write verse had its origin in the divine inspiration that was the output of a mixture of nature appreciation and the recesses of the human psyche. Some forty years earlier, Wordsworth had written of just the same link between the mind of man and the glories of a beneficent and all-pervasive nature. More recently, Emerson and Thoreau had published their respective tracts on Transcendentalism, all of which purported to evince a similar connection. Poe was upset that so many writers uncritically accepted the relegating of a poet's mindful intent to a secondary tier or importance. In both essays, Poe writes of the need for a poet to eliminate any source of creation that does not immediately reside within that poet's stated intention. Out would go the Romantic interweaving of man with nature. In would come the pragmatic even mechanistic construction of verse according to that poet's own internal blueprint.

The key that links both essays is Poe's insistence that the search for Beauty must form the core of poetic creation. Beauty, to Poe, does not mean a slavish intent to wax philosophical over the mere hyperbolic listing of the infinity of ways that a poet may laud any object of beauty. Rather, Poe tended to personify beauty as a living, breathing entity that existed in its own right, thus making the striving for its poetic expression as the driving force behind putting pen to paper. Beauty without the striving to express that beauty would then leave a poem bereft of any enduring vitality.

What emerges as the primary difference between the two essays is Poe's secondary reason for their respective purposes. In "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe writes of the internal processes of his own mind that account for the composition of his poem "The Raven." His essay presents his thesis of the necessity for having Beauty as the core of his poetic process using the metaphor of a series of filters which act in concert to weed out one element after another until he can successfully account for the totality of effect that culminates in the poem's final stanzas. His initial filter is his limiting of the poem to one hundred lines. His second filter is his insistence that Beauty must be the effect desired. Third, he requires a tone of sadness, leading toward tears and melancholy. Fourth, he chooses the poetical "pivot" of the single word refrain to express this tone. Fifth, he notes that this refrain must possess the unique combination of aural and alliterative resonance to instill the desired amount of scarcely repressed emotion. Sixth, it would not suffice for the narrator to utter such a word; only a non-human creature capable of mimicking human speech would do, thus rationalizing the appearance of the raven. Seventh, Poe declares that only the death of a beautiful woman could account for the poem's heaviness of melancholy. Finally, the poem must begin with the refrain's being used in a seemingly benign manner and must end with the reader's growing understanding that this single word refrain gradually takes on a multiplicity of nuance that grows more foreboding with each stanza.

Poe's handling of Beauty in "The Poetic Principle" expands on his earlier explanation in "The Philosophy of Composition." In the latter, Beauty exists mostly as a striving toward a desired effect in the genesis of a single poem. However, in "The Poetic Principle," Poe shifts emphasis to the relation that Beauty must share with poetic length. Poe believed that lengthy poems like Milton's Paradise Lost were not poems at all, merely loose concatenations of discrete poems. The longer the poem, the more diluted the effect would be. For a tone-conscious poet like Poe, such a dilution must then render an elongated poem as devoid of power and reader interest. Further, Poe elaborates on the role that Truth must play in poetry. Truth, for Poe, was neither intrinsically necessary nor desirable. The earlier Romantics and Poe's contemporary Transcendentalists had insisted on a poet's fidelity to nature. Truth to nature, they exclaimed, was paramount. Truth to nature, Poe countered, was marginal, if that. What was paramount to Poe was his definition of poetry as the "rhythmical creation of beauty." And since the poet was responsible only to his own sense of the structural architectonics of a proposed poem, such a poet must combine the filters of "The Philosophy of Composition" with the expanded interaction of poetic beauty with poetic length from "The Poetic Principle" to produce a poem that will provide the reader that sense of heightened pleasure that Poe deemed critical. Thus, for the modern reader to grasp Poe's theories of How to Write Poetry, that reader should combine a careful reading of both essays and determine how and to what extent they are truly relevant.