The Raven [Paperback]

Edgar Allen Poe (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1559211784 | ISBN-13: 978-1559211789 | Publication Date: July 1, 2007 | Edition: 1st

"once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary..." thus begins perhaps the most-quoted poem ever written in the English Language. Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven is illustrated with Alen James Robinson's masterful etchings and wood engravings

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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 at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought..." -- From The Philosophy of Composition

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Moyer Bell and its subsidiaries; 1st edition (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559211784
• ISBN-13: 978-1559211789
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 6.9 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,070,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #86 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > British > 19th Century

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but short, March 8, 2006

By 

J Simpkins (Mishawaka, IN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Raven (Paperback)

This book should be mandatory for any aspiring authors, but note that it's very short (it took me a little over an hour to read). If you can find a copy at a library, just check it out rather than buying it. A must-read, though!

5.0 out of 5 stars Poe's Evil: The "Raven" or Himself?, January 22, 2011

By 

Martin Asiner "Adjunct College Instructor" (Jersey City, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Raven: With, The Philosophy of Composition (Hardcover)

When Edgar Allan Poe published his "The Philosophy of Composition" in the April 1856 issue of Graham's Magazine, he was attempting to inculcate in the American reading public a response to the still ongoing battle between the fast disappearing edicts of the Age of Reason and the more thoroughly entrenched aura of Romanticism typified by the first generation of Romantics. Complicating matters for Poe was his having to take shifting sides that favored certain elements of decorum that marked the Age of Reason and then simultaneously accepting various traits of Romantic thought.

One of the most basic tenets of Romanticism was the elevation of the heart over the head. Where a Neo-Classicist of the eighteenth century would subordinate intuition and imagination to the calm reason of the intellect, a Wordsworth would reverse matters and insist that a writer must look inwardly to find a divine inspiration in a nature that simply teemed with the very spark of an animating creator. For a Romantic poet to compose verse in a mechanistic way devoid of melding that poet's spirit with such a nature was nothing less than a contradiction in terms. Poe thought that such a nature-based method to compose verse was wrong on many levels. His essay was his written response to that controversy and in it he delineated a series of steps which led to the composition of his poetic masterpiece, "The Raven."

Nevertheless, Poe readily accepted certain tenets of Romantic thought. To a Neo-Classic writer of the eighteenth century, all poetry had to have a moral cleverly grafted onto the poem. Here Poe sides with the Romantics who insisted that though a poem had to have purpose, it need not have a moral, which if in any case were present had to flow naturally from the poem. A Neo-Classic writer had his favored poetic structures and devices: blank verse, epigrams, and allegory whereas a Romanticist favored deposing them and in their stead utilizing a lyrical mode that more nearly captured the language of the common man. Poe sided with the Romantics in their revulsion to epigrams, allegories, and satires.

Poe divides his essay into several sometimes overlapping areas. First, he insists that a poet has to isolate a poem's desired effect before he could put pen to paper. Second, this poet must reject the Romantic emphasis on placing the individual poet as the core of creative power. What the poet must engage in is exactly the precise and mechanistic mode of thinking and writing that the Romantics found so distasteful. Third, this mechanistic mode of creation involves among other things the following words of wisdom for the incipient poet: write the ending of the poem and then work backwards stanza by stanza until the first stanza is written last; be aware that in poetry, brevity is the soul of wit; identify Beauty as the reason for the existence of the poem; identify melancholy as the overarching tone of the poem; use the refrain as the structural "pivot;" choose exactly the "right" word for the refrain based on its sound and connotation; and connect death to that refrain via a judicious use of alliteration and other sound devices. Fourth, the finished product must begin with a generalized and subtle hint at the poem's true purpose which must become increasingly complex and morbid as the poem approaches the final stanza.

Once the reader grasps the stated mechanics of the essay, then that reader has the odd feeling that what Poe writes may not be what he means. Poe asks the reader to take him at his word that he is analytically attempting to deconstruct the Muse as he follows a straight line of composition beginning with effect desired and ending with the opening stanza, a process not unlike that of a snake swallowing its tail. Cause and effect begin to merge uneasily into one another. Poe made a career of writing short stories that placed effect and mood on center stage. The other standard literary devices--plot, character, setting--existed only as props upon which he could ground his desired effect. The effect in "The Raven," as Poe relentlessly urges, is to trace the slow growth of the utter moral depravity of its narrator. The problem here is that he assumes that this depravity exists in a moral vacuum untouched by any other filament of the human psyche. When Poe writes that the effect of a poem is paramount, he relegates every other consideration to non use. He further assumes that man is naturally depraved and his verse and prose merely heighten the insidiousness of this inevitable lapse of morality. His "The Philosophy of Composition" purports to explain the methodology used to create the writing of "The Raven," but Poe never adequately explains exactly how and why the reader must accept his initial premises that effect is paramount or beauty is the chief aim of the poet or even that the death of a fair woman must take precedence over all other matters. Nor does he make it clear whether he is merely discussing the genesis of this one poem or that his methodology ought to apply across the board to all poets in all ages, thus resulting in innumerable variations on the same general theme.

Finally, as the reader compares the poem to the essay, the reader notes that in the former, the narrator's plunge into moral nihilism is a metaphorical linking to a "Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance." Poe implies that the baneful effects of evil lie within the bird and if that bird were only to take its beak from the narrator's heart, then all would be well. Yet, in the latter, he suggests that the reader ought "to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated." It is too facile for the reader to accept unhesitatingly that this moral is the emblematical doppelganger of the raven. Rather, Poe implies, as he does in many of his short stories, that if the nature of evil must be accounted for, then the motif of claustrophobia, which is ubiquitous in his writings, may actually be the source of that evil. It is inwardly that the reader may look to explain the horror and depravity that afflict so many of Poe's tormented protagonists. His "The Philosophy of Composition," then, may be Poe's desire to explain, however obliquely, that evil truly does exist but it is far easier for Poe to point a finger of blame outwardly at birds, haunted houses, and gaseous swamps than to look inwardly at his own soul for a more candid explanation.