Edgar Allan Poe's Philosophy of Composition: Aesthetic Design

Poe's Aesthetic Rationale and Historical Position in American Poetics. Edgar Allan Poe, as America's first medievalist, attached to American letters a gothic and antiquarian literary past it never possessed as a new nation with a short cultural history. Poe also initiated America's poetics, aligning his name with Aristotle, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth in explicating the function of poetry and belles-lettres. Early in "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), Poe announces his intention to "detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion". Poe explicitly rejects Coleridge's concept of method—that "ecstatic intuition" and spontaneity serve as the primary sources of poetry—and refuses to subscribe to Wordsworth's theory of poetry arising from "intense emotions recollected in tranquility". Instead, Poe (provided he is sincere and not constructing a parody of aesthetic rationale) insists upon the calculated nature of his literary effects.

Mathematical Precision, Unity of Effect, and Poetic Principles. Poe utilizes his famous poem "The Raven" to exemplify his central thesis: to disabuse the reader of the notion that literary success "is referable either to accident or intuition". He asserts that his creative process proceeds "with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem". In detailing this methodology, Poe addresses two core principles of composition:

• First, Poe argues that all works of literary art must observe strict structural limits, specifying that "there is . . . a distinct limit . . . to all works of literary art—the limit of one sitting". While he applies this rule rigorously to poetry, Poe notes that short prose narratives are superior to long novels for this exact reason.
• Second, Poe stresses literature's unity of effect, positing that by carefully constructing the ending of a work first, an author can govern the reader's emotional response and subordinate all narrative elements—tone, setting, plot, and characterization—to the realization of this singular effect.

Poe maintains that "the legitimate province of the poem" is the delineation of beauty, and that "the contemplation of the beautiful" constitutes the ultimate aesthetic pleasure. The human soul is elevated most profoundly, Poe claims, when beauty is linked with melancholy, particularly thoughts of death. In designing "The Raven," Poe calculated every structural detail: he set the scene on a tempestuous evening to force a non-reasoning creature to seek shelter, and positioned the black bird upon a pallid bust of Pallas Athena to create a sharp visual contrast with its dark plumage while evoking the intellectual atmosphere of a student narrator studying volumes of forgotten lore. Declaring that the death of a beautiful woman is "the most poetical topic in the world," Poe chose the refrain "nevermore" to generate "the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrows".

Phonetic Structure, Spatial Insulation, and the Fantastic. The selection of the word nevermore arises logically from Poe's framework for unity of effect, as he asserts that the acoustic qualities of vowel sounds carry greater significance than literal semantic definitions. Poe had previously employed similar phonetic constructions, such as the name Lenore, to achieve this melancholic tonal resonance. In "The Raven," the lover and the bird interact within a room rendered sacred by memories of the lost Lenore. Poe emphasizes that a strict "circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident," which he translates into an "indisputable moral power". Finally, Poe notes the deliberate "air of the fantastic" throughout the narrative, acknowledging that the bird's entrance "with many a flirt and flutter" borders on the ludicrous before settling into solemnity.

Analytical Prompts for Critical Discussion and Academic Writing. To analyze the theoretical principles, critical reception, and historical context of Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition," consider the following academic prompts:

1st question: Is Poe guilty of committing what modern literary theorists term "the intentional fallacy"? Can an author truly control the innumerable subjective impressions, psychological responses, and thematic interpretations that a finished work of art provokes in an audience?

2nd question: Examine contemporary romantic poetic treatises, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." Does Poe's poetic output align with the "real language of men" as conceptualized by the British Romantic poets? In what specific ways can Poe's calculated aesthetic be characterized as expressive or expressionistic?