Edgar Allan Poe, John Henry Ingram
The Raven; with literary and historical commentary
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066443504
Table of Contents
Genesis
GENESIS.
HELLEY
'S exclamation about
Shakespeare
, "What a number of ideas must have been afloat before such an author could arise!" is equally applicable to the completion of a great poem. How many fleeting fancies must have passed through the poet's brain! How many crude ideas must have arisen, only to 'be rejected one after another for fairer and fitter thoughts, before the thinker could have fixed upon the fairest and fittest for his purpose! Could we unveil the various phases of thought which culminated in
The Sensitive Plant
, or trace the gradations which grew into
The Ancient Mariner
, the pleasure of the results would even rival the delight derived from a perusal of the poems themselves.
"A history of how and where works of imagination have been produced," remarked L. E. L., "would often be more extraordinary than the works themselves." The "where" seldom imports much, but the "how" frequently signifies everything. Rarely has an attempt been made, and still more rarely with success, to investigate the germination of any poetic chef d'œuvre: Edgar Poe's most famous poem—The Raven—has, however, been a constant object of such research. Could the poet's own elaborate and positive analysis of the poem—his so styled Philosophy of Composition—be accepted as a record of fact, there would be nothing more to say in the matter, but there are few willing to accept its statements, at least unreservedly. Whether Edgar Poe did—as alleged—or did not profess that his famed recipe for manufacturing such a poem as The Raven was an afterthought—a hoax—our opinion will not be shaken that his essay embodies, at the most, but a modicum of fact. The germs of The Raven, its primitive inception, and the processes by which it grew into a "thing of beauty," are to be sought elsewhere.
"I have often thought," says Poe, "how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would—that is to say, who could—detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion ... 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 stepladders 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."
Besides the unwillingness there is, also, as Poe acknowledges, frequently an inability to retrace the steps by which conclusions have been arrived at: the gradations by which his work arrived at maturity are but too often forgotten by the worker. "For my own part," declares Poe, "I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions."
Having made so positive a declaration the poet attempts to prove its trustworthiness by assuming to show the modus operandi by which The Raven was put together. The author of The Balloon Hoax; of Von Kempelen and his Discovery; of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and of other immortal hoaxes, confidingly assures us that it is his design to render manifest that no one point in the composition of his poetic master-piece The Raven, "is referrible either to accident or intuition" and "that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."
From the premises thus precisely laid down, Edgar Poe proceeds to trace step by step—phase by phase—to their logical conclusion, the processes by which his famous poem was manufactured. We not only doubt, we feel assured that The Raven was not built entirely upon the lines thus laid down. Some commentators—notably Mr. William Minto, in a remarkably thoughtful and original essay[1]—have elected to place entire reliance upon Poe's statements, as given in The Philosophy of Composition; we, for reasons to be given, can only regard them as the result of an afterthought, as the outcome of a desire—or perhaps of a necessity—to produce an effect; to create another sensation.
Those unable or unwilling to accept the poet's theory for The Raven's composition have diligently sought for the source of its inspiration—for the germ out of which it grew. To satisfy this desire for information many fraudulent statements and clumsy forgeries have been foisted on the public: these things will be referred to later on, for the present they are beside our purpose. Among the few suggestions worth noticing, one which appeared in the Athenæum[2] requires examination. In The Gem for 1831, it is pointed out, appeared two poems by Tennyson, "included, we believe, in no collection of the poet's works. The first poem is entitled No More, and seems worthy, in all respects," says the writer, "of preservation." It reads thus:—
"Oh sad No More! oh sweet No More!
Oh strange No More!
By a mossed brook bank on a stone
I