Poe's Composition of Philosophy: Reading and Writing "The Raven"

LELAND S. PERSON, JR. Poe's Composition of Philosophy: Reading and Writing "The Raven" For most readers "The Philosophy of Composition" is less important as an account of how Poe actually wrote "The Raven" than as a statement of his general poetic theories. Kenneth Burke, for example, carefully distinguishes between Poe as the author of "The Raven" and Poe as critic of the poem, in order to argue that the essay represents a significant "guide for critics"—indeed, "the ideal form for an 'architectonic' critic to aim at."1 Although Burke does not go as far as Edward H. Davidson, who maintains that to appreciate the essay "one need not know the poem at all," like many other critics, he does separate the essay from the poem.2 Since few critics consider the essay in a context that includes "The Raven," the unfortunate result is that Poe's "Philosophy" is commonly disjoined from the "composition" that forms its pretext. In this essay I should like to rejoin Poe's philosophy and his composition by examining the intriguing relationship between the essay and the poem. As early as 1850 George Washington Peck suggested that in "The Philosophy of Composition" Poe "carried his analysis to such an absurd minuteness, that it is a little surprising that there should be any [one] verdant enough not to perceive that he was 'chaffing.'" Peck even compared the essay to Poe's "hatmless hoaxes," at the end of which the authot "cries 'sold!' in our faces."' Much like "The Purloined Letter," which Poe published just prior to "The Raven," and which has been exhaustively analyzed for its intticate doublings of texts and authors, I think "The Philosophy of Composition " can be regarded, although in a different sense than Daniel Arizona Quarterly Volume 46 Number 3, Fall 1990 Copyright © 1990 by Arizona Board of Regents [SSN 0004- 16 10 Leland S. Person, Jr. Hoffman has suggested, as a "put-on": ostensibly a critical essay that becomes another version of the work it purports to critique.4 By conflating the processes of reading and writing so that reading becomes rewriting , Poe subverts the very sort of scientific or mathematical certainty that he seems to be praising and illustrating in his essay. Put anothet way, he deconstructs not only his own "philosophy of composition," but philosophy itself—making philosophy essentially synonymous with composition/ Furthermore, the deconstruction to which Poe subjects "The Raven" in "The Philosophy of Composition" can also be observed in the poem itself. Reading the raven, no less than reading "The Raven," means writing, or composing, a philosophy. The "philosophy of composition" that Poe describes in his essay depends upon a perfect, logical relationship between authorial intention and what he calls "effect." The intention to produce an effect is always matched immediately, he would have us believe, by the perfect word. In explaining his famous organic theory of poetry (as a "metremaking argument"), Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in "The Poet" that "the thought and the fotm are equal in the order of time, but in the otder of genesis the thought is prior to the form."6 Emerson was ttying to resolve a paradox, of course. Thoughts must exist in some form in order to be thoughts at all; a thought without a form would not be a thought. Yet Emerson wishes to distinguish hierarchically between thoughts according to the propriety of their forms. To do this he posits a gap in the order of genesis between thought and fotm and so raises the possibility of alternative forms, as well as the possibility of better or worse, more natural or less natural, forms. But in Poe's philosophy of composition, the effect or form of a thought must somehow precede the thought itself. "Nothing is more clear," he claims, "than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence , or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention."7 The denouement, or effect, must be...