The Philosophy of Composition

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe claims to describe the process he used to write his poem “The Raven.” There is no indication, however, that Poe followed the method he describes, and some consider the essay an exaggeration or even a hoax. Regardless of whether the explanation of his writing process is accurate, the essay illustrates the author’s aesthetic and literary values and principles.

Poe begins by arguing for the necessity of “unity of impression” or “unity of effect” (545). A defender of the short story and one of its most important authors, Poe made a similar argument in his 1842 essay “The Importance of the Single Effect in the Prose Tale,” in which he claimed that the writer must first imagine the outcome of the plot (in the case of a short story) or the desired effect on the reader (in the case of a poem) before beginning to write. The writer must begin at the end of the literary work and then proceed backward, filling in the details and incidents that build up to the climax and that single effect that he or she wants to achieve.

Poe’s method ensures that the elements of the poem are linked in such a way that nothing is left to chance, and it has no random or unnecessary elements. Poe says there must be a necessary, causal connection between the desired effect and each element of the work. The process he describes is like the activity of a detective who starts at the end, with a crime, and determines the events that led to it. Poe’s detective character Auguste Dupin uses a similar method to solve his cases.

The notion of “unity of effect” is connected to Poe’s idea that a poem must be brief. He argues that even if some narrative texts, such as novels, sacrifice unity, this should never happen in poetry: for a poem to be intense, it must be short. His rule of thumb is that the best works can be read in one sitting, and long poems are merely a collection of short ones.

Although Poe has been classified as a Romantic, the writing process he describes is decidedly anti-Romantic. Romantics tended to view works of art as the result of inspiration and intuition and as an expression of a profound inner experience that could not be explained rationally. Poe, who made a living by writing, mocks the Romantic myth and criticizes those writers who “prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy” (544). Instead, he states, a good poem is the result of careful analysis and thought.

Even if Poe distances himself from the Romantics in his depiction of the writing process, he is close to them in other aspects of his aesthetics. Like the German and English Romantics, Poe understands beauty as an ideal toward which every literary work must strive. Contact with beauty elevates and lifts the human soul. Similarly, the appreciation of an artistic work allows the human spirit to gain contact with an ideal. However, for Poe as well as for the Romantics, the contact with the ideal of beauty can only be fleeting, and this explains the necessary brevity and intensity of the poem.

Poe’s notion of beauty is related to the darker elements of his aesthetic, particularly his fascination with death. The claim that “the death […] of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world” (548) coheres with his belief that beauty can only be experienced in an intense but fleeting way. For that reason, “melancholy,” or the longing for lost beauty, is the highest form of artistic enjoyment and is “the most legitimate” of all artistic tones (547).

The Romantic idea that beauty can be experienced only fleetingly is connected to Poe’s notion that the theme of death is necessary for the tone of the poem. His essay can be read in the tradition of “Dark Romanticism” or “Gothic Literature,” which includes authors such as Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Byron, and Mary Shelley, whose works often explored the subject of death. However, Poe distances himself from the excesses of this tradition, and he explicitly objects to the exaggerated use of supernatural elements. He is careful to point out that he resorted to certain literary elements to suggest something supernatural—a stormy night, a bereaved lover, a knock at the door, a bird of ill omen that repeats a mournful word—but that every aspect of the plot is “within the limits of the accountable” (553). The power of the poem is connected to the tension between a supernatural explanation that is insinuated and the more rational explanation that the lover is torturing himself and losing his connection to reality.