Edgar Allan Poe's “Philosophy of Composition” and Its Application in “The Raven”

Abstract

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe sets out, step by step, the elements he considers essential to a successful literary work: length, unity of effect, and technique, illustrated throughout by his own poem “The Raven.” This article examines that essay alongside the poem it claims to explain. It argues that whatever the truth of Poe’s retrospective account of his own method, the essay supplies a genuinely useful vocabulary for describing what “The Raven” actually does. The ways in which its length, refrain, rhyme scheme, and choice of subject work together to produce a single, sustained melancholic effect. The article also takes up the long-standing skepticism surrounding Poe’s account, from T.S. Eliot’s doubts about whether the poem’s imperfections are consistent with the calculation Poe describes to Joseph Wood Krutch’s characterization of the essay as an exercise in rationalization. It considers why the essay was nonetheless taken up so readily by Baudelaire and, through him, by the French Symbolists. Read as either a literal account of composition or as a retrospective justification, “The Philosophy of Composition” remains one of the most influential statements of poetic craft in the language, and “The Raven” its most thoroughly annotated test case.