Edgar Allan Poe’s Deliberately Meta Writing Process for Maximum Spook
How Poe purposefully set out to make “The Raven” evoke gothic melancholia — with no creative flights of fancy involved.
As October draws to a ghostly close I am of course thinking of the Victorian gothics— and what better time to bring back this piece I wrote in 2021?
Until I read Edgar Allan Poe’s extremely self-aware and blow-by-blow account of how he wrote his famous poem “The Raven,” I assumed that it must have been one of those poetic “flights of fancy” that flashed upon him like a brilliant inspiration from a heavenly and somewhat spooky Muse.
(I hope you realized that “flight of fancy” was a pun. Because birds fly, and a raven is a bird, and — you know what, I’m killing this by explaining it. One could say I’m murdering it. Like a murder of crows, which are related to ravens — please don’t click away. I promise this is gonna be good.)
The Romantic impression (heh, see what I did there — OKAY, I will stop) I’d had of Poe’s writing process could not have been farther from the truth. I know this now because Poe documented his writing process in excruciating yet vastly entertaining detail, allowing uncultured swine such as myself a benevolent peek into the workings of his brilliantly bizarre mind.
The essay Poe wrote is called “The Philosophy of Composition,” and you can read it in its entirety here.
I know you won’t actually read it in its entirety, despite my kind proffering of a link, so let’s highlight a few key passages and then you can be on your merry way, morbid curiosity satisfied (at least for now).
Poe begins by utilizing em dashes galore — he writes,
“Most writers — poets in general — 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…”
He continues to revel in the em dash for a very lengthy and somewhat redundant paragraph, but I think you get the point. Poets want you to imagine that they compose everything under a trance-like state of haloed inspiration, when in reality they are crumpling up innumerable sheets of expensive Victorian paper and throwing them dramatically into a wastepaper basket.
Or, in today’s terms, they’re writing a bunch of crud and then wearing out the backspace key.
Poe is quite candid about his intentions in writing “The Raven.” No Platonic god spoke to him from the heavens above a Greek tragic stage through the voice of a divine muse. He calculated, he wrote, he conquered.
“It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible [sic] either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”
After waxing poetic (see what I did there) at great length about the appropriate length for a work of poetry, Poe gets down to business and picks a topic.
Now, as aforementioned, I’d always thought “The Raven” had been an inspired work of fantasy, perhaps motivated by a real loss in Poe’s admittedly tragic life. Nope. He runs through the possible impressions he’d like his poem to leave, and lights on Beauty and Tragedy. “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones,” he writes, presumably peppering his paper with giant crocodile tears.
Specifically, he decides to feature The Death of a Beautiful Woman.
If I didn’t already know Edgar Allan Poe was a rather alarming individual whose choices are cause for concern, I would be both alarmed and concerned by his preferences.
But, then, spooky goth stuff including violence toward women definitely sells.
So he’s going to write about a dead woman, and he himself, as narrator, will graciously accept the role of Bereaved Lover.
But how to convey this ghastly and heart-wrenching narrative? Well, people feel most impacted by words you repeat a lot, which is why that Geico commercial has irretrievably hammered into all our brains that 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.
A refrain, or “burden” as Poe calls it, is therefore settled upon. A single word shall be repeated at the end of each stanza. And “nevermore” is chosen as evoking “a force” that must be “sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis,” since O and R combine to produce a sound “in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which I had predetermined as the tone of the poem.”
Poe initially considered a parrot as the inhuman proclaimer of his scary big word, but decided a Raven was “more in keeping with the intended tone.”
This was probably a wise move, as Iago from Aladdin would certainly have not carried the same wistful menace.
Poe then writes the majority of the poem backwards, starting with the climactic stanza in which he asks the Raven if he will ever see Lenore again, even in Heaven, and the Raven is like, nah, bro.
Sorry. Sorry. “Nah, bro,” doesn’t have enough of the ominous oomph of O and R. Instead the Raven says, “NEVERMORE.”
And he says it at the end of every stanza that doesn’t end with the words “nothing more” — eleven times in all. That word, of course, is the operative one in the poem, the one remembered by nearly everyone who had to slog through it in high school English, and was even reportedly shouted by children who chased Poe through the streets following the runaway success of his poem’s publication. One has to wonder, which did Poe find scarier — his imaginary big black bird, perched symbolically on a bust of Athena, or a bunch of snaggle-toothed Victorian orphans screaming and swarming him whenever he went outside?
Back to our essay. Poe goes on and on about the structure he chose — which, if you’re interested, consist of trochaic rhythm and octametre acatalectic, both of which may be answers on Jeopardy! someday so you may want to file them away for reference.
Okay! Here comes the bird. The languishing lover is sitting in his choleric chamber, lamenting for his lost Lenore, and this huge scary flapping creature begins to tap at the window. Poe writes,
I made the night tempestuous, first, to account for the Raven’s seeking admission, and secondly, for the effect of contrast with the (physical) serenity within the chamber. I made the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, also for the effect of contrast between the marble and the plumage — it being understood that the bust was absolutely suggested by the bird — the bust of Pallas being chosen, first, as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself.
(Pallas in this instance refers to Athena, goddess of wisdom and the arts. I guess P, A, L, and S all convey sonorousness just as O and R do, but I’m grateful the Raven’s refrain wasn’t “plastic.” It lacks dignity.)
As the night continues tempestuous outside the grief-filled chamber, the Bereaved Lover berates the housebreaking bird with questions about the deceased Lenore, to which the Raven answers… well, you know.
Does the Raven represent Hope? Is he a respite sent from Heaven to soothe the poet’s melodramatically beleaguered breast? Is there a balm in Gilead? Is this, indeed, a bird or a prophet or a devil?
As the narrator asks his questions, descending grimly from confused interest into burning despair, Poe brings reality and plausibility into communion with metaphor and superstition.
So far, every thing is within the limits of the accountable — of the real. A raven, having learned by rote the single word “Nevermore,” and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven, at midnight, through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleams — the chamber-window of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased… The bird itself perches on the most convenient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who, amused by the incident and the oddity of the visitor’s demeanor, demands of it, in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven addressed, answers with its customary word, “Nevermore” — a word which finds immediate echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance aloud to certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the fowl’s repetition of “Nevermore.” The student now guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer “Nevermore.”
Now Poe brings both essay and poem to a sinister conclusion. The Poet/Narrator/Bereaved Lover/Interrogator of a Bird Who Has No Human Capacity For Thought (Dude, Just Leave Him Alone) finally begins to rave at the Raven. “TAKE THY BEAK FROM OUT MY HEART, and take thy form from off my door!” he howls.
“It works on two levels! Obviously the Raven isn’t really impaling him but it’s making his sorrow worse! It’s Deep! and Symbolic!” Poe gleefully tells us, and brings the essay to a banging conclusion by telling us the Raven was emblematical all along.
The End.
Edgar Allan Poe enjoyed immediate fame upon the publication of The Raven in The New York Mirror in 1845, though no real pecuniary success, and died penniless just four years later.
It’s interesting to note, as a 21st-century pseudo-critic (that is, as an English major undergrad) that Poe references “the bleak December” as the setting for his spooky ballad, yet of course Americans today don’t really consider December as bleak or creepy. (We save that association for October.) Poe published “The Raven” in January of 1845, and probably wrote it in 1844; less than two years earlier, Charles Dickens had published A Christmas Carol, which is credited with revitalizing the Western Christmas tradition and bringing the celebration of the Christmas season into mainstream Anglo culture. (Prince Albert had a hand in this as well.) But in 1840’s Baltimore, the trend had not quite caught on with a fervor yet… or maybe Poe was just an outlier.
In all honesty, the outlier thing makes more sense, when you consider his general lifestyle, habits, friends, relations, relationships, and, uh… choices.
*side-eyes Edgar Allan Poe for all eternity*
Sources Used:
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (linked at the beginning of this piece but I’ll link it again in case you don’t feel like scrolling)
The Philosophy of Composition, which I also linked at the beginning of this piece and quoted from extensively and which is basically the SUBJECT of this piece, so if you didn’t pick up on that by now then I’m not really sure what to say to you.