Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/114

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE ""

Poe, of course, is an extreme case. A poem or a story that develops with the rigid consequence of a mathematical problem is necessarily too artificial to pass as a transcript from life. But a study of Poe's analysis of The Raven—quite aside from the question whether he actually wrote the poem, as he says he did, or merely succeeded in making himself think he did so —compels us to face, for [100]