Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/15



GENESIS.

HELLEY'S exclamation about Shakespeare, "What a number of ideas must have been afloat before such an author could arise!" is equally applicable to the completion of a great poem. How many fleeting fancies must have passed through the poet's brain! How many crude ideas must have arisen, only to 'be rejected one after another for fairer and fitter thoughts, before the thinker could have fixed upon the fairest and fittest for his purpose! Could we unveil the various phases of thought which culminated in The Sensitive Plant, or trace the gradations which grew into The Ancient Mariner, the pleasure of the results would even rival the delight derived from a perusal of the poems themselves.

"A history of how and where works of imagination have been produced," remarked L. E. L., "would often be more extraordinary than the works themselves." The "where" seldom imports much, but the "how" frequently signifies everything. Rarely has an attempt been made, and still more rarely with success, to investigate the germination of any poetic chef d'œuvre: Edgar Poe's most famous poem—The Raven—has, however, been a constant object of such research. Could