Page:The Raven; with literary and historical commentary.djvu/16

 2 the poet's own elaborate and positive analysis of the poem—his so styled Philosophy of Composition—be accepted as a record of fact, there would be nothing more to say in the matter, but there are few willing to accept its statements, at least unreservedly. Whether Edgar Poe did—as alleged—or did not profess that his famed recipe for manufacturing such a poem as The Raven was an afterthought—a hoax—our opinion will not be shaken that his essay embodies, at the most, but a modicum of fact. The germs of The Raven, its primitive inception, and the processes by which it grew into a "thing of beauty," are to be sought elsewhere.

"I have often thought," says Poe, "how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would—that is to say, who could—detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion ... Most writers—poets in especial—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—at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view—at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and pinions—the tackle for scene-shifting—the stepladders and demon-traps—the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio."