What elevates your soul?
This may seem a grandiose question, too vague for serious contemplation, too time consuming for exploration in a world so voracious for results, regardless of their substance. However, this is precisely what Edgar Allan Poe, lord of literary art and science, designates as the sole province of the poem, and, essentially, of all Art.
The pursuit of Beauty that compels us to write "is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us--but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone."
This craving for a taste of eternity, to participate in the dance of the multiverse, with whatever measure of grace we may muster, is what urges us to expression, and is what Poe elucidates in his profound work, 'The Poetic Principle.'
What is moving you? What effect do you hope to accomplish? Your Soul is your taproot to literary accomplishment. Being in tune with it, and tuning it to the appreciation of Beauty, or the cultivation of Taste, is the lifeblood of your work.
Taste wages war upon Vice with Beauty. I implore you to experience Poe's elegant unfolding of this assertion in all its lithesome verbosity in 'The Poetic Principle.' In this work, Poe presents poems he admires and, while explaining their virtues, outlines the essence of what makes Poetry, and, I believe, by extension, all Art, powerful, namely its alliance with Beauty, with what moves our Souls.
Poe's powerful sermon concerning the fuel of creativity in 'The Poetic Principal' is balanced with technical pointers in his work, 'The Philosophy of Composition,' in which he outlines, point by point, the composition process of his most acclaimed poem, 'The Raven.'
"There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story…I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view--"
I adore this approach because it asks us to keep in touch, as we write, with what we want to see, with the magic we intend to permeate our work, and by extension, to envelop the reader.
Here, Poe outlines the logic that determined the subject matter of so many of his works.
"Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem…" Truth and Passion (excitement of the mind and heart) may be included, but tempered in proper proportions to serve "that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem." And, what is the highest tone or manifestation of Beauty, our dearest Poe asks. Of course, "all experience has shown that this tone is one of "sadness…Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones." And "of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy? Death--was the obvious reply." In what instance is death most closely allied to Beauty? "the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world…" (To balance the morbid impression this quote may incite, I feel obliged to mention that he also sites the love of a woman among the most inspirational of soul foods.)
It surprised me immensely to hear Poe, after reading all his soul shivering works and references, declare in this piece that the composition of 'The Raven' "proceeded, step by step to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem." You may just have to read 'The Philosophy of Composition' to believe it yourself.
Among the practical tips Poe offers in this piece are:
- know what your ending, or at least the "intended effect" of your ending, is going to be, that way you can bring the reader's mind into the proper frame for the climax of the piece, and, for poems, make sure the previous lines do not compete in intensity with the last stanzas
- to make the "real" more artistically palatable include, first, some amount of complexity, or, as he says, "adaptation" and, secondly, what I find most exciting and agreeable, include some under current of indefinite meaning. This sounds to me like the silent "God's Beat" in music, an openness to the unknown, to the All that is possible, to the Tao that cannot be told. Poe cautions us that an excess of "suggested meaning" just results in a lack of substance typical of "the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists." Not sure what that is yet, but it does not sound good!
While it is obvious that The Raven's narrator knows what the bird will say and asks anyway, deepening the evidence of his own despair, I have never fully appreciated before reading Poe's assertion in 'The Philosophy of Composition' that all events depicted in 'The Raven' can be firmly placed within the realm of the "real." As Poe takes care to do this, it forces the reader to realize that all the strangeness, or otherworldly nature of the poem abides within our own collective souls and minds-in our desire for heightened experience of "the luxury of sorrow" impelled by "the human thirst for self-torture." Thanks Poe!
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