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Edgar Allan Poe and the Rise of Literary Studies

Creative Writing as Professional Writing

Breaks with Popular Conventions

Sound Over Sense

"No one point in its composition is referrible 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." (Par. 8)

"for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing." (Par. 24)

"The difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating this word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone." (Par. 65)

Poetry is ART!

"The Philosophy of Composition"

Puts the Reader in Her Place

  • Breaks with popular conventions
  • Disciplines Romanticism
  • Creates a new theory of textuality, later known as "symbolism"

"The idea of making the lover suppose, in the first instance, that the flapping of the wings of the bird against the shutter, is a 'tapping' at the door, originated in a wish to increase, by prolonging, the reader's curiosity..." (Par. 28)

What am I doing when I write a poem?

Disciplines Romanticism

Repetition Not Imitation

"Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would 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..." (Par. 5)

"The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity--of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so vastly heighten, the effect, by adhering, in general, to the monotone of sound, while I continually varied that of thought: that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain--the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried." (Par. 15)

Defining Symbolism

A New Theory of Textuality

Symbolism

  • What distinguishes symbolists is not their use of symbols, but their understanding of the term. They believed that the physical world was a distorted reflection or a faint echo of the world of essences. Symbols provide a fleeting glimpse of this reality. Music can also be a kind of incantation, conjuring this world.
  • Symbolists thus believe that meaning is dynamic and multivalent--"rich" and "suggestive," in Poe's words. They reject a one-to-one correspondance between words and ideas or symbols and reality.

"Two things are invariably required--first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness--some under-current, however indefinite of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness...which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal." (Par. 36)

Poe's theories paved the way for symbolism and he

is sometimes labeled a symbolist, particularly in his attention to sound and the mystical, incantatory qualities of repetition.

  • For example, to a symbolist, a rose is not a symbol of "death" or "beauty" but a combination of all the significations it has possessed in all cultures through the ages.

A major literary movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is difficult to define precisely.

Charles Baudelaire

Other symbolists include Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia Lorca, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot

  • Charles Baudelaire's poem "Correspondances" from his 1857 major work, Les Fleurs du Mal, or The Flowers of Evil, is considered to offer a key definition of symbolism.

Problems with Symbolism, or

Why are all the women dead?

  • Baudelaire's poetry, along with Poe's, influenced later avant-garde poets significantly, and is considered to be a primary influence on the development of modernism, among poets such as Yeats, Pound, and Eliot.
  • Poe in Par. 65: "The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."
  • Baudelaire in "A Carcass"
  • What does this new theory of poetry and of beauty have to teach us about women, bodies, and/or femininity?
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