SOURCE: Person, Leland S. “Poe's Composition of Philosophy: Reading and Writing ‘The Raven.’” Arizona Quarterly 46, no. 3 (autumn 1990): 1-15.

In the following essay, Person offers a critical assessment of the relationship between Poe's famous poem and the essay, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he purports to explain the poem's creation.

For most readers “The Philosophy of Composition” is less important as an account of how Poe actually wrote “The Raven” than as a statement of his general poetic theories. Kenneth Burke, for example, carefully distinguishes between Poe as the author of “The Raven” and Poe as critic of the poem, in order to argue that the essay represents a significant “guide for critics”—indeed, “the ideal form for an ‘architectonic’ critic to aim at.”¹ Although Burke does not go as far as Edward H. Davidson, who maintains that to appreciate the essay “one need not know the poem...