tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5863301599557441497.post3127632774679407599..comments2023-05-02T09:08:52.494-05:00Comments on Resistance is futile: The Philosophy of Composition, by Edgar Allan PoeAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01974988315420539840noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5863301599557441497.post-24958721312621802752015-11-19T13:00:05.223-06:002015-11-19T13:00:05.223-06:00Mabbott says: "Poe admitted freely that his “...Mabbott says: "Poe admitted freely that his “Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham’s Magazine for April 1846, was not expected to be taken as literal truth, but it is a dramatized account of the actual writing of the earliest published version." But gives no source for this free admission. As far as I know it is, if it exists, the basis for doubting Poe's sincerity that might not be based on simple opinion.<br /><br />Critics saying it is "possibly half tongue-in-cheek" is meaningless. Like saying: 'possibly Rachel B doesn't mean what she writes.' It is possible, but it' possibility is not supported by anything except opinion. Try googling (Valery 'philosophy of compostion') or (Ravel 'philosophy of composition) for some very different, and vastly more productive, opinions.<br /><br />You go to the heart of the matter when you say: "This mechanical process might pump out a poem-esque work, but would it have any soul? The whole process seems rather art-defying." But that is perhaps mere prejudice. Ravel says of PoC: "the finest treatise on composition, in my opinion, and the one which in any case had the greatest influence upon me was [Poe's] "Philosophy of Composition... I am convinced that Poe indeed wrote his poem "The Raven" in the way that he indicated." <br /><br />Poe is one of the first artists to understand that art and intellect can go together as well as art and inspiriation do. His ideas were probably among the most influential in the history of aesthetics and part of that influence was based on his masterpieces showing his ideas in action. No doubt Poe WAS an inspired artist, no doubt there are depths and undercurrents in ALL of his masterpieces that can not be accounted for by what he says in PoC about how he wrote the Raven. But that is hardly a reason to doubt his sincerity. Nor should we think Poe was a gigantic computer, he was a man, and the full, multidimensional complexity of his individual writings could not be expressed in a single essay. But as history proves, I believe, the inspirational power of intellect, theory, planning, and so on is most definitely not 'art defying'. I believe many painters informed their art with meticulously executed theories. Is Seurat's Grand Jatte art-defying? <br /><br />Lastly I will say that much of the doubt came from a time when the writings of Poe were much valued in the English speaking world, but the lofty minded and highly naive spirit of American criticism led to a rather ambiguous, often disparaging, attitudes towards Poe. People like Alan Tate and Daniel Hoffman were fascinated but looked down on Poe from their high minded new critical perches. When in the late 60s French literary thinking brought American literary thinking into the modern, international, world so that lofty minded doubts about Poe were swept away and the IMMENSE, century old, literary reputation of Poe in France was thoroughly vindicated as was his IMMENSE influence on the world beyond America's shores. Poe was doing things with words that people like Tate and Hoffman just could not understand*. Of course those French (and Italians and Germans and so on) had the advantage of having read and absorbed the theories of Poe without fussiness or squeamishness. I always think of America's pre 60s critical literary establishment as people who would have been rather comfortable discussing art and literature around Judge Hardy's Sunday dinner table. Lofty minded but very naive.<br /><br />* Alan Tate for example brags about how already by age 12 he found the Mad Tryst scene in Usher very questionable however fine a tale Usher may have been. But half a century earlier Andre Gide had already identified the Mad Tryst as a canonical instance of a mise-en-abyme. Tate and Gide were reading with very different levels of literary sophistication.Theorbyshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16626985721724069042noreply@blogger.com