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THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE
works was put together. I select The Raven as most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable 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.
Poe, of course, is an extreme case. A poem or a story that develops with the rigid consequence of a mathematical problem is necessarily too artificial to pass as a transcript from life. But a study of Poe's analysis of The Raven—quite aside from the question whether he actually wrote the poem, as he says he did, or merely succeeded in making himself think he did so[1]—compels us to face, for our-
- ↑ Poe wrote the Raven, later the genesis of this Raven. This—the after-stroke—American pleasantry, no doubt, but admired and emulated by our young school. The devil of the thing is to find the raven, the dry sob, the foreboding nevermore.—DAUDET, Notes from Life.
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