Edgar Allan Poe
In 1845, the famous American writer Edgar Allan Poe published his masterpiece “The Raven”.
You can read the poem here. A brief extract can give you an idea of the style:
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil! —
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted —
On this home by Horror haunted — tell me truly, I implore —
Is there — is there balm in Gilead? — tell me — tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
The poem narrator is a lover who is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. It’s one of the most famous poems ever written.
In 1846, Poe published a follow-up essay, “The Philosophy of Composition”. In this text, Poe tell us how he, in a completely cold and analytical fashion, created the poem.
We tend to imagine a poet like a sentimental man that looks at the flowers of the garden while he remembers tender or sad episodes of his love life. In “The Philosophy of Composition”, Poe presents himself much more like a marketer who’s defining the attributes of his product to cause maximum effect on its target audience.
Let’s look at how he defines his product (or poem 
) previous to its writing, thinking on the effect he wants to cause.
Target Market: Poe clearly defines who he is targeting:
Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem, per se, the circumstance- or say the necessity- which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.
The length: the poem must be short enough to be read on one sit and long enough to produce the desired effect:
for it is clear that the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect- this, with one proviso- that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all
…Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement which I deemed not above the popular, while not below the critical taste, I reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poem- a length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight.
The province or domain: after some careful thought, he decides that it will be about beauty.
Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes- that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment- no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to is most readily attained in the poem.
The tone of the poem: it must be Melancholy…
Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation- and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimatee of all the poetical tones.
With a similar line of thought, Poe decides that he will select a word or stanza “Nevermore”. He then sets to seek “ a pretext for the continuous use of the one word nevermore”.
In observing the difficulty which I had at once found in inventing a sufficiently plausible reason for its continuous repetition, I did not fail to perceive that this difficulty arose solely from the preassumption that the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by a human being- I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the 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.
Well, here we are with “nevermore”, the Raven and a lot of the product attributes defined. Now Poe with a last effort finally selects the central theme of the poem:
I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word “Nevermore” at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object- supremeness or perfection at all points, I asked myself- “Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death, was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious- “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
The essay follows with many similar ideas and deductions, but the idea is the same, I invite you to read it, it’s interesting.
As you can read here, it is uncertain if Poe really followed the method he describes in “The Philosophy of Composition”. Anyway, as always with Poe, his idea makes one think.
When you decide to make a product, what is your style? do you let your personal tastes and emotions take control? do you “fall in love with the idea”? Or do you use reasoning to select a domain and coldly define a product in the Poe’s style?
