Poe's Conception of Poetry as Pleasure

In his 1836 "Letter to B--," Edgar Allen Poe contends that the object of poetry is pleasure, not truth; moreover, the pleasure should be indefinite rather than definite, consisting of romantic images whose sensations are ambiguous and whose effects present beauty as a "transpersonal or archetypal entity." (Knapp 48) In "The Philosophy of Composition," dated ten years later, Poe expands on his original notion by restricting the means by which indefinite pleasure can best be achieved within the framework of the poem: "[The] pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most pure, and the most elevating, is...found in the contemplation of the beautiful." (Poe 16)

Beauty, for Poe, is juxtaposed with the passion of the human soul--not necessarily a passion for a specific woman, but a melancholy longing frequently symbolized by the type of passion between the speaker and his lost Lenore in the poem "The Raven." Knapp argues that "beauty is the essence and core of ["The Raven"]; [it is the essence of] its universality and its meaning." (Knapp 47) The project here is to analyze the theme of "The Raven," exploring the ways in which it achieves Poe's ideal of Beauty as indefinite pleasure, and by linking indefinite pleasure to the ideal of unfulfilled desire.

Throughout the poem Poe uses details of setting and plot to emphasize a spatial and temporal ambiguity that creates indefinite pleasure. From the first line the reader knows that it is midnight, the point exactly halfway

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ighest and best Beauty is unfulfilled desire. (Pollin 94-96) The scholar's texts emphasize the "reality" that the speaker's desire for Lenore has been doomed by her death. Yet in this permanent state of unfulfillment there exists also the almost spiritual elevation of the lover's lasting fidelity for Lenore. All three characters of the poem beg the question of veracity or credibility, and the reader can only conclude that the forced sense of mystery is endemic to meaning. The speaker, the only human and "actual" character, albeit distanced by time, memory, and a possibly unreliable first-person narrative, invites the reader to speculate with him about the other two characters, the dead Lenore and the Raven. When the speaker hears the tapping for the second time, he peers out into the darkness dreaming "dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before" (Poe 82). The nature of these dreams becomes clear when he whispers the name of his dead loved one: "Lenore?" The daring dreams involve a fantasy that Lenore might have come back from the dead, but the only answer is, ironically, the echo of his own voice, as if to suggest that the relationship itself may have existed only in his imagination. The reader knows nothing of Lenore

Category: Literature - P