The Rationale of Verse

by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Rationale of Verse" is an essay by Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. Born in Boston, he was the second child of two actors. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died the following year. Thus orphaned, the child was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia. Although they never formally adopted him, Poe was with them well into young adulthood. Tension developed later as John Allan and Edgar repeatedly clashed over debts, including those incurred by gambling, and the cost of secondary education for the young man. Poe attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. Poe quarreled with Allan over the funds for his education and enlisted in the Army in 1827 under an assumed name. It was at this time his publishing career began, albeit humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian". With the death of Frances Allan in 1829, Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement. Later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point and declaring a firm wish to be a poet and writer, Poe parted ways with John Allan. Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845 Poe published his poem, "The Raven", to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years after its publication. For years, he had been planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents. Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in specialized fields, such as cosmology and cryptography. Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre. After his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his career as a writer. He chose a difficult time in American publishing to do so. He was the first well-known American to try to live by writing alone and was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law. Publishers often pirated copies of British works rather than paying for new work by Americans. The industry was also particularly hurt by the Panic of 1837. Despite a booming growth in American periodicals around this time period, fueled in part by new technology, many did not last beyond a few issues and publishers often refused to pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised. Poe, throughout his attempts to live as a writer, repeatedly had to resort to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.

62 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2013

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[K. Anna Kraft · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have arranged my takeaway thoughts into a haiku:

"That poor, fussy man,
Just can't help picking apart
The things he loves best."

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no doubt that Poe was a true disciple of Poetry. Especially in the building blocks of its creation. Sometimes I wonder if Gene Roddenberry's alien culture of Vulcan logic wasn't based on Poe's theory of ratiocination which Poe used in explaining the rationale of the elements of poetry. I truly wonder if Poe's ears weren't slightly pointy?

The Rationale of Verse is a "critical essay by Poe conceived as a lecture and first published as Notes on English Verse in the March 1843 issue of the Pioneer. Poe revised the essay and added material to expand the earlier emphasis on English verse. The revised and final version of the essay, now titled the The Rationale of Verse, appeared in the October-November 1848 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. Critics consider the essay to be Poe's most complete account of metrics and poetic form. Poe elaborates in this essay upon topics that are introduced in The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, with the aim of providing a systematic analysis of versification. Poe argues for a formal approach to the composition of a poem, rather than an approach that allows creative whim free rein. For the poet to achieve a full totality of effect, Poe suggests that the poet must turn his attention in composition to the carefully orchestrated use of parallelism, refrain, and repetition. According to Poe, 'Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness. To this enjoyment, also, all the moods of verse-rhythm, metre, stanza, rhyme, alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects-are to be referred.' This rationale of verse states that the human enjoyment of equality, whose 'idea embraces those of similarity, proportion, identity, repetition, and adaptation or fitness,' is also an important factor in creating verse. 'Unpracticed ears can appreciate only simple qualities, such as those found in ballad airs. . . . Practiced ears, on the other hand, appreciate both equalities at the same instant. . . . One is heard and appreciated from itself: the other is heard by the memory.' The essay also provides readers with a lesson in scansion, both the nature of different metres and their uses by specific poets, although Poe finds that when the ancient Greek and Latin verse is 'scanned by the Prosodial rules, we can, for the most part, make nothing of it whatever.' The opposite is true of English verse in which 'the more emphatically we dwell on the divisions between the feet, [A poetic foot is a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry] the more distinct is our perception of the kind of rhythm intended.' " Sova, Dawn B. (2001). Edgar Allan Poe, A to Z: the essential reference to his life and work. New York: Checkmark Books. (207-208)

[Lee Foust · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sad to say I have to abandon this only a few pages in. It's all technical poetic meter stuff I'm just not up to--no word yet on what exactly is the rationale of verse, but if it's syllable counting I'm afraid I disagree with my old friend Edgar.