Edgar Allan Poe: Reflections on Poetry
Edgar Allan Poe: Reflections on Poetry

Summary/Abstract: In his theory of poetry Edgar Allan Poe dealt with several crucial literary and theoretical issues. In his review of Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems (1842) Poe reconfirms the significance of the search for beauty that overcomes the limits of the terrestrial, Supernal Beauty, in which he recognizes the grand aim of poetry as well as the perennial essence of human nature. It is in his Longfellow review that he states that the first element of poetry is the thirst for Supernal Beauty, while as a second element he names the very attempt to satisfy that thirst with novel combinations of those forms of beauty that already exist or were made by our ancestors, claiming that poetry represents a rhythmical creation of Beauty. This statement was repeated in “The Poetic Principle,” the essay in which he expressed the most relevant “aesthetic” postulates of his theory. In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe rejected the conventional Romantic vision of artistic creation as a primarily spontaneous process and pointed out that this is a process of planning and calculation, highly controlled by the artist, while in “The Rationale of Verse” he detailed his “mathematical approach” to poetic work.

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