Halloween is almost here, and so is NaNoWriMo. So it’s the perfect time to share Edgar Allen Poe’s essay on his process for writing The Raven.
Poe’s attitude is that composition is a “mathematical problem”. He starts from the big-picture – a poem short enough to read in one sitting, suffused with melancholy (”the most legitimate of all the poetical tones).
Then he gradually circles in to more and more fine details. He inevitably arrived at Nevermore via identifying “the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant”. I would mock this, except that obviously it worked! Besides, it matches perfectly with the odd consensus that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in English.
There’s a nice description of how Poe drafted in the raven itself, as a suitably unreasoning mouthpiece to endlessly repeat nevermore:
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creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.
I love that intermediate step of the parrot – it’s such a natural choice, while also being so obviously wrong.
Poe doesn’t mention The Raven’s real secret of success, which is that it’s the perfect shape for parodies. That is where the parrot claims its true place. Take this version from 1865, whose narrator is tormented by a foul-mouthed bird (”But the parrot only swore”):
And the parrot never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the very self-same perch where first he sat in days of yore;
And his only occupations seem acquiring imprecations
Of the last and freshest fashion, which he picks up by the score;
Picks them up, and, with the greatest gusto, bawls them by the score,
And will swear for evermore.