Text 1A2-II
I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper
might be written by any author who would—that is to say, who
could—detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of
his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why
such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a
loss to say—but, perhaps, the authorial vanity has had more to do
with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers—poets
in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a
species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the
scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—at
the true purposes seized only at the last moment—at the
innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of
full view—at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as
unmanageable—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the
painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and
pinions—the tackle for scene-shifting—the step-ladders, and
demon-traps—the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black
patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute
the properties of the literary histrio.
I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no
means common, in which an author is at all in condition to
retrace the steps by which his conclusions have been attained. In
general, suggestions, having arisen pell-mell are pursued and
forgotten in a similar manner.
For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the
repugnance alluded to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in
recalling to mind the progressive steps of any of my
compositions, and, since the interest of an analysis or
reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite
independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analysed,
it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to
show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works
was put together. I select The Raven as most generally known. It
is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its
composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the
work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision
and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.
Edgar Allan Poe. The Philosophy of Composition, 1846 (adapted)