In text 1A2-II, Poe affirms that

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who wouldthat is to say, who coulddetail, 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 saybut, perhaps, the authorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writerspoets in especialprefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzyan ecstatic intuitionand would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thoughtat the true purposes seized only at the last momentat the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full viewat the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageableat the cautious selections and rejectionsat the painful erasures and interpolationsin a word, at the wheels and pinionsthe tackle for scene-shiftingthe step-ladders, and demon-trapsthe 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 intuitionthat the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.