Besides the unwillingness there is, also, as Poe acknowledges, frequently an inability to retrace the steps by which conclusions have been arrived at: the gradations by which his work arrived at maturity are but too often forgotten by the worker. "For my own part," declares Poe, "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."
Having made so positive a declaration the poet attempts to prove its trustworthiness by assuming to show the modus operandi by which The Raven was put together. The author of The Balloon Hoax; of Von Kempelen and his Discovery; of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and of other immortal hoaxes, confidingly assures us that it is his design to render manifest that no one point in the composition of his poetic master-piece The Raven, "is referrible either to accident or intuition" and "that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."
From the premises thus precisely laid down, Edgar Poe proceeds to trace step by step—phase by phase—to their logical conclusion, the processes by which his famous poem was manufactured. We not only doubt, we feel assured that The Raven was not built entirely upon the lines thus laid down. Some commentators—notably Mr. William Minto, in a remarkably thoughtful and original essay[1]—have elected to place entire reliance upon Poe's statements, as given in The Philosophy of Composition; we, for reasons to be given, can
