The Path to a Text

[Audio version]

It was a curious sequence of events that led me yesterday morning to reading one of the best texts on literature I have ever read. I was teaching an English class early, and having asked my students for a topic to read about, they proposed Donald Trump. I found a rather funny article that we started reading, about how Trump is actually not a politically incorrect president—for being politically incorrect is a personal and witty decision—but rather and plainly a jerk.

Soon I wrote to a friend of mine who I thought would be interested in such a topic, and told her that I had found an article I wanted to read with her in one of our English study sessions. She agreed, and also confessed she hadn't yet done the homework I had assigned to her. "Hasten!," I replied, using a word she didn't know. Instead of translating it or explaining its meaning, I decided to complicate her life by sending her the poem in which I came to know it—Ulalume, by Edgar Allan Poe—and telling her to interpret the meaning from the context.

[Reading of Ulalume]

I really like that poem. Some fragments of it—like «Ah, hasten—Ah, let us no linger / Ah, fly!—let us fly!—for we must»—resound in my memory from time to time, so I decided to finally fulfill the task of memorising it. At first I looked for it on the web, but then remembered that it's easier to memorise from a physical book, because the location of the fragments relative to the pages helps to organise the schema; and while browsing the pages of the bilingual edition of Poe's poetry I have at home, I found an essay on the composition of The Raven that I had blamingly overlooked for years.

[Reading of The Raven]

The Raven is a perfect poem. I memorised it years ago, and I keep finding wonders to it while recalling its rythm, its images, its gloomy comicality driving to unavoidable melancholy. Forget about memorising Ulalume. That essay had to be gold in a golden case. And it was indeed.

Poeker card

Hereby, then, I recommend anyone into writing, or actually into any kind of creative activity, to read The Philosophy of Composition, by Edgar Allan Poe.

He specifies some technicalities of the metric that might bore a mind not so fond of classical poetry as mine, but that they may skip wihout losing the point at all. The core is, first, in the open declaration that, contrary to what many authors of the time wanted their readers to believe, a good literary work is not as much about inspiration and natural talent than about solving (with discarded drafts and self disappointments) an enigma kindled by an idea that needs its reasons to be found and properly stated; and second, in the step by step construction, from broad to specific, of that masterpiece that is The Raven, as an example of how such enigmas are solved by always keeping in sight the satisfaction of the intended public and the desire of originality.

I will say no more about its contents. Go read it. Enjoy it.

Perhaps a more modern point of view about literature would discard some of those ideas as not pertaining to how poetry (or even prose) is composed nowadays, but I think that's the great thing about points of view: We share them to learn from each other; they're there to help us grow, and accept, and enjoy. I hadn't, for instance, loved Picasso's work as I love it now before recieving this point of view: He had the skill and the talent to draw whatever you asked him for, but he decided to draw his distorted figures because that's how he felt the distorted world he lived in needed to be depicted.

Because Picasso was no jerk. He was politically incorrect.

Poe was a different kind of genius, who looked for distorsions in our minds (or his) and shaped them to amaze. So go read the essay and the poem, and his other poems, and his tales (even his never-resting novel, if you want), and then sleep well, and dream of the path to your sorrows and fears.

[Reading of Annabel Lee]