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Essay On The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

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The Philosophy of Composition," was written to recount the method Poe used to write his famous poem "The Raven". In the essay Poe challenges those who suggest that writing is a mysterious process prompted solely by the imagination. Poe demonstrates that there are no details in his works that appear due to accident or intuition, and that his work proceeds "to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem" (Poe) which is shown in Poe's The Cask of Amontillado. The Cask of Amontillado is a mystery due to the absence of Montresor’s motive for his crime. The goal is to capture the reader’s attention to question “Why did he do it?” Like Poe wrote in The Philosophy of Composition “It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief”(Poe). …show more content…

This is where Poe uses “an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction (Poe). Montresor elaborates a sophisticated philosophy of revenge: “I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong” (Poe). And this seems to be similar to what Poe wrote in The Philosophy of Composition “With the indulgence, to the utmost extreme, of this self-torture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping of the limits of the real”

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