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The Rationale of Verse
"The Rationale of Verse" from Edgar Allan Poe. American author, poet, editor, and literary critic (1809-1849).
34 pages, Paperback
First published April 21, 2013
12 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Allan Poe
9,795 books28.7k followersThe name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.
For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 7, 2020
I have arranged my takeaway thoughts into a haiku:
"That poor, fussy man,
Just can't help picking apart
The things he loves best."
"That poor, fussy man,
Just can't help picking apart
The things he loves best."
December 5, 2020
There is no doubt that Poe was a true disciple of Poetry. Especially in the building blocks of its creation. Sometimes I wonder if Gene Roddenberry's alien culture of Vulcan logic wasn't based on Poe's theory of ratiocination which Poe used in explaining the rationale of the elements of poetry. I truly wonder if Poe's ears weren't slightly pointy?
The Rationale of Verse is a "critical essay by Poe conceived as a lecture and first published as Notes on English Verse in the March 1843 issue of the Pioneer. Poe revised the essay and added material to expand the earlier emphasis on English verse. The revised and final version of the essay, now titled the The Rationale of Verse, appeared in the October-November 1848 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. Critics consider the essay to be Poe's most complete account of metrics and poetic form. Poe elaborates in this essay upon topics that are introduced in The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, with the aim of providing a systematic analysis of versification. Poe argues for a formal approach to the composition of a poem, rather than an approach that allows creative whim free rein. For the poet to achieve a full totality of effect, Poe suggests that the poet must turn his attention in composition to the carefully orchestrated use of parallelism, refrain, and repetition. According to Poe, 'Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness. To this enjoyment, also, all the moods of verse-rhythm, metre, stanza, rhyme, alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects-are to be referred.' This rationale of verse states that the human enjoyment of equality, whose 'idea embraces those of similarity, proportion, identity, repetition, and adaptation or fitness,' is also an important factor in creating verse. 'Unpracticed ears can appreciate only simple qualities, such as those found in ballad airs. . . . Practiced ears, on the other hand, appreciate both equalities at the same instant. . . . One is heard and appreciated from itself: the other is heard by the memory.' The essay also provides readers with a lesson in scansion, both the nature of different metres and their uses by specific poets, although Poe finds that when the ancient Greek and Latin verse is 'scanned by the Prosodial rules, we can, for the most part, make nothing of it whatever.' The opposite is true of English verse in which 'the more emphatically we dwell on the divisions between the feet, [A poetic foot is a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry] the more distinct is our perception of the kind of rhythm intended.' " Sova, Dawn B. (2001). Edgar Allan Poe, A to Z: the essential reference to his life and work. New York: Checkmark Books. (207-208)
The Rationale of Verse is a "critical essay by Poe conceived as a lecture and first published as Notes on English Verse in the March 1843 issue of the Pioneer. Poe revised the essay and added material to expand the earlier emphasis on English verse. The revised and final version of the essay, now titled the The Rationale of Verse, appeared in the October-November 1848 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. Critics consider the essay to be Poe's most complete account of metrics and poetic form. Poe elaborates in this essay upon topics that are introduced in The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, with the aim of providing a systematic analysis of versification. Poe argues for a formal approach to the composition of a poem, rather than an approach that allows creative whim free rein. For the poet to achieve a full totality of effect, Poe suggests that the poet must turn his attention in composition to the carefully orchestrated use of parallelism, refrain, and repetition. According to Poe, 'Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness. To this enjoyment, also, all the moods of verse-rhythm, metre, stanza, rhyme, alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects-are to be referred.' This rationale of verse states that the human enjoyment of equality, whose 'idea embraces those of similarity, proportion, identity, repetition, and adaptation or fitness,' is also an important factor in creating verse. 'Unpracticed ears can appreciate only simple qualities, such as those found in ballad airs. . . . Practiced ears, on the other hand, appreciate both equalities at the same instant. . . . One is heard and appreciated from itself: the other is heard by the memory.' The essay also provides readers with a lesson in scansion, both the nature of different metres and their uses by specific poets, although Poe finds that when the ancient Greek and Latin verse is 'scanned by the Prosodial rules, we can, for the most part, make nothing of it whatever.' The opposite is true of English verse in which 'the more emphatically we dwell on the divisions between the feet, [A poetic foot is a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry] the more distinct is our perception of the kind of rhythm intended.' " Sova, Dawn B. (2001). Edgar Allan Poe, A to Z: the essential reference to his life and work. New York: Checkmark Books. (207-208)
May 24, 2023
I'm sad to say I have to abandon this only a few pages in. It's all technical poetic meter stuff I'm just not up to--no word yet on what exactly is the rationale of verse, but if it's syllable counting I'm afraid I disagree with my old friend Edgar.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews