"The Raven" ( Edgar Allan Poe )

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"In his 1836 "Letter to B--," Edgar Allen Poe contends that the object of poetry is pleasure, not truth; moreover, the pleasure should be indefinite rather than definite, consisting of romantic images whose sensations are ambiguous and whose effects present beauty as a "transpersonal or archetypal entity." (Knapp 48) In "The Philosophy of Composition," dated ten years later, Poe expands on his original notion by restricting the means by which indefinite pleasure can best be achieved within the framework of the poem: "[The] pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most pure, and the most elevating, is...found in the contemplation of the beautiful." (Poe 16)

Beauty, for Poe, is juxtaposed with the passion of the human soul--not necessarily a passion for a specific woman, but a melancholy longing frequently symbolized by the type of passion ..."

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