How to write like Poe (Based on "The Philosophy of Composition")

How to write like Poe
(Based on "The Philosophy of Composition")


1) Tone and narrative

Poe says that the first thing he thinks when he is going to write is which feeling he wants to cause in the reader. After that, he thinks about how his text is going to be narrated. He says that he tries to be original. For that, he chooses to have a peculiar narrative with an ordinary tone, an ordinary narrative with a peculiar tone, or even a peculiar narrative with a peculiar tone.


2) Length

Poe says that many poets use excessive details. He says that he is not against it, but sometimes those details make the poem long. And that is a problem, because people would accept to read a book like Robinson Crusoe in many sittings, but with a poem, it is different. People want to read a poem in one or two sittings, so it must be short. But, according to Poe, it doesn't mean that a short poem is a bad poem. You have to try to make your best to involve the reader in your text.



3) Themes

For Poe, beauty and melancholy are the most poetical themes. Thus, to write a good poem, you must use them. He uses "The Raven" as an example. According to Poe, the combination of those two themes is one of the responsible for the success of the poem. He says that love is the most beautiful theme and to lose a love is the most melancholic theme. So, combining these elements with a refrain, he caused a great effect on the reader.


4) Refrain

Poe says that it is important to have a refrain in the poem. According to him, after reading it many times, the reader starts to make many poetical interpretations. In "The Raven" for example, he used the refrain "Quoth the Raven, Nevermore" (the answer usually uttered by the raven in the poem). In the first stanza, it was a plausible answer. In the second, a bit less. In the third, lesser, and so on.



5) Character and local

To produce a suspense effect on the reader, Poe says that he decides to use a raven as the talking bird. He says that he thought about using a parrot, but a raven was a more morbid bird. To complete the suspense effect, he had to combine the character with a local. For that, he decided to use the lover's chamber, a rich furnished place. He wrote that "it was a tempestuous night" to combine the situation with the raven too.



6) Conclusion

After reading "The Philosophy of Composition", we can easily understand why Poe was such a good writer,  can't we? We can realize that his poems were more than a simple text. They were  "mathematical problems" as he says. It explains to us "how the magic happens", why his poems and texts were so interesting. After all, how could a poem with such a good combination of tone, narrative, length, themes, characters and local, working together as gears, be a bad poem?