"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words"
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Poe compresses his entire poetics into a single line, declaring what poetry is for and how it works. Rhythmical signals music: meter, cadence, refrain, echo. Creation signals artifice, a deliberate design rather than a spontaneous spill of feeling. Beauty names the goal, not truth, utility, or moral instruction. He belongs to a Romantic tradition, yet he draws a sharp boundary; the poem is not a sermon or a philosophical argument, but an engineered experience of exalted feeling.
In essays like The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, he insists that the highest object of poetry is the elevation of the soul through beauty, and that beauty reaches its most potent form when tinged with melancholy. Hence the obsessive sonics of The Raven: internal rhyme, alliteration, haunting refrain. Lines such as "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" illustrate how meaning is inseparable from music; the weary, dragging trochees enact the mood. Rhythm is not decoration but structure, the very mechanism by which language becomes more than statement and transforms into spell.
This emphasis resists the 19th-century American demand that literature be edifying or practical. Poe treats the poem as an autonomous artwork pursuing a single effect, achieved through unity, brevity, and sound. By calling beauty the end, he relocates value from message to experience, from the correctness of what is said to the felt radiance of how it is said. The claim also anticipates the Symbolists, who found in his work a model for poetry as music of meaning, with Baudelaire and Mallarme extending his fusion of cadence and suggestion.
The definition is narrow and provocative, but its power lies in focus. Poetry, for Poe, is the art of making beauty audible in language, the crafting of rhythms that lift ordinary words into an intensity where emotion, memory, and sound converge.
In essays like The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, he insists that the highest object of poetry is the elevation of the soul through beauty, and that beauty reaches its most potent form when tinged with melancholy. Hence the obsessive sonics of The Raven: internal rhyme, alliteration, haunting refrain. Lines such as "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" illustrate how meaning is inseparable from music; the weary, dragging trochees enact the mood. Rhythm is not decoration but structure, the very mechanism by which language becomes more than statement and transforms into spell.
This emphasis resists the 19th-century American demand that literature be edifying or practical. Poe treats the poem as an autonomous artwork pursuing a single effect, achieved through unity, brevity, and sound. By calling beauty the end, he relocates value from message to experience, from the correctness of what is said to the felt radiance of how it is said. The claim also anticipates the Symbolists, who found in his work a model for poetry as music of meaning, with Baudelaire and Mallarme extending his fusion of cadence and suggestion.
The definition is narrow and provocative, but its power lies in focus. Poetry, for Poe, is the art of making beauty audible in language, the crafting of rhythms that lift ordinary words into an intensity where emotion, memory, and sound converge.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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