"There are things so deep and complex that only intuition can reach it in our stage of development as human beings. And to Poe... well, a great logician could be an enemy to him, what he called conventional world reason"
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John Astin points to a Romantic conviction: some realities are too elusive for analysis, and only intuition can touch them. That insight fits Edgar Allan Poe, who distrusted what he might call the sober calculus of daylight, the kind of rationality that tidies away mystery. A great logician, in that sense, becomes an enemy because logic reduces, explains, and closes the case, while Poe writes to open abysses and keep their vertigo intact.
Poe himself embodies a paradox. He invented the detective tale and celebrated ratiocination through Dupin, yet even those stories hinge on intuitive leaps, atmospheric suggestion, and a feel for the criminal psyche that no rulebook supplies. Elsewhere he openly challenges utility and moral instruction as the purpose of art. In essays like The Poetic Principle he insists that poetry aims at Beauty, not Truth or Duty, and in The Imp of the Perverse he argues that a stubborn, self-sabotaging impulse lives within us, a principle reason cannot domesticate. Tales such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat render grief, dread, and compulsion with a sensory immediacy that bypasses argument. The logic of these works is the logic of a dream: coherent in feeling, resistant to paraphrase.
Even where Poe courts method, he complicates it. The Philosophy of Composition claims step-by-step planning for The Raven, yet the essay reads like a performance, half mask, half mirror, suggesting that design and inspiration are inseparable. In Eureka, his cosmic speculation anticipates ideas modern physics would later entertain, but he arrives there by an imaginative flight rather than demonstration.
Astin, who inhabited Poe onstage, hears the hierarchy beneath the surface: let intuition lead and allow reason to serve. Conventional world reason wants closure; Poe wants resonance. To meet him on his own ground is to admit that our present stage of human knowing is crooked, partial, and that the truest paths sometimes begin where logic, confident and deaf, refuses to go.
Poe himself embodies a paradox. He invented the detective tale and celebrated ratiocination through Dupin, yet even those stories hinge on intuitive leaps, atmospheric suggestion, and a feel for the criminal psyche that no rulebook supplies. Elsewhere he openly challenges utility and moral instruction as the purpose of art. In essays like The Poetic Principle he insists that poetry aims at Beauty, not Truth or Duty, and in The Imp of the Perverse he argues that a stubborn, self-sabotaging impulse lives within us, a principle reason cannot domesticate. Tales such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat render grief, dread, and compulsion with a sensory immediacy that bypasses argument. The logic of these works is the logic of a dream: coherent in feeling, resistant to paraphrase.
Even where Poe courts method, he complicates it. The Philosophy of Composition claims step-by-step planning for The Raven, yet the essay reads like a performance, half mask, half mirror, suggesting that design and inspiration are inseparable. In Eureka, his cosmic speculation anticipates ideas modern physics would later entertain, but he arrives there by an imaginative flight rather than demonstration.
Astin, who inhabited Poe onstage, hears the hierarchy beneath the surface: let intuition lead and allow reason to serve. Conventional world reason wants closure; Poe wants resonance. To meet him on his own ground is to admit that our present stage of human knowing is crooked, partial, and that the truest paths sometimes begin where logic, confident and deaf, refuses to go.
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| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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