Page 59 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

whom the angels name Lenore.’ Quoth the Raven, ’Nevermore.’"

This principle of beginning at the end or climax to write a poem or story
was one so important that Poe insisted on it at great length. In the "Murders

in the Rue Morgue" the author necessarily began at the end, imagined the
solution of the mystery, and gradually worked back to the beginning,
bringing in his detective after everything had been carefully constructed for

him, though to the ordinary reader of the story it seems as if the detective
came to a real mystery.

It may be observed that all of Poe’s stories and poems are built up about
some principle of the mind. They illustrate how the mind works. After the

principle is stated the illustration is given.

Can anything be more important and interesting than to know how the mind
thinks, how it is inspired with terror or love or a sense of beauty? If you
know just how the mind of a man works in regard to these things, you can

yourself create the conditions which will make others laugh or cry, be filled
with horror, or overflow with a sense of divine holiness. Ordinary

story-tellers and ordinary poets write poems or stories that are pretty and
amusing; but it is only a master like Poe who writes to illustrate and explain
some great principle. His stories teach us how we may go about producing

similar effects in the affairs of life. We wish success in business, in society,
in politics. To gain it we must make people think and feel as we think and

feel. To do that we must understand the principles on which men’s minds
work, and no poet or writer analyzed and illustrated those principles so
clearly as Poe.

CHAPTER XII

MUSIC AND POETRY

Poe always maintained that music and poetry are very near of kin, and in
nearly all his greatest poems he seems to write in such a way as to produce

the impression of music. As you read his verses you seem to hear a musical