Twelve - Postlude: Philosophies of Composition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
Summary
I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would—that is to say, who could—detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say—but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition—and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—at the true purposes seized only at the last moment—at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view—at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the painful erasures and interpolations—in a word, at the wheels and pinions—the tackle for sceneshifting—the step-ladders, and demon-traps—the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
Thus Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1846 essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, set out to narrate the composition of his poem The Raven. His intention, he wrote, was to ‘render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.’ Baudelaire, introducing his translation of that essay in 1859 (to which he joined a prose translation of The Raven and his own preface), picked up Poe's theatrical metaphor, inviting his readers, ‘voyons la coulisse, l’atelier, le laboratoire, le mécanisme intérieur, selon qu’il vous plaira de qualifier la Méthode de composition’ (let us view the wings, the studio, the laboratory, the interior mechanisms, however it pleases you to describe ‘The Philosophy of Composition’). In another of his lengthy translator's essays on Poe's life and work, Baudelaire addressed the premise of ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ more directly:
The champions of inspiration will … not fail to find it blasphemous and profanatory, but I believe that it was for them that the article was specially written.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- French Art SongHistory of a New Music, 1870-1914, pp. 302 - 324Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022