Poetry And Imagined Worlds

Creativity and Everyday Experience

Olga V. Lehmann, Nandita Chaudhary, Ana Cecilia Bastos, Emily Abbey, Olga V. Lehmann, Nandita Chaudhary, Ana Cecilia Bastos, Emily Abbey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319648576
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319648583
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Psychology

Brings together international scholars from the fields of psychology, creativity and literature

Looks into the challenging question of how the arts and poetry in particular is used in human decision making and our search for meaning

Focuses on contemporary challenges in these areas

Part IPoetic Resources as Tools to Make Meaning

© The Author(s) 2017

Olga V. Lehmann, Nandita Chaudhary, Ana Cecilia Bastos and Emily Abbey (eds.)Poetry And Imagined WorldsPalgrave Studies in Creativity and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64858-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Liaison of Poetry and Tattoos: The Multivoicedness in Edgar Allan Poe’s Poem “The Raven”

Meike Watzlawik¹

(1)

Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Meike Watzlawik

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Edgar Allan Poe, last verse of “The Raven,” 1845

Meike Watzlawik

is a Professor for Development & Culture at the Sigmund Freud University, Berlin, Germany. Before, she was a visiting professor at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, Department of Development & Culture (2011–2014). From 2008 to 2009, she was a visiting scholar (Humboldt Foundation Feodor-Lynen Awardee) at Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA, where she became part of the international network of cultural psychologists initiated by Jaan Valsiner. She studied psychology at the TU Braunschweig, where she also received her doctoral degree in 2003 and Habilitation in 2008. Examining different aspects of identity has been the focus of her research.

End Abstract

Months ago, a friend of mine showed me—hesitant at first—his new tattoo. It was a picture of a skull with a raven sitting on top of it, and the word “Nevermore!” He will now carry this insignia on the side of his abdomen for the rest of his life—at least that is the intention. When I asked him why he had chosen that particular tattoo, he replied that, having been inspired by Egdar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” he wished to symbolize a lost love. In addition, it was to remind him of never wanting to go through such pain again, as the (recently) lost love had caused him. “Nevermore!” he stated—in a melancholic tone of voice.

I had read “The Raven,” before, but I could not remember much of it, and so I read it again. The poem indeed describes a man lost in sorrow over the death of his love Lenore. Sitting in his room, he hears a tapping, and—eventually—he is joined by a raven, who repeatedly, and no matter which question the man poses, only replies, “Nevermore.” Pondering his loss, the man takes the raven to be an evil prophet, especially because even the question of whether he will see Lenore again in Heaven is answered with “Nevermore.” In despair, the man commands the raven to leave, but it will not quit its perch, leaving the man to believe that his soul will “nevermore” leave the raven’s shadow (cp. stanza above). The poem itself is melancholic, pessimistic, and to some extent, gruesome. Had that been Poe’s intention when writing it?

The Author’s Perspective

Poe offered an answer in his 1846 essay, “The Philosophy of Composition ,” by describing how he had written “The Raven.” In every poem, he considers beauty to be “the atmosphere and the essence” (Poe, 1846, p. 164). But how can beauty be found in a poem that triggers such emotions as melancholy and sadness? Poe (1846) explains that “the tone of [beauty’s] highest manifestation” (p. 164) is one of sadness: “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones¹” (p. 164). After declaring melancholy to be the intended tone of his poem, he then explains why and how he had chosen the refrain, “Nevermore,” as a word capable of supporting the poem’s tone, and meant to be repeated in a continuous or monotonous way. Since humans seemed inadequate for this task, Poe chose a “non-reasoning creature capable of speech”—the raven, a bird of ill omen and with a far better chance than a parrot in maintaining a melancholic tone, as Poe states. Tone and refrain being set, the question of the topic remained. Poe describes his choice as follows:

I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” […] the answer, here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” (p. 165)

Following this statement, Poe explains the establishment of the poem’s climax, comments on the poem’s originality, and gives reasons for choosing the locale where lover and raven meet. He describes the encounter of the two and how the reader, eventually, is able to grasp the under-current of meaning when Poe uses the poem’s first metaphorical expression, having the lover demand: “Take thy beak from out my heart!” Since the raven again answers “Nevermore,” the reader, like Poe, begins to regard the raven as a symbol of “mournful and never-ending remembrance”—especially when reading the last line of the poem: Shall be lifted—nevermore!

So yes, Poe intended “The Raven” to be melancholic—and beautiful at the same time. He intended the raven to be a symbol for suffering, but also for remembering something of beauty. What Poe does not convey in his “Philosophy of Composition” is whether he ever experienced such mournful and never-ending remembrance himself: He neither denies nor states this. Apparently, friends must have suspected certain meanings, but Poe only comments that they “have evinced a disposition to misrepresent” the “elucidation of my real meaning.” Today, it can be read manifold that Edgar Allan Poe most likely was inspired to write “The Raven” because of personal experience . Stedman (1884/2014) summarizes this most appropriately when writing:

Through the industry of Poe’s successive biographers, the hit made by The Raven has become an oft-told tale. The poet’s young wife, Virginia, was fading before his eyes, but lingered for another year within death’s shadow. The long, low chamber in the house near the Bloomingdale Road is as famous as the room where Rouget de l’Isle composed the Marseillaise. (pp. 5–6)

“The Philosophy of Composition” is, nevertheless, and in contrast to the suspected background, a rather technical dissection of “The Raven” and, the way in which it was written. Poe strives to make it appear as if the poem was the result of a detailed, almost mathematical plan to fulfill its intended purpose (Vitoriano & Gomes, 2015); these authors even argue that, with this dissection, Poe positions himself diametrically opposite to the dominant romanticism of his time, a more aligned position proposed by Hegel […], for whom the work of art is born “from training by thought, reflection on the way of its production, as well as exercise and skill to produce” (p. 106).

Since Poe is post hoc commenting on his own work, depicting the writing process as labor as well as inspiration (i.e., his gift), he might be seen as “precursor of the new modern trends of relationship that the author establishes with his own work, readers and critics” (Vitoriano & Gomes, 2015, p. 106), allowing for a different kind of dialogicality : talking about the process of emergence rather than about the meaning of the end result itself. Yet the writing process still seems to have been more personal than that, since scholars have discussed whether this technical essay was an intellectual hoax, as Poe himself might have mentioned in front of friends (Stedman, 1884, p. 13) . Stedman (1884) concludes that—like all poems —“The Raven” most likely was inspired, in parallel, by personal experience (which was, of course, not the sole influence, as we will show later) and that Poe subsequently saw how his draft, having emerged in that way, could be improved, as described in “The Philosophy of Composition .” The technical dissection of the poem might therefore be considered “neither wholly false nor wholly true” (Stedman, 1884, p. 14). The word “true” in the preceding sentence suggests nonetheless that there is a truth, but that, in fact, the meaning assignment can change over time, and can be ambivalent at certain moments. In his first draft of “The Raven,” Poe might have been inspired by personal experience , giving voice to his own mourning, suffering, ambivalence , and despair, to name just a few possible emotional states. Later on, the technical approac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Poetic Resources as Tools to Make Meaning
• Part II. The Poetic Roots of Creativity and Imagination
• Part III. The Poetics of Daily Life
• Back Matter