Originality and Innovation in the Poetry of Edgar Allen Poe

To experiment is a process that is associated mainly with the sciences.   To the realm of science and the scientific mind, which thinks, hypothesises, theorises, and tests through experimentation, and all with a view to ultimately creating a law.   This law will be treated as a truth, something about which any question of it's own integrity has slowly but surely been drained to it's last drop, to become dry of doubt, mystery dissolved.   It may have taken innovation and experimentation to get there, but now it is unmoveable.   In artistic or creative pursuits, this can never be true.   Some poets have made a name by breaking any existing laws or rules they may have come up against, but in general, there are no laws waiting.   Here is an examination of experimentation, but in the context of innovation in the works of a poet, namely Edgar Allen Poe: 'the range of imagination is unlimited.'1   He was an experimentel man, an amateur mathematician2, a writer and poet who was 'teaching a very strict and deeply alluring doctrine, in which a kind of mathematics and a kind of mysticism became one . . .'.3   Experimentation for him was a process driven by creative innovation and imagination of which uniqueness and originality were the by-products, and indeed the goal.4   Language was his laboratory.   Using three of his more well known poems, 'The Raven', 'Ulalume', and 'The Bells'   it is possible to examine this process in his work.
  His early work as a writer, apart from earning him a wage and some respect as a critic, went mostly unrecognised until 1845, when he published the now well known poem, 'The Raven'.   Clearly there was something about this poem that captured the interest of it's readers.   What exactly this may have been, is unlikely to be found anywhere, if not in Poe's own description of the process of it's creation, in an essay entitled, 'The Philosophy of Composition'.   This is a rare and very interesting window into the mind of a poet.   What we find here, is an...