Reconsidering Poe’s “Rationale of Verse”

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s essay “The Rationale of Verse” has been ill-treated. A rationale is a “an explanation or exposition of controlling principles (as of an opinion, belief, practice, or phenomenon),” 1 and Poe’s essay attempts to explain the controlling principles of poetry—including all traditions, across all languages, throughout all history. In writing his “Rationale,” however, Poe disputed scholarly wisdom that had been established for centuries, and the science of his time offered no support. Lacking empirical evidence, Poe made claims from his own intuition and argued from examples and anecdotes. “The Rationale of Verse” was repeatedly rejected before its publication and has since been alternately ignored, scorned, and reviled for its “bluffing and shoddy scholarship.” 2 However, recent research in both linguistics and psychology holds the promise of legitimizing Poe’s theories. Additionally, Stuart Levine and Susan Levine’s recent edition Critical Theory: The Major Documents offers a new and exhaustive analysis of “Rationale,” providing us with the occasion to look again at this text. Given what we now know, Poe’s thesis may be extracted and reexamined, allowing us to see “The Rationale of Verse” as an important component of his critical theory. “The Rationale of Verse” is intended as a technical manual for prosodic practice, as Poe makes clear in its fourth paragraph: