Transcript of John Astin as Edgar Allan Poe
Will you, like so many others, imagine the ringing and hear the rhythm of "The Bells?" If my poetic theories are correct, you shall feel them in your bones. As I wrote in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1831, "A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth. It is opposed to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music, without the idea, is simply music. The idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness."
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