SOURCE: Fletcher, Richard M. “The Later Poems.” In The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 47-62. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.

In the following essay, Fletcher discusses Poe's limitations as a poet, suggesting that Poe's own awareness of those limitations caused him to revise his poetry extensively.

Our findings from previous chapters [of The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe] include the following. Poe's creative development in poetry, far from being the spontaneous development he so fondly would have us believe it was, resulted only after arduous effort over a period of approximately fifteen years. Nor can we truthfully say that he ever achieved that instantaneous and effortless act of creation in verse that he sought to give the impression of possessing as an inborn capability. Instead, even after he had written a poem Poe continued to be plagued by uncertainties about the soundness of its tonal values, a...