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By Root 1052 0

—and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness...The length, the province, and the tone being thus determined, I betook myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic piquancy which might serve me as a keynote in the construction of the poem. [He decides on a refrain whose application should be continually varied, and which therefore must be brief, ideally one word.] The question now arose as to the character of the word which was to form the close of each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt; and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant...It would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word, “Nevermore...” The next desideratum was a pretext for the continuous use of this one word...etc.

Whether Poe actually used this recipe in composing The Raven is doubtful—I’m inclined to agree with Marie Bonaparte that he didn’t, though for common-sense rather than Freudian reasons—but only a nineteenth-century writer would have gone in for this particular kind of mystification.

In their descriptions of the techniques of whaling and of river piloting, large sections of Moby-Dick and of Life on the Mississippi read like Fortune articles written by geniuses, if this may be conceived. (It almost happened with James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.) The whole middle section of Moby-Dick is a strange mixture of story and encyclopedia, with chapters on such topics as “The Line” (what kind is used, how it is coiled in the tubs, etc.), “The Crotch” (“a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwhale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon”), “The Blanket” (all about the whale’s skin), “The Head,” “The Tail,” and “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton.” Even in the climactic last chapters, when the quarry is at last engaged, Melville adds a typical footnote: “This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up and down poise of the whale-lance....” Moby-Dick is a happy Triumph of the Fact: from an intense concern with the exact “way it is,” a concentration on the minutiae of whaling that reminds one of a mystic centering his whole consciousness on one object, Melville draws a noble poetry. Whitman also draws poetry, of a less noble kind, from Facts; a good deal of Leaves of Grass reads like, in Emerson’s phrase “an auctioneer’s inventory of a warehouse”:

The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold...

The house-builder at work in the cities or anywhere,

The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,

The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them regular,

Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises according as they were prepared...

Many of his poems, as Salut au Monde, try magically to swallow the world by naming everything in it; to incorporate it all in Walt, democratically embracing everything and everybody, repeatedly proclaiming that one Fact is just as good as another Fact, that it is justified by merely existing (in Walt’s cosmic, omnivorous belly).

I do not call one greater and one smaller,

That which fills its period and its place is equal to any.

I am large, I contain multitudes.

Even the corpse is on his visiting list:

I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me.

Where Melville contemplated his Facts singly, turning each over in his mind until it had yielded up both its own concrete quality and its meaning as symbol, Whitman was too often the greedy child, grabbing Facts in double handfuls and dropping them quickly to pick up bright new ones:

Beginning my studies, the first step pleas’d me so much,

The mere fact consciousness...

I have hardly gone