Poe and Ravel: mécanisme intérieur

Time and time again, when asked in interviews about the greatest influences on his compositions, Maurice Ravel would answer that “[q]uant à la technique, mon maître, c’est certainement Edgar Poe.” For the student of Poe, his “Philosophy of Composition,” which purports to analyze The Raven, is central to an understanding of his aesthetic theory and Ravel would have come across both works in French in the celebrated 1857 edition of Charles Baudelaire. For the student of Maurice Ravel, his deliberately repeated statement that Poe’s analysis of The Raven was so important to his compositional method thus appears as a deliberate invitation on the part of the composer, tempting all who wish to understand Ravel into perusing Baudelaire’s rendering of the essay for secrets of his craft. But is Ravel leading us astray? This article better contextualizes the reception the American poet received in France and attempts to understand Ravel’s commentary in reference to his compositional method and contemporary notions of dandyism. Is Ravel’s indebtedness to Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” a cultural by-product of an overwhelmingly fashionable author, an empty or quasi-empty cipher contrived by Ravel to mischievously deceive us, or is there a real and substantial resonance between Ravel’s and Poe’s “mecanisme intérieur,” to use Baudelaire’s description of Poe’s method