“content,” is not mysterious if looked at directly. This mosaic 
TV image had already been adumbrated in the popular press 
that grew up with the telegraph. The commercial use of the 
telegraph began in 1844 in America, and earlier in England. The 
electric principle and its implications received much attention in 
Shelley’s poetry. Artistic rule-of-thumb usually anticipates the 
science and technology in these matters by a full generation or 
more. The meaning of the telegraph mosaic in its journalistic  
manifestations was not lost to the mind of Edgar Allan Poe. He 
used it to establish two startlingly new inventions, the 
symbolist poem and the detective story. Both of these forms 
require do-it-yourself participation on the part of the reader. By 
offering an incomplete image or process, Poe involved  his 
readers in the creative process in a way that Baudelaire, Valéry, 
T. S. Eliot, and many others have admired and followed. Poe 
had grasped at once the electric dynamic as one of public