commodities, and of literature as a commodity for the market, 
it became necessary to study the consumer’s experience. In a 
word it became necessary to examine the effect  of art and 
literature before producing anything at all. This is the literal  
entrance to the world of myth.

     It was Edgar Allan Poe who first worked out the rationale 
of this ultimate awareness of the poetic process and who saw 
that instead of directing the work to the reader, it was 
necessary to incorporate the reader in the work. Such was his 
plan in “the philosophy of composition.” And Baudelaire and 
Valéry, at least, recognized in Poe a man of the Leonardo da 
Vinci stature. Poe saw plainly that the anticipation of effect 
was the only way to achieve organic control for the creative 
process. T. S. Eliot, like Baudelaire and Valéry, gives his entire 
sanction to Poe’s discovery. In a celebrated passage of his