Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/09132_Field_TCGG T897.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 933b | 16 lines

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