From the dream of universal social therapy and regeneration which Wordsworth and Coleridge had at first accepted as a necessary consequence of submission of the heart to the pure messages of the external world, Coleridge awakened with his 'Dejection: An Ode' in 1802.

Giedion influenced me profoundly. Space, Time and Architecture was one of the great events of my lifetime. Giedion gave us a language for tackling the structural world of architecture and artifacts of many kinds in the ordinary environment. He learned this language from his preceptor, Wölfflin, whose principles of art history revolutionized the entire language of art criticism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century… Giedion began to study the environment as a structural, artistic work – he saw language in streets, buildings, the very texture of form.

Whitehead does not elaborate on the great nineteenth century discovery of the method of invention. But it is, quite simply, the technique of beginning at the end of any operation whatever, and of working backwards from that point to the beginning. It is the method inherent in the Gutenberg technique of homogeneous segmentation, but not until the nineteenth century was the method extended from production to consumption. Planned production means that the total process must be worked out in exact stages, backwards, like a detective story. In the first great age of mass production of 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.

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.

Harold Stahmer has written Speak, That I May See Thee.

A poem in itself functions dramatically, not strategically or persuasively. It is for contemplation, and functions for the spectator or reader as a means of extending and refining moral perception or dramatic awareness.

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 Valery, at least, recognized in Poe a man of the Leonardo da Vinci stature.