Eureka
An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe
By Edgar Allan Poe
Hesperus Press
Copyright © 2003
Edgar Allan Poe
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781843910091
Introduction
A longing swept him like the wind of the muse to understand and transform
his beginnings: to see the indestructible nucleus and redemption
of creation, the remote and the abstract image and correspondence,
in which all things and events gained their substance and universal
meaning. However far from him, however distant and removed, he
longed to see,
he longed to see the atom, the very nail of moment in the
universe.
-Wilson Harris,
Palace of the Peacock (London, 1960)
Poe's Eureka is a product of the age that also produced Carlyle's Sartor
Resartus, Melville's Moby-Dick and Pierre, Thoreau's Walden, the music of
Liszt and Wagner, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Humboldt's Kosmos,
startlingly unconventional works difficult to confine to convenient categories,
works intended, indeed, to dissolve boundaries between categories
that their creators felt to be oppressive. To some of their creators Poe
has direct intellectual ties, to which this introduction and the notes allude,
but the larger context, the milieu in which such explosive artifacts
were invented, must be borne in mind lest Eureka appear an isolated
anomaly, an inexplicable freak. Mention, no more, is all that is appropriate
here. Understand that the list of unconventional and rebellious works
of that age is arbitrary; the reader may think of others. That was an era
of such things.
These introductory remarks are an attempt to characterize one of this
group of strange mid-century works. The reader should keep in mind that
these comments were written by an editor who, in the course of annotating
Eureka, came to see many aspects of how it had been put together.
Knowing its seams and stitches, acutely aware of its patchwork fabric, he
is perhaps too close to it, too liable to underestimate its impact on those
who come to it with less foreknowledge of Poe's methods. Poe intended
that impact to be powerful.
For certainly many readers have been moved by Eureka. Paul Valiry said
that he was grateful to Poe for the scientific briefing and for a glimpse of
the emotion behind scientific discovery. "These sciences," he wrote, "now
taught so coldly were founded and developed by men with a passionate
interest in their work. Eureka made me feel some of this passion." The
great underlying unity for which Eureka argues has of course been deeply
appealing to many. Valiry again put it well: "The universe is formed
on a plan the profound symmetry of which is present, as it were, in the
inner structure of our minds. Hence, the poetic instinct will lead us blindly
to the truth."
This introduction must stress the strong connections between Eureka,
the works that Poe used in preparing it, and the rest of his writing. Explaining
these connections, however, does not demonstrate that Eureka is merely
a collage of ideas and language assembled from the writings of others and
from Poe's own work, for it connects to his poetry, criticism, and fiction in
another way as well: in it, as in all his best writing, Poe remembered the
importance of dramatic impact, of memorable effect. Poe had selected the
largest of topics-matter and spirit, science and inspiration, the nature and
meaning of the universe, the history and destiny of the world. He meant
to bring it all off grandly. If much of the substance of Eureka comes from
borrowings familiar to the specialist in Poe, much of its rhetorical tone and
its occasional exaltation come from the same sources as that tone and that
mood when they appear in work of Melville, Whitman, Wagner, or other
inventors of new forms.
This is not to imply that there were no precedents. When Poe called
Eureka a poem, he was placing it in a very long tradition of writings that
were poetic and were at the same time attempts to grasp the nature of
things. In translation, at first hand or through secondary accounts, Poe
was familiar with at least some such works. Humboldt's Kosmos, to whose
author Eureka is dedicated but that Poe may not have read thoroughly,
was a modern example, at once a scientific treatise and a highly charged
emotional poetic response to the cosmic environment. Equally emotional
was the religiously moralizing scientific rhetoric of J. P. Nichol, much less
important intellectually but very well known to Poe, as we shall see.
What Poe engaged in is an ancient, honorable venture. Parmenides of
Elea, for example, around 470 B.C.E.-the date is very tenuous-similarly
presented his great findings as a poem. Carried by a chariot "on to the
resounding road of the Goddess" of Truth, he reported what the goddess
had spoken, axioms about the nature of existence, spirit, matter, oneness,
and the heavenly bodies. Poe would not have accepted Parmenides-paragraph
17 of Eureka, indeed, perhaps even alludes to his dicta as examples
of axioms that should be challenged-but like Parmenides he
began his truth-giving poem with a dramatized journey in quest of knowledge,
dealt with the nature of being, and attempted to tie all understanding
to a physics and astronomy that showed unity. "Thought and being
are the same," says Parmenides' goddess. Poe's, too.
There is philosophical precedent as well for Poe's idea of multiple
universes and multiple gods (87) in the thinking of the presocratic
philosopher Anaximander (ca. 610-ca. 546) as his ideas have been transmitted
by later Greek and Roman compilers and doxographers. Simplicius
(sixth century c.e.), for example, reported, "Those who believed in
an unlimited number of worlds, as Anaximander and his associates did,
regarded them as coming-to-be and passing away throughout unlimited
time" (Wheelwright, The Presocratics, 57). Cicero, in De Natura Deorum,
said, "It was the opinion of Anaximander that the gods come into existence
and perish, rising and setting at long intervals, and that there are
countless worlds" (ibid., 59). In St. Augustine's Civitas Dei, Anaximander
is said to have "believed that the worlds, ... are indefinite in number, and
they contain everything that would grow upon them by nature. He held
further [as Poe would, too] that those worlds are subject to perpetual
cycles of alternating dissolution and regeneration" (ibid., 59).
Poe scholars quarrel about how well he knew the classics. Perhaps he
knew very little about other than major figures. The matter of parallels
with ancient Anaximander, however, suggests several points. First, it shows
that Eureka, although strange, was by no means isolated; there is a long
tradition of similar works that unify poetic, religious, and scientific approaches
to truth. Sometimes they are even congruent in major details.
Comparison also suggests that Poe may have had a sense that the Greek
philosophy he knew (even his knowledge of Plato seems suspect to some
modern scholars, in part because in Poe's era Plato was read differently)
was only a flawed remnant of a direct visionary truth that people once
had enjoyed intuitively. Poe seems to have toyed with the idea of the existence
of a golden age. The ideal creative artist Ellison, in Poe's "The
Domain of Arnheim" (1842-47), speaks of how nature as we see it now
shows but the flawed remnant of the ideal beauty it once might have
embodied. Monos, in the visionary story "The Colloquy of Monos and
Una" (1841), says that seer-poets "ponder piningly, yet not unwisely, upon
the ancient days," when Nature spoke directly. The passage moves, appropriately,
to a wistful call for "the pure contemplative spirit and majestic
intuition of Plato" (Short Fiction, 108-9, 119-24, esp. 120, 146-47).
It is unlikely that Poe knew what is known or believed of the early Milesian
philosopher and cosmologist Anaximander. His name is never mentioned
in Poe's work, although there is an allusion to the Ionic school of
philosophers to which Aniximander belonged in Poe's satire "How to
Write a Blackwood Article" (1838). But because Eureka is dedicated to
Humboldt, whose Kosmos is a beautiful and poetic modern scientific work
that attempts to unify diverse fields of knowledge, and because Poe seems
to have felt that the "proper spirit" for scientific inquiry existed once in
ancient Greece, it is worth noting places in which Eureka for whatever
reason actually intersects ancient speculative thought. This is because,
although available evidence will not support claims of influence or knowledge,
it seems likely that Poe had the "ancients" in mind as he wrote
Eureka. Monos, in the story just mentioned, explains how occasionally in
human history "the poetic intellect-that intellect which we now feel to
have been the most exalted of all" has revealed truths that were not available
to "the unaided reason" (Short Fiction, 120). The motto of this story
is the Greek M[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "Mellonta Tauta," the title of the story Poe
incorporated into the opening portions of Eureka (11 and 174n).
There is no question, then, of at least the association of ideas. Ancient
Greece suggested the unity of poetic and scientific vision. The same passage
in "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," incidentally, alludes to "the
mystic parable" of the tree of knowledge. Poe had at hand a part of Humboldt's
Kosmos; he was cobbling together evidence to support a cosmological
insight. Perhaps, to mix metaphors, the ancient vein was open
again.
Poe's calling Eureka a prose-poem gives some readers pause. Several
overlapping explanations might justify the term. Eureka could be called
a poem, first, for reasons that Poe states very plainly in the course of it:
"Man cannot long or widely err, if he suffer himself to be guided by his
poetical ... instincts." Moreover, "the Universe ... is ... the most sublime
of poems.... Poetry and Truth are one" (237). Supernal beauty and
supernal truth are identical, and they are identical with us, because we
are made of the stuff of the eternal unity: the particles that constitute us
and all the universe began as "unparticled" matter. Mankind carries in
its being, then, knowledge of its origin and destiny; Poe's universe is even
now returning to unity. Through the ages, Poe writes, occasional sages
have brilliantly sensed the nature of reality. He created fictional sages of
his own, who speak in some of his visionary stories. They, like the scientists
he admires and like all of Poe's truth-givers, are poetically inspired.
Poetic truth-givers appear in stories other than visionary tales as well.
Thus in the detective story "The Purloined Letter" (1844) Poe pointedly
reveals that the detective Dupin is also a poet. It is he, using poetic gifts,
who can solve mysteries that elude the dead and unpoetic logic of the
prefect of police. In "The Domain of Arnheim" (1842-47), Ellison can
transform the environment to make it embody the Edenic beauty that was
the earth's in remote times past. Ellison is a landscape architect because,
the narrator explains, the creation of landscape provides the freest scope
for the poet. So because poetic inspiration gives truth and is in itself
founded in the essence of the universe, Eureka, a book that offers inspired
revelation of the true nature of the universe, is a poem.
As the annotations make clear, Eureka is closely intertwined with both
Poe's prose and his poetry. The notes point to numerous echoes of his
poems, but there are also echoes of his poetic theory. In his criticism, Poe
explains how poets deliberately play upon readers' minds, making associations
and constructing effects. In paragraph 188 and elsewhere, he
confesses that Eureka is built the same way, poetically, through "graduated
impression" rather than through a "merely natural ... arrangement." One
more sense, then, in which it is a "poem," despite Poe's famous dictum
that a long poem is impossible.
At a stage at which Poe seemed not yet to have devised the subtitle A
Prose Poem, the notion that Eureka was a poem occurred to a journalist.
Hence it is also possible that Poe did not think to call Eureka a poem until
the idea was given him by a reviewer in the New York Express, who said, "The
work has all the completeness and oneness of plot required in a poem"
(Pollin, "Contemporary Reviews of Eureka," 27).
The notes locate and discuss those sections in Eureka that refer to its
poetic nature. This essay, however, seems the proper place to mention a
famous contradiction: Poe says emphatically in his criticism that a long
poem cannot exist, for no reader can remain for long in the state of high
elevation of soul that is (to Poe) the nature of true poetic response. Eureka
cannot be read in one sitting. Yet Poe called it a poem. No matter. If
his entitling Eureka a poem is inconsistent with such statements in his
criticism, the criticism itself is sometimes contradictory, too. Indeed, Poe's
arguments are frequently contradictory throughout his writings.
Yet while the major criticism is sometimes contradictory, it consistently
makes use of the same allusions, references, citations, quotations, pet
sayings, and turns of phrase. Eureka does as well. Poe's criticism, his other
nonfiction prose, and his fiction as well are built from a single storehouse
of material. Indeed, Poe sometimes uses the same "example" in
different places to support opposite sides of an argument. The relationship
between Eureka and Poe's statements of literary theory is especially
close, as the notes show.
Four characteristics unite most of Poe's work: the presence of a body
of reusable ideas, phrases, allusions, and quotations; an apparent belief
in supernal inspiration; a craftsmanlike concern with strong effect; and
high intelligence. The first is not substantive, the second is sometimes
undercut or parodied. The third and fourth are almost always in evidence.
All four are present in Eureka, and their interaction needs to be assessed.
Poe complains in various pieces about transcendentalism in general
and about Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular, but he is often philosophically
very close to Emerson. Paragraph 22 provides a convenient illustration.
In it, Poe's narrator speaks of "the great thoroughfare-the majestic
highway of the Consistent." In his great poem "Blight," Emerson uses
"same" to mean just about what Poe does in paragraph 22 by "consistent":
The old men studied magic in the flowers,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the same. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars....
Continues...
Excerpted from Eureka
by Edgar Allan Poe
Copyright © 2003 by Edgar Allan Poe.
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