More Than a Feeling

At the end of January 1847, Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe—the 24-year-old wife (and cousin) of Edgar Allan Poe—succumbed to tuberculosis in the couple’s cottage on the outskirts of New York City, in what is now the Bronx. Poe was devastated.

The six years during which Virginia battled the disease were hard on Poe. “It was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair which I could not longer have endured without the total loss of reason,” he wrote in a letter the year after Virginia’s death, alluding to her constant cycle of sickness and recovery. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity,” he confessed.

And that’s the story, the simple version anyway, enshrined in later biographies: Poe went mad. It’s a myth as prevalent today as it was in Poe’s final years. He’s often depicted as another John Keats, a man for whom the world was too much, ravaged by drink and circumstance into a slow deterioration and an early grave.

“[Poe] was at times a dreamer, dwelling in ideal realms, in heaven or hell, peopled with creations and the accidents of his brain,” according to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a literary rival responsible for many modern misconceptions about the poet. Because Poe made enemies through his literary criticism, because he was always hard up for money, and because his stories frequently featured characters on the verge of insanity, his contemporaries caricatured him as a mad, macabre ne’er-do-well. Thomas Dunn English offered perhaps the most savage parody of Poe in his novel 1844, or The Power of the S.F. (1846), in which a character named Marmaduke Hammerhead, author of “The Black Crow,” uses the phrase “Nevermore” and is portrayed as a drunkard, a fraud, and an abuser.

Griswold’s obituary of Poe, first printed in the New-York Tribune under the byline “Ludwig,” painted an unflattering portrait of the poet: “He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers...for the happiness of those who at that moment were objects of his idolatry, but never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned.” Griswold followed up the obituary with a biographical sketch that pushed the depiction of Poe as a madman even further. Many believe Griswold’s insults were meant to destroy Poe’s reputation, but they had the opposite effect; Poe became more popular in death than he had been in life. Griswold’s distorted image—which was one of the few biographical sketches of the poet for the next 25 years—solidified many of the myths that persist.

Of course, the world is rarely as simple as the myths people tell themselves, beautiful and baroque though such legends may be. Poe’s drinking did intensify after his wife’s death, his behavior did grow more erratic, and his health did become increasingly unstable, but after several months of sickness and grief-stricken creative paralysis, he dived headlong back into his work.

First, he finished his poem “Ulalume,” which he published anonymously in the American Review, in December 1847. “I do not care to be known as its author just now,” he wrote. In the poem, Poe returned to what he called “unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” namely “the death ... of a beautiful woman” (presaging director Alfred Hitchcock by a century).  

Though the poem’s interest in the death of a beautiful woman is understandable given Poe’s recent loss, the project he turned to next could not have been foreseen. Almost exactly a year after his wife passed, Poe gave a lecture at the Society Library in New York. In a letter discussing the upcoming speaking engagement, he claimed, “I have chosen a broad text—‘The Universe.’” This lecture, detailing his intuitive theory on the origins and inner workings of the universe, formed the basis of Eureka (1848), the last work Poe published.

From a certain angle, Eureka looks unlike any of Poe’s previous work. The ideas of poetry he expressed in earlier essays, such as “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition”—a poem shouldn’t be long, poetry is different from prose, poetry needs to avoid didacticism, literature should aim for a “unity in effect” that is achieved through methodical process, not “ecstatic intuition”—are contradicted by the method and meaning of Eureka. It’s a long, instructive, discordant prose poem that uses intuition to explore Poe’s personal cosmogony.

From another angle, though, Eureka appears as the capstone to a career toward which all Poe’s previous work had vectored, a culmination that encapsulates all the generic diversity with which he had experimented. Eureka is as much a scientific treatise as a poem, as much a critical essay as the monologue of a madman, as much a satire as a “tale of ratiocination” (Poe’s term for his detective stories featuring that proto Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin, a man of true intuition).

At the time of Eureka’s release, readers weren’t sure what to make of it. The book—subtitled “A Prose Poem”—seemed too scientific to be literature and too literary to be science, too serious to be taken satirically and too satirical to be taken seriously. A critic for Literary World called Eureka a glorification of “the noble art of guessing” and rebuked Poe’s scientific claims as “arrant fudge.” Alexander von Humboldt, the scientist to whom Poe dedicated Eureka, understood the book as an enjoyable “satire on science.” Decades later, T.S. Eliot argued that Eureka “makes no deep impression.” Paul Valéry, however, praised Poe’s cosmogony as an “affirmation of the symmetrical and reciprocal relationship of matter, time, space, gravity, and light.”

How readers should approach Eureka remains one of its enduring mysteries. “I offer this Book of Truths,” Poe explains in the preface, “not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:—let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.”

Yet, according to George P. Putnam, the book’s publisher, Poe’s initial pitch was far loftier: “Newton’s discovery of gravitation was a mere incident compared to the discoveries revealed in this book,” the poet said. Other sources, including contemporary letters in which Poe detailed “a loose summary of my propositions and results,” back up the idea that the “science” presented therein was meant as a sort of theoryless theory or proofless proof—“unthought-like thoughts”—but sincerely put forth.

“[I]t is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead,” Poe writes in the preface, but Eureka explodes the limits of poetic form while returning to familiar Romantic questions about the relationships between science and poetry, reason and imagination, truth and beauty. In his “Book of Truths,” Poe attempts to formulate and express what scientists now call a “theory of everything,” except Poe’s theory is based on nothing but intuition—or, as he might have phrased it, based on everything because of intuition.

***

“Science had developed from poetry,” Goethe once claimed, for it was through myth and verse that the ancients captured knowledge and passed it down to their descendants. As science developed, it moved further and further from its fetal poesy. Goethe hoped that “a swing of the pendulum might beneficently reunite the two, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.” Eureka is, at least in one interpretation, an attempt to swing the pendulum, a push toward the reunification of science and poetry after years of discord and misapprehension.

There is a long, rich history of poets wrestling with the fear that natural philosophy (aka science) would—to borrow a line from Keats’s “Lamia”—“clip an Angel’s wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line ... unweave a rainbow.” In fact, at a dinner party painter and critic Benjamin Haydon hosted, Keats once toasted “Confusion to the memory of Newton!” When William Wordsworth refused to drink to such a toast until Keats explained himself, Keats replied, “Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.”

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the Romantic poets of the 19th century witnessed a restructuring of modern life through science, innovation, and technology. Science promised to get humanity closer to truth and, thus, closer to God, but poets were skeptical of such claims. “And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?” asked William Blake. Elsewhere he wrote, “The atoms of Democritus / And Newton’s Particles of light / Are sands upon the Red sea shore, / Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.”

Poets across the pond resisted the tyranny of science and industry as well. Poe wrote about the potential dangers of natural philosophy in an early sonnet titled “To Science,” which calls science a “[v]ulture, whose wings are dull realities.” The transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of Poe’s contemporaries, determined that “Science does not know its debt to imagination.” Walt Whitman preferred looking up “in perfect silence at the stars” to hearing the lecture of a “learn’d astronomer.”

In the 20th century, E.E. Cummings accused “the naughty thumb of science” of prodding the beauty of the “sweet spontaneous earth.” More recently, Richard Dawkins tried to set the record straight in Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998). The book’s thesis is simple: “mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved.” He argues that science doesn’t rid the universe of beauty, doesn’t leech the wonder from the world but offers other ways to understand and appreciate the sublime. Plus, each mystery solved engenders more mysteries.

When a friend of theoretical physicist Richard Feynman claimed that scientists miss the beauty of a flower in their study of it, Feynman responded, “The beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn’t so readily available to others. I can see the complicated interactions of the flower. … I don’t see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds.”

But if there is something to the gripes of poets past, who seemed to fear the damage facts and figures can do, it is in the concept of critical reasoning and the scientific method. If inductive and deductive logic are the only two paths to truth, they wondered, then what of poets, dreams, beauty, symmetry, intuition?  

In Eureka, Poe attempts to navigate a new road to truth, swing Goethe’s pendulum, and reunify science and poetry by creating an intuitive cosmogony.

***

“Eureka! Eureka!—I found it! I found it!”—cried Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, as he stepped into the bath and noticed the water level rise. In this moment of intuition, he suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must equal the volume of the body part that’s submerged. Or so the story goes.

Poe had long been interested in intuition as a mode of thought. C. Auguste Dupin, the detective from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” was “the embodiment of an idea, strongly urged in Eureka and elsewhere, that poetic intuition is a supra-logical faculty, infallible in nature, which includes and obviates analytical genius,” according to the poet Richard Wilbur.

In Eureka’s opening pages, Poe offers his “general proposition”: “In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.” His goal is to simulate in textual form a man atop a mountain rapidly whirling on his heels “to comprehend the panorama in the sublimity of its oneness.” Poe continues:

We need so rapid a revolution of all things about the central point of sight that, while the minutiae vanish altogether, even the more conspicuous objects become blended into one. Among the vanishing minutiae, in a survey of this kind, would be all exclusively terrestrial matters. The Earth would be considered in its planetary relations alone. A man, in this view, becomes mankind; mankind a member of the cosmical family of Intelligences.

Early in the book, Poe introduces a strange science fiction conceit: a message in a corked bottle is set adrift in the sea by a future man (from the year 2848). This future “letter-writer” asks of his correspondent, “Do you know that it is scarcely more than eight or nine hundred years ago since the metaphysicians first consented to relieve the people of the singular fancy that there exist but two practicable roads to Truth?” Poe satirizes these two roads—the “deductive or à priori philosophy” of Aristotle (whom the future man calls “Aries Tottle”) and the “à posteriori or inductive” philosophy of Francis Bacon (whom the future man calls “Hog”). The letter-writer continues: “… you can easily understand how restrictions so absurd on their face must have operated, in those days, to retard the progress of true Science, which makes its most important advances—as all History will show—by seemingly intuitive leaps.”

The future letter-writer invokes the 17th-century German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler as an example of an intuitive leaper: “Yes!—these vital laws Kepler guessed—that is to say, he imagined them.” When the future man imagines asking Kepler if he achieved his understanding of planetary motion via the deductive or the inductive route, Kepler responds: “I know nothing about routes—but I do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul—I reached it through mere dint of intuition.”

After ending his “quotations from this very unaccountable and, perhaps, somewhat impertinent epistle,” Poe then proceeds to describe, over the course of 150 pages, the origins of the universe, which he intuits must have begun as an “absolute Unity in the primordial Particle,” from which the atoms that make up all matter “irradiated spherically—in all directions.” Atoms, now diffused, attract not to any concrete or abstract locality, not to a particular or general point, but each to each, to the condition of their original unity: “Nothing like location was conceived as their origin. Their source lies in the principle, Unity. This is their lost parent.”

Everything is, thus, connected: “If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now upon the point of my finger, what is the character of that act upon which I have adventured? I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator.” Perhaps here is the connection to the death of Virginia and why Eureka was the work that followed her passing. Poe sees in her death, like a precursor to the butterfly effect or chaos theory, one thread of a larger web in which everything attracts, and is attracted to, everything else.

For Poe, the universe is determined by two opposing forces: attraction and repulsion, unity and disunity, material and spiritual. Though scientists today would critique the idea that all matter bursts into “previously vacant space” rather than space itself bursting from that original singularity, it is remarkable that Poe intuited that the universe is expanding and that it began with a Big Bang—moreover, he understood this almost a century before Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaître proposed such theories in the 1920s. In Eureka, Poe also imagines black holes and is the first recorded person to solve Olbers’ paradox (the mystery of why the sky is dark at night rather than lit up by light from the seeming infinitum of stars).

In his book Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time (2002), Tom Siegfried points out that Friedmann—the mathematician who used Einstein’s theories to determine the universe is expanding and may eventually collapse—loved Poe’s work. “Not many people have made this connection,” Siegfried writes. “It seems to me quite possible, then, that Friedmann was conditioned by Poe’s imagination to see the true meaning of Einstein’s equations, whereas others, Einstein included, did not.”

Where science fails for Poe is in its insistence on only two paths to truth. Science is in need, it would seem, of poetic imagination. “A perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth,” he writes toward the end of Eureka. “We may take it for granted, then, that Man cannot long or widely err, if he suffer himself to be guided by his poetical, which I have maintained to be his truthful, in being his symmetrical, instinct.”

The “madding” Poe, the “guessing” Kepler, and the “bathing” Archimedes are one. They intuit, they imagine, they leap. They are poets as much as they are scientists. Their reasoning is as much aesthetic as it is logical.

***

In a piece for the New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson explains Poe’s seemingly miraculous scientific prophesies:

Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

What makes Eureka a poem worth discussing more than 170 years later isn’t merely that Poe predicted a host of scientific discoveries but, rather, the “aesthetic reasoning” that allowed him to do so. For Poe, the mind can understand the universe and God because the mind is of the same original unity. Scientific understanding of the universe and poeticization of the experience within it are not separate magisteria.

In Cosmic Optimism (1949), a study of American poets and their interpretations of evolution, Frederick William Conner argues, “In few places is the ambivalence of the nineteenth century in respect to mechanistic science and spiritual aspiration more plain than in Eureka.” The book’s betweenness is where much of its beauty lies—the delicate balance of these opposing forces. The prose poem exists not only between prose and poetry but also between Poe’s supposed sanity and his mythic madness, between corporeal Newtonian materialism and transcendentalist Emersonian evolutionism, between the Romantic tradition and the Industrial Revolution, between scientific argument and poetic revelation, between pre-Socratic method and post-Newtonian understanding, even between sincerity and satire.

Though Robinson is convinced of Poe’s sincerity and though contemporary letters seem to show the poet genuinely espousing these cosmological beliefs, some critics read Eureka as a satire or a hoax. Professor and critic Harriet R. Holman writes, “Certainly satire is suggested by Poe’s odd introductory section to Eureka, which he incorporated into the satiric tale ‘Mellonta Tauta.’ And satire is suggested by his startling catalog of seeming praise for discredited ‘scholars’ and for men he had attacked in other works—the Scottish philosopher-economists Hume, Mill father and son, and Bentham; and Humboldt, Carlyle, Emerson, and other Transcendentalist metaphysicians.” Of course, the fact that Poe aligns himself, at the end of Eureka, with a kind of pantheistic Transcendentalism, an ideology he elsewhere savaged as a critic, is one telltale sign of satiric intent. Another is the fact that Eureka is the antithesis of Poe’s expressed ideas of what poetry should be.

And it would be wise to remember that Poe perpetrated numerous hoaxes before Eureka. For example, his story now anthologized as “The Balloon-Hoax” was published in 1844 in the Sun newspaper in New York as a supposedly factual report. Similarly, the even more outlandish tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” was presented in pamphlets as a true story soon after its original printing. When Arch Ramsay, “druggist, of Stonehaven,” wrote to Poe from Scotland, asking if the Valdemar case was true, Poe admitted, “‘Hoax’ is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case.” To another correspondent Poe wrote, “‘The Valdemar Case’ was a hoax, of course.”

If Poe’s hoaxes were elaborate provocations, couldn’t Eureka also be a long con? Would it matter if it were?

In his essay “The Boom in Science Fiction,” the 20th-century Japanese writer Kōbō Abe writes about the internal logic of Poe’s works, furthering Valéry’s claim that “in Poe’s system consistency is both the means of discovery and the discovery itself.” Though Abe doesn’t specifically discuss Eureka in this excerpt, these lines may be instructive for a reading of that prose poem: “But rather than question whether Poe’s findings are verified by the facts, shouldn’t we rather ask whether he manages to elicit in his readers the feeling of surprise that accompanies discovery? In literature, proximity to discovered facts is far less important than adherence to the internal laws of discovery itself.”

This is what Poe enacts in Eureka through “mere dint of intuition”—the “internal laws,” the “poetic imagination,” the “aesthetic reasoning,” of discovery itself: “And, in fact, the sense of the symmetrical is an instinct which may be depended upon with an almost blindfold reliance. It is the poetical essence of the Universe—of the Universe which, in the supremeness of symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems,” Poe writes.

Did Poe miscalculate the importance of Eureka in his oeuvre? Will that change? Should it? Perhaps by the time some future person leaves a message in a bottle—say, in the year 2848—“The Raven” may be remembered “nevermore” and Eureka may “rise again,” as its preface predicts, in the annals of literature where science and poetry are beneficently reunited. Perhaps future readers will mock us 21st-century rubes for our insistence on only two roads to truth. Perhaps they will find us daft for mythologizing Poe as a madman instead of canonizing him as a saint of intuitive scientia.

Regardless of what the future will bring to readings of Poe, what makes Eureka worth exploring now is precisely its betweenness, its ambivalence, its multivocality. Though Eureka may seem didactic in that it teaches a theory of the universe, it’s anything but because it resists a monolithic interpretation. Poe elsewhere argued for the importance of “unity in effect” in literature, but what Eureka offers—even as it argues all organisms emerged from and are a part of a primary unity—is a mélange. It is poem and scientific treatise, it is satirical and sincere, it is the culmination of—and at odds with—the rest of Poe’s oeuvre. It also intuits a cosmogony of opposing forces, so unity and disunity, attraction and repulsion forever course through it. Like only the best hoaxes, it continues to cast a spell and demands readers cut their own paths toward its meaning.

In a letter to his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, dated July 7, 1849, Poe wrote, “I have no desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more.” He died three months later.