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To my mother, who read me scary stories
Art is the perfection of Nature: Were the world now as it was the sixt day, there were yet a Chaos: Nature hath made one world, and Art another. In briefe, all things are artificiall, for Nature is the Art of God.
—Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643
INTRODUCTION
Subject: The Universe
At the start of February 1848, New York newspapers announced a mysterious impending event: “Edgar A. Poe will lecture at the Society Library on Thursday evening … Subject, ‘The Universe.’” There could be no grander topic. But no one could say just what to expect: a story, a poem, a critical diatribe? It might contain anything and everything.
The Home Journal ventured, “There is but one thing certain about it, that it will be compact of thought, most fresh, startling, and suggestive.” As a “born anatomist of thought” Mr. Poe “takes genius and its imitations to pieces with a skill wholly unequalled on either side the water.” The announcements fueled speculation about the man himself. Despite his renown, he had been out of the public eye for more than a year.
The venue, newly relocated to Leonard and Broadway, offered few clues. The Society Library’s board included social luminaries such as the banker Cornelius Roosevelt. Its fare was more polished than at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, ten blocks south; Ralph Waldo Emerson had delivered his “Lecture on the Times” there, but all manner of entertainments passed through its doors. Recent performances featured Swiss bell ringers, the American Daguerreotype Association, and the stage magician Signor Blitz.
Would Poe’s lecture be a story, a poem, a scientific treatise, or some unheralded novelty? The Weekly Universe remarked, “Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science—not merely a poet—not merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.”
The speech was Poe’s return after a fretful absence. He had become famous three years earlier with his poem “The Raven.” Its odd, enticing melody and haunting refrain, uttered by a cryptic bird to a scholar racked with grief, had engraved itself on the public mind: “Quoth the raven: Nevermore.” First published under a pseudonym, it was celebrated, reprinted, and parodied. A Gotham paper raved, “It is written in a Stanza unknown before to gods, men, and booksellers, but it fills and delights the ear strangely with its wild and clashing music. Everyone reads the Poem and praises it.”
They also heard it. Poe became a fixture of New York’s literary salons, where he magnetized listeners with intense and hushed recitations. The poet Frances Sargent Osgood recalled “his proud beautiful head erect, his dark eyes flashing with the electric light of feeling and of thought.” Another author reported his reputation as a practitioner of mesmerism, the new science of invisible fluids and the vibrations that unite minds: “People seem to think there is something uncanny about him, and the strangest stories are told, and, what is more, believed, about his mesmeric experiences.”
“The Raven” opened other doors. In 1845 he gave a lecture titled “The Poets and Poetry of America” to a crowd of three hundred, denouncing the feeble state of American writing and criticism, its regional cliques and inflated reputations. By the end of 1846, Poe’s poems, tales, unflinching opinions, and flair for provocation had brought him near to his dream of running his own magazine. A sketch of him in the first flush of fame suggests a man of poise, wit, and discernment, with good reason to be optimistic (if perhaps a bit anxious).
But his luck changed. For most of 1847 he dropped from salons and lecture halls, to whispers of scandal and tragedy. He moved to Fordham, twelve miles north of the city, with his aunt and his ailing wife, Virginia. He later confessed to a friend, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much.”
Both allies and enemies speculated about his condition. His friend George Eveleth, a medical student, wrote to the editor Evert Duyckinck, “Where is Mr. Poe—what is he doing—and what is he likely to do?… Does he continue to drink hard yet, or has he reformed?” His rival Thomas Dunn English, who had written a novel with a vicious caricature of a drunken Poe, ridiculed his lowered state: “We understand that Mr. E. A. POE has been employed to furnish the railing for the new railroad over Broadway. He was seen going up the street a few days ago, apparently laying out the road.”
Poe around 1846, miniature sketch by John A. McDougall
In fact, withdrawn from the squabbles of the New York papers and salons, safe from public scrutiny and petty attacks, Poe was plotting the next phase of his career. While he was nearly isolated, at one of his lowest moments, his imagination soared. Rambling through Fordham’s lush meadows and on the stark, stony cliffs along the Hudson, he undertook daring new works: essays articulating the “science of composition”; “Ulalume,” an incantatory ballad lit by the “nebulous lustre” of a newly born star; a visionary tale, “The Domain of Arnheim,” scrawled on a single, long scroll, in which an artist of unlimited wealth engineers a vast landscape garden resembling a heaven or a hell; and, most audaciously, the lecture titled “The Universe,” which the New York papers announced in early 1848.
Poe was pinning his hopes on this work, the first step of his concrete plan “to re-establish myself in the literary world.” As a magazine writer, he was lucky to receive more than twenty dollars for an article, no matter how widely it was read. A lecture with a decent audience paying fifty cents each could earn him several months’ rent. He planned to follow the New York event with a national tour, reaping ticket revenues and subscriptions for his reborn literary magazine, The Stylus, starting with his former classmates from the University of Virginia and the U.S. Military Academy: “I must get a list of, at least, five hundred subscribers to begin with:—nearly two hundred I have already. I propose, however, to go South and West, among my personal and literary friends—old college and West Point acquaintances—and see what I can do.”
His lecture’s published title would be Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe. “Eureka!—I found it!”—was the exclamation of the ancient philosopher Archimedes upon discovering a method for testing the purity of gold. “Eureka!” was also the joyful shout of prospectors in California. Poe was convinced that the discoveries in his essay would secure his immortal fame, make him rich, and, by plumbing the mysteries of the universe, save his life.
The strategy was less crazy than it might seem. Poe had trained in mathematics and engineering at West Point and spent subsequent decades reviewing fast-breaking developments in electromagnetism, chemistry, natural history, and astronomy; he was positioned as well as nearly any of his contemporaries to speak on cosmology. The origin and makeup of the universe obsessed great minds of the age—Pierre-Simon Laplace, John Herschel, Alexander von Humboldt—and had captivated the American public. The Scottish minister and astronomer Thomas Dick published popular astronomy books that harmonized natural science and Protestant theology, while the eight volumes of the Bridgewater Treatises had updated “natural theology” to keep pace with scientific advances.
The bestselling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in Edinburgh in 1844, was still being ferociously debated on both sides of the Atlantic. Scandalously, Vestiges retold the origin and development of the solar system, the sun, the earth, and humanity as the result of uniform natural law—without divine intervention. Was the book’s anonymous author a radical, a crank, or a respectable man of science? No one could say. Building on the notoriety of Vestiges, just days before Poe was to speak at the Society Library in early 1848, John Pringle Nichol, professor of astronomy at Glasgow—one of the prime suspects for having written Vestiges—gave a series of well-attended talks in New York.
Nichol had concentrated popular attention on nebulae—remote, shimmering patches of light being closely inspected with powerful new telescopes. According to the “nebular hypothesis” he advanced, our own sun had once been a whirling, luminous cloud of gas before it condensed, leaving the planets orbiting in its wake.
The theological consequences were stark: if true, this hypothesis meant the heavens had gradually evolved into their present state and the universe had a markedly different history than in Genesis. If such processes of evolution occurred as a result of natural laws, without a creator’s intervention, they might still be at work, beyond our tiny planet, or even here on earth, in the formation of new species.
In and around the cottage in Fordham, his aunt and vigilant protector, Maria Clemm, accompanied Poe as he worked. “I used to sit up with him, often until four o’clock in the morning
Since childhood, Poe had been looking to the stars: peering through his British-made telescope from the balcony of his foster father’s Richmond mansion; polishing lenses as an artillery engineer in the U.S. Army; setting one of his earliest poems, “Al Aaraaf,” on a new star observed by the astronomer Tycho Brahe. Like C. Auguste Dupin, the gentleman investigator Poe introduced in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—the first modern detective story—Poe suspected that the constellations he observed on his night walks held clues to the early history of the universe and the laws governing its life and death.
Poe spent January 1848 revising his lecture, like the scholar in “The Raven,” “wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” He hired the Society Library and called on friends in the press to announce the event. Yet the weather was beyond his control. The chosen night, February 3—a year and four days after his wife’s death—a storm struck the city.
When Poe stepped to the lectern, dressed with simple elegance in a black suit with an immaculately clean (if threadbare) collar and neckerchief, and placed before him a stack of manuscript pages covered with his minuscule and regular handwriting, a mere sixty-odd people had braved the cold to attend—a “select, but highly appreciative audience.”
Undaunted, Poe unraveled the mystery of the universe. “I have seen no portrait of POE,” a listener remarked, “that does justice to his pale, delicate, intellectual face and magnificent eyes. His lecture was a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy. He appeared inspired, and his inspiration affected the scant audience almost painfully.” The core of Poe’s lecture was a new creation story, marked with strange and poetic symmetries: a theory of the formation of stars, extending the nebular hypothesis to the universe as a whole.
Everything, in his telling, began with a single, unitary particle that exploded outward to the limits of “the Universe of Stars,” its diffused matter gathering in nebular clouds. These clouds then condensed inward, forming suns and planets. Yet the inward force of gravity was countered by a rival, repulsive force that Poe called electricity—the cause of all “phaenomena of vitality, consciousness and Thought.” For eons, the two principles had been locked in struggle, generating the diverse beings that filled Earth and other planets. Eventually, gravity would take the upper hand, and “with a million-fold electric velocity” all matter would rush back together, hurtling once more into the “absolute unity” of the “primordial Particle.”
A reporter for the Morning Express described the lecture as “the most elaborate and profound” he had ever heard; it was “greeted with warm applause by the audience, who had listened with enchained attention throughout.” Poe saw Eureka as the culmination of his writings, his dreams, and his ill-starred life. He told a friend that it was destined to “revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science. I say this calmly—but I say it.”
When it was published, he wrote to his mother-in-law, “I have no desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more.” He died the next year.
The Poe Effect
Many of Poe’s devoted fans—whether they revere him as the mastermind of horror, inventor of the detective story, pioneer of science fiction, high priest of symbolist art, or brooding prince of the goths—have never read Eureka, the cosmological theory he propounded that night in 1848. Beyond its length, and the difficulties of its form and argument, Eureka seems out of place among Poe’s most famous works, whether his outrageous tales of horror and madness or his hymns to ethereal beauty.
This book tells the full story of Edgar Allan Poe’s life—but it does so from a new angle. It returns Poe’s cosmology to its place at the summit of his life and thought, showing his work as a singular expression of the tumultuous ideas and passions of his age, thoroughly bound up with the emergence of modern science.
Poe explored the exhilirating prospects and treacherous blind spots of science’s powerful new ways of assembling the world. Understanding his life and work demands close attention to his multiform engagements with these theories, methods, and discoveries. In return, Poe’s life and works are vividly revealing of modern science in a decisive moment. The historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn labeled the first half of the nineteenth century “the second scientific revolution.” With methods of precise measurement and calculation, researchers were consolidating the programs of the seventeenth century—the first “scientific revolution,” identified with Bacon, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, and Newton—while scientific fields diversified and expanded. Poe’s case sheds distinctive light on the obsessions and controversies of early nineteenth-century science as it unfolded in America. His work embodies its defining tensions: between popular diffusion and elite control, between empathy and detachment, between inspired enthusiasm and icy materialism.
Poe argued that every word and image in a poem or tale should contribute to a single, deliberately chosen effect. His works deliver a dazzling array of shocks and delights—effects of terror, humor, disgust, sublimity. Yet a second moment often follows the initial blow. Attentive readers might wonder, how did he do it? What combination of words, expectations, and publicity allowed him to strike such a concussion upon the individual and collective mind? Further questions might follow: Were these the techniques of a high and inspired art, or crude tricks to trigger base reactions? In cases where Poe attained an effect of reality, or “verisimilitude,” readers might ask, is this a true report of facts or a hoax, a humbug?
The “Poe effect” was an exclamation point followed by a question mark: a striking, concentrated impact that left the reader wondering after a chain of causes. These led back to a captivating but elusive source: Poe himself. Poe’s fantastic tales, detective stories, and nonfiction writings dramatized the act of inquiry and the struggles, fears, hopes, and delusions of the human being undertaking it. His invention of new sensations and his search for hidden causes place him at the center of the maelstrom of American science in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The senses of Poe and his contemporaries were bombarded with new technical effects: electromagnetic signals, brilliant light shows, musical innovations, clattering city streets, mesmeric emanations, machine-printed words. They were also confronted with new methods and theories for analyzing the universe, curing illness, justifying political decisions, organizing society, and shaping minds. Today’s image of science is of laboratories, microscopes, and white coats: a regulated and uniform undertaking, heavily funded by government and recognized as the best—indeed, for some, the only—means of obtaining reliable knowledge about the world. Yet as Poe embarked on his career in the 1830s, this image of science was at best a distant dream.
The term “scientist” was coined only in 1833, to replace the generalist “natural philosopher.” In Europe, the fallout from Napoleon’s wars and the dawning Industrial Revolution prompted violent conflicts over rights and property, belief and expertise. The scientific situation in the United States was even more chaotic, because national traditions and institutional frameworks did not yet exist. In the popular press and lecture halls, self-appointed experts announced dubious observations and flamboyant theories on every topic. No sufficiently powerful authorities existed—whether scientific associations, national academies, or peer-reviewed journals—to separate reliable claims from errors or outright fraud.
But the current was beginning to shift. In Poe’s time a number of aggressive, well-connected reformers—whose paths Poe crossed and recrossed and whose discoveries and inventions he digested and reviewed—began to refashion science into a set of interwoven claims about how to inhabit the world, a driving force for material improvements, a unified image of knowledge and nature.
