Text: Benjamin De Casseres, “Poe's Unknown ‘Eureka’ Philosophic Masterpiece,” Sun and New York Herald (New York, NY), vol. LXXXVII, no. 154, February 1, 1920 (Sunday Magazine section), p. 7

[page 7, column 1:]

WAS Edgar Allan Poe the American Newton, Darwin and Einstein all rolled into one? Was Edgar Allan Poe the greatest metaphysical and religious Columbus that the world has ever known? Was it an American known to the world only as a poet writer of weird and diabolistie tales who was one of the great philosopher revealers of the ages?

Poe the poet and the author of the tales of the grotesque and arabesque had smothered Poe the philosopher, the mathematician, the scientist, the propounder of a great system of cosmic evolution many vears before Charles Darwin published Origin of Species” and Herbert Spencer “First Principles.” “Eureka” has almost been forgotten, although Poe declared the truths disclosed in it were of more consequence than the discovery of the law of gravitation. It was published in 1848 by G. P. Putnam, 155 Broadway, in boards. Poe called it a prose poem. It lies buried to-day among his collected works, but it is a book in itself and stands apart. A search for “Eureka” in four or five of the big book stores of New York made last week by the writer revealed the astounding fact that not only did not any of the salesmen questioned know whether “Eureka” was to be found among his prose or poetical works, but in many cases the work could not be had at all. A copy was at last found in the book store of the publishing house that published “Eureka” sixty-nine years ago.

Bears on Einstein Theory.

“Eureka,” aside from being one of the profoundest and sublimest works of one of the greatest imaginations that ever enriched the earth, bears to-day tremendously upon the theories of Einstein and the extension of the law of gravitation to light, the mystery of radium, which threatens to upset all physical law, the law of gravitation itself included; the problems of hyperspace, the origin and destiny of man in the light of psychic phenomena, which have thrown some of the greatest scientists off their feet, and the newer speculations about the immortality of the soul.

Is the neglect of this work to be accounted for on the ground that Edgar Allan Poe was “only an “Eureka” was not born of a European brain?

It was almost in rage that Blasco Ibanez — a Spaniard and a man totally unfamiliar with our language — deplored and execrated the lack of respect shown to the world famous name of Poe in his own country. “America for Americans” we phonetically shout.

America for Americans! So be it, and forever! But, then, why this neglect of the man who gave us our greatest [column 2:] philosophical work- work that antedated Darwin's theory and will outlast, in my opinion, all that Darwin wrote?

Nor is “Eureka” the work of a young man, of a half baked student of mathematies, physics and metaphysics.

Poe died in 1849. “Eureka” was published in 1848. It is, therefore, the last, the most matured, the profoundest work of his brain. It is his confession of faith, his spiritual testament to posterity, his Apologia pro vita sua.

Poe first enunciated his doctrine of universal emanation and final absorption of all matter and mind into the Godhood under weird and extraordinary conditions. It might form the basis of one of his own tales.

After 1845 Poe, feeling that he was coming to his end, planned what he conceived to be his greatest bequest to posterity — a theory that should explain the [column 3:] physical and spiritual universes and man's relation to God, based on the mathematical philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza. He had a sure instinct of his coming end — like certain wild animalsand went away into himself to prepare his valedictory to the suns.

He then lived at his now famous cottage in Fordham with Mrs. Clemmwhom he always kissed good night before going to bed, and whom he always called — his debts and a body broken over the wrack of life; but his mind was always in the Elsewhere.

He wandered, day and night, at that time, around the High Bridge over the Harlem River, tramped the rocky slopes and spent hours meditating, his eyes fixed on the waters of that river but his mind trying to solve the eternal problem.

In the winter of 1847 he could be seen, dressed in a long military coat, pacing [column 4:] the porch of the cottage hour after hour, spinning and weaving on the loom of the sublime generations in his skull the web of his long, essay.

In the spring of 1847 he walked the garden with “Mother” Clemm, outlining to her his book, and stopping every little while to ask her whether she understood. Her answer was generally to lead him into the house and give him some hot coffee, where he would often stay sunk in profound meditation till 4 o’clock or later in the morning, good “Mother” Clemm sitting near to see that her “big baby poet” did not catch cold.

“Eureka” was finally completed in 1848. He conceived the idea of a trip through the United States soliciting for subscriptiens for a magazine to be called The Stylus, in which he would print “Eureka” Willis and others were backing him in his trip, but it never came to pass. [column 5:]

One of his projects was to work New York audience before beginning the trip. Poe thereupon advertised a lecture to be given in the Society Library, the oldest and largest library in New York city, at 348 Broadway, at the corner of Leonard street. Have the skyscrapers buried his dreams under their colossal weight of steel and granite?

On the night of February 3 he appeared before about sixty persons and held them entranced — so the papers of the time say -for two hours by a sketch of his theory. It was a stormy night — night in the Pee manner. Is there a being of those sixty still alive who heard that lecture! It is not probable. ‘The lecture was printed by many of the papers, but made no impression. He said to one of the reporters present:

“If you have ever dealt with such topics you will recognize the novelty and moment [column 6:] of my view. What I have propounded will in good time revolutionize the worlds of physical and metaphysical science. I say this calmly, but say it.” The reporter for the Express (who was he?) said in his paper the next morning that Mr. Poe's lecture he regarded as “beyond all question the most elaborate and profound effort we ever listened to. The work has all the completeness and oneness of plot required in a poem, with all the detail and accuracy required in a scientific lecture.

“Starting from the Deity, as a comet from the sun, it went careering onward in its march through infinite’ space, approaching more and more the comprehension of man, until bending its course nearer and nearer it grew brighter and brighter until it buried itself in a blaze of glory whence it had birth.”

Another writer said it was one hour and a half after the lecture began that the audience was sensible of time at all. In a select and nervous diction he went on “with cold, abstracted eye, not upon the men and women before him but toward those sublime celestial orbs about whose origin and destiny he was discoursing in such, lofty language.”

He finally took the manuscript to Mr. Putnam, with the suggestion that 50,000 copies be issued at once. Mr. Putnam was so profoundly impressed after reading the work that he accepted it within forty-eight hours after its submission. Five hundred copies were immediately printed.

Poe's preface to “Eureka” is Poesque to the nth Poe degree. Here it is:

“To the few who love me and whom I love — to those who feel rather than think -to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only reality — I offer this book of Truths, 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 it be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.

“What I here propound is true — therefore it cannot die: or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life Everlasting. “Nevertheless, it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.”

Poe's Preface to “Eureka.”

Poe was sure of his reckoning. Science is “all in the air” to-day. It is going back to the poets and seers for data. The seientific “truths” of one generation are the jests of the next. Only the poet sees through the ephemeral, the temporary, the material. In “Eureka” he took both the intuitional and the rationalistic tools of the soul and showed the universe to be but an sonic or evelie dream in the brain of Brahma. Evolution is the method of illusion. Matter has no reality. Involution of spirit is the truth — and there is nothing but God and vibrations.

Many scientific and literary men have tried to draw up a resume of “Eureka,” but it is beyond them. It must be read by the eye of the imagination, and to master its one hundred and fifty pages is to rise with the Great Secret in the brain. “Think,” says Poe in the concluding lines of this lost masterpiece of the imagination, “that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness; that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at last attain the awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life — Life — Life within Life — the less with the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.”

All thought is travelling Poeward today. The struggle for existence, the theory of gravitation and the cellular theory of life all lapse in that great apotheosis at the end of “Eureka.”

Has this “morbid,” “neurotic,” American, known only by his “Raven” and a few tales, written the book of the centuries? Has an American put Darwin and into the nursery school of thought?