Text: Dawson Gaillard, “Poe's Eureka: The Triump of the Word,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. 42-46 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 42, continued:]

In his measured and extraordinary claim that Eureka (1848) would revolutionize science, Poe expresses his faith that the act of saying unfolds truth through time. To Poe, language is both a power and a responsibility: the one from God and the other man's obligation through it to reach God. Only by saying can we initiate the experience of being in a universe of divine immanence. This belief animates Poe's momentous, synthetic task in Eureka, which is to speak of “the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical — of the Material and Spiritual Universe: — of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny.”(1)

An access to Poe's aim in Eureka may be found in his own critical approach to Alexander Von Humboldt's Cosmos: “But however admirable be the succinctness with which he has treated each particular [page 43:] point of his topic, the mere multiplicity of these points occasions, necessarily, an amount of detail, and thus an involution of idea, which preclude all individuality of impression.[¶] It seems to me that, in aiming at this latter effect, and, through it, at the consequences — the conclusions — the suggestions — the speculations — or, if nothing better offer itself, the mere guesses which may result from it — we require something like a mental gyration on the heel. 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” (XVI, 187). By a rapid revolution of all things (words, in this instance) about the central point of sight, we can perhaps blend Poe's minutiae into oneness. Words become blended into the Word.

The apostle John tells us: “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Alluding to this text in Eureka, Poe implicitly describes the origin of language: “ ‘In the beginning’ we can admit — indeed we can comprehend — but one First Cause — the truly ultimate Principle — the Volition of God. The primary act — that of Irradiation from Unity — must have been independent of all that which the world now calls ‘principle’ — because all that we so designate is but a consequence of the reaction of that primary act: — I say ‘primary’ act; for the creation of the absolute material particle is more properly to be regarded as a conception than as an ‘act’ in the ordinary meaning of the term. Thus, we must regard the primary act as an act for the establishment of what we now call ‘principles.’ But this primary act itself is to be considered as continuous Volition. The Thought of God is to be understood as originating the Diffusion — as proceeding with it — as regulating it — and, finally, as being withdrawn from it upon its completion. Then commences Rëaction, and through Rëaction, ‘Principle, ‘ as we employ the word (XVI, 237-238). The Thought of God at its own continuous Volition originated its own diffusion and proceeded with it until the completion of the diffusion was fulfilled, that is, until irradiation from unity for the establishment of what we now call “principles” was complete. In other phrasing, the Thought of God continued until the Word had become words. All that we designate as principles, which are models framed by human language, are “but consequence of the reaction of that primary act.” As a consequence of the reaction to divine conception, words are also a way back to the primordial One: “All Things and All Thoughts of Things, with all their ineffable Multiplicity of Relation, sprang at once into being from the primordial and the irrelative One” (XVI, 22). As a way back to the irrelative One, words are impulses on the ether, a concept that Poe dramatizes “The Power of Words” (1845).

In that colloquy, Agathos explains to Oinos that “the source of all motion is thought — and the source of all thought is — ” “God,” Oinos interjects (VI, 143). Every impulse, every thought, every thought of thought undulates upward and onward to their source until they are “reflected — unimpressive at last — back from the throne of the Godhead” (VI, 142). As thought manifest, words are motion. Moving onward and upward, they coalesce to create a fair star, an affective entity, which makes Agathos weep. At last such impulses will converge in perfect, fulfilled rapport with the Godhead. The Word will become one with itself and us; thought will be reconciled with Thought. The letter and the spirit will be one. And to reach that brief, perfect pause, we strive for whatever reconciliation mortals can achieve by language.

Expansive language promises a way to such reconciliation. Like God and spirit, Poe claims, the word infinity “of which the equivalents exist in all language, is by no means the expression of an idea — but of an effort at one” (XVI, 200). These words provide the means by “which one human being might put himself in relation at once with another human being and with a certain tendency of the human intellect” (XVI, 200). According to Poe, “Man needed a term by which to point out the direction of this effort. . .” (XVI, 200). Words, hen, are not merely social instruments to relieve loneliness or to carry on the business of the day. They are also the means to pull the human intellect and emotion along by giving them form and direction. Like similar nouns, infinity is necessary even though it is only the “possible attempt at an impossible conception,” even though it remains “the cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt” (XVI, 200). Certain words are necessary to exercise the tendency of the human intellect and to allay briefly the thirst of the soul. Without them, instead of moving onward and upward, we move into the dark, bizarre enclosures of the self that resemble Prospero's abbey and Usher's house.

Belief in a higher self that created and began the dynamics of the universe underlies most of Poe's works. His Thought withdrawn, God's Volition is, nevertheless, continuous in its effects. Thus we can know His presence and, possibly, something of His essence. Many of Poe's stories leave us with a sensation of having witnessed some revelation of magnitude and design beyond our immediate comprehension. The scene at the end of “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) with its allusions to the Revelation of St. John the Divine (the blood-red moon, the voice like a thousand waters) is rendered in a language of mystery. Even while it dramatizes a fall, the scene creates the effect of a movement upward and out to some reality beyond the immediate scene. [page 44:]

A. D. Van Nostrand stresses the revelatory quality in Poe's poetry: “Apparently the poem proper is not the structure on a page but the revelation caused by the printed words. It is an apocalyptic moment in the consciousness of the reader.”(2) Reflecting on Poe's endings and his characters who come back, like Lazarus, to speak to us of revelations, Paul John Eakin concludes, “Whether Poe's endings take the hero to the brink of the abyss or plunge him into the gulf beyond, they all confirm that Poe and his heroes believe in a significant universe; they believe in its buried treasure and they dream of the man who can find it out and cry ‘Eureka!’ to an astonished world.”(3) Like Poe, however, A. D. Van Nostrand recognizes that even with all that language can accomplish, “Words are the problem.”(4)

We aggravate it when we misuse language in our failure to realize possibilities. Edward H. Davidson describes Poe's “almost desperate necessity to recapture the lost sense of the oneness of things and to vivify language as a means of re-creation of man's aboriginal insight.”(5) Placing Poe in the context of his age, Davidson compares him with Emerson who believed that there was a time when all men spoke poetry, when science and art were one. Now, however, a dispersion of thought has resulted in a dichotomy between empiricism and imagination. With separation came detachment of meaning from words, or, we may say, of spirit from the letter.(6)

Looking forward to modern poets, Davidson maintains: “With Poe we have almost a formulation of he theory of modern symbolism: namely, the artist must recast and make relevant the long-separated dualism of man's mind; he must bridge between the chaotic, particularized world of empirical data and the instinctive, cognitive awareness that mind and matter cohere in a disclosed design.”(7)

Poe also resembles Susanne K. Langer who ascribes our language-making to a need in man “which other creatures probably do not have, and which actuates all his apparently unzoo logical aims, his wistful fancies, his consciousness of value, his utterly impractical enthusiasms, and his awareness of a ‘Beyond’ filled with holiness This basic need, which certainly is obvious only in man, is the need of symbolization.”(8) Langer attributes the need-to-symbolize to biology; however, Poe implies that language expresses a religious need arising out of the matrix of the divinely conceptualized universe. In this regard, Poe looks back to Jonathan Edwards, the efficacious word being to both men our contact with God, the Ultimate One. To Edwards, words are the occasions by which we come to sense divine excellence.(9) Like Edwards, Poe designed language to affect the audience cordially as well as intellectually, thus bringing the “soul often to a glimpse of things supernal and eternal — to the very verge of the great secrets” (X IV, 187).

The 2848 letter-writer quoted at the beginning of Eureka criticizes thinkers for limiting their terminology. Those who followed Aristotle were bound by the term self-evident truths (XVI, 188); those who followed Bacon relied upon “the one word ‘fact’ “(XVI, 191). In his Marginalia, Poe condescendingly describes people who place too much trust in language as an end in itself: “Your true logician gets, in time, to be logicalized, and then, so far as regards himself, the universe is one word. A thing, for him, no longer exists. He deposits upon a sheet of paper a certain assemblage of syllables, and fancies that their meaning is riveted by the act of deposition” (XVI, 37). To Poe, language is a means to greater awareness; narrowness of use is error of an irresponsible kind, for it cuts off the avenues to the great secrets.

When Poe complained in 1829 that the old vulture Science had “Driven the Hamadryad from the Wood” and had “Torn the Naiad from her Flood,”(10) he meant that scientific and utilitarian language had torn the sensory images, the possibilities for exaltation, from our word hoard. To constrict language, to deaden it, is to stultify thought and feeling, depriving us of our sense of God, whose works and promises are with us always whether or not we recognize them as His. To deaden language is to shut us away from powers which give life to the soul. Sarcastically critical, Poe castigates the practice: “There are people, I am aware, who, busying themselves in attempts at the unattainable, acquire very easily, by dint of the jargon they emit, among those thinkers-that-they-think with whom darkness and depth are synonymous, a kind of cuttlefish reputation for profundity; but the finest quality of Thought is its self-cognizance; and, with some little equivocation, it may be said that no fog of the mind can well be greater than that which, extending to the very boundaries of the mental domain, shuts out even these boundaries themselves from comprehension” (XVI, 204). Though praising Laplace and Newton in Eureka, Poe criticizes them for not making their language ample enough — for being limited in their intellectual endeavors by keeping within the boundaries of scientific language: “They, as well as all the first class of mathematicians, were mathematicians solely: — their intellect, at least, had a firmly-pronounced mathematico-physical tone. What lay not distinctly within the domain of Physics, or of Mathematics, seemed to them either Non-Entity or Shadow” (XVI, 223). [page 45:]

In his prose-poem, Poe dramatizes the versatility of language. Explicitly he maintains that one may exploit its possibilities without conflicting with current intellectual theories: “.. .the establishment of my propositions would involve no necessity of modification in the terms of the Newtonian definition of Gravity, which declares that each atom attracts each other atom and so forth, and declares this merely; but (always under the supposition that what I propose be, in the end, admitted) it seems clear that some error might occasionally be avoided, in the future processes of Science, were a more ample phraseology adopted. . . “(XVI, 221). In his slowly mounting argument, Poe builds an ample phraseology that leads us to glimpse great secrets.

Early in Eureka occurs the following step-by-step outreaching of language: “‘We know absolutely nothing of the nature or essence of God: — in order to comprehend what he is, we should have to be God ourselves.’ [¶] ‘We should have to be God ourselves! ‘ With a phrase so startling as this yet ringing in my ears, I nevertheless venture to demand if this our present ignorance of the Deity is an ignorance to which the soul is everlastingly condemned” (XVI, 205). In the above, Poe indicates that the words put the notion in our minds, a first step towards sensing the excellence of a divinely conceived universe. This phraseology, startling in its suggestiveness, leads us to recognize the possibility as dramatized in Poe's repetition of the quoted sentence — thence to further speculation.

Herein lies the central direction of Eureka as well as the rhetorical technique: suggestive language frees our thinking for more thought. The soul is not condemned to everlasting ignorance, he shouts triumphantly. His quest in language is over; his discovery completed.(11) In his demonstration of the mind's search, he constructs a paradigm of the close relationship between mind and soul, which is important as a means to “further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions, “as Thomas S. Kuhn claims.(12) it “functions by telling the scientist about the entities that nature does and does not contain and about the ways in which those entities behave. That information provides a map whose details are elucidated by mature scientific research. And since nature is too complex and varied to be explored at random, that map is as essential as observation and experiment to science's continuing development.”(13) Kuhn suspects that “something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.”(14) Poe's paradigm implicitly aims to retrain the visual and conceptual experience of his audience by embodying his perceptions in ample phrasing.

Apprehending the cosmos gradually in words, Poe conveys a sense of his mounting wonder at the grandeur that science has discovered. “If then I seem to step somewhat too. discursively from point to point of my topic, let me suggest that I do so in the hope of thus the better keeping unbroken that chain of graduated impression by which alone the intellect of Man can expect to encompass the grandeurs of which I speak, and, in their majestic totality, to comprehend them” (XIV, 276-277). The graduated impression, which Poe keeps unbroken, parallels the gradual revelation in time of the prophetic Word as described by him in his review of Arabia Petraea (1837): “Two thousand years have now afforded their testimony to the infallibility of the Divine word, and the evidence is still accumulative” (X, 6).

Eureka constructs a universe in which evidence of the Word becomes progressively visible. About cosmology, Geoffrey Rans notes: “What Poe is proposing is, then, in short, a myth,”(15) but he also es a universe within our hearing. Pausing in his progression, Poe calls attention to the point we have reached in the gradual evolution of his cosmology: “The willing into being the primordial particle, has completed the act, or more properly the conception of Creation” (XVI, 207). He then continues the deliberate construction of his universe “on a purely geometrical basis” (XVI, 209).

To retain the graduated impression and the amplitude of language, Poe emphasizes word usages that prepare us for ideas on which he will later elaborate. For example, he first selects open-ended phrasing, such as “repulsion of limited capacity — a separate something” (XVI, 210) and “the repulsive something”(XVI, 211) in anticipation of leading the reader to accept his notion of electricity, which he introduces several paragraphs later. Even then he refrains from limiting his terminology: “In fact, while the tendency of the diffused atoms to return into Unity, will be recognized, at once, as the principle of the Newtonian Gravity, what I have spoken of as a repulsive influence prescribing limits to the (immediate) satisfaction of the tendency, will be understood as that which we have been in the practice of designating now as heat, now as magnetism, now as electricity; displaying our ignorance of its awful character in the vacillation of the phraseology [page 46:] with which we endeavor to circumscribe it” (XVI, 212). He specifies that he will call the elusive principle “merely for the moment, electricity” (XVI, 212), thus taking great care to avoid locking us into terminology. He wants to prevent the errors that his 2848 letter-writer criticized. His tentative, tip-toe advances of words shape a language world without rigid boundaries. Through open phrasing, he attempts to create a model for reaching rather than a weight for sinking.

Much like the speaker in “MS. Found in A Bottle” (1833), who doodles until he spells the word Discovery, Poe expresses surprise at the result of his rumination: “What does the Newtonian law declare? That all bodies attract each other with forces proportional to their quantities of matter and inversely proportional to the squares of their distances. Purposely, I have here given, in the first place, the vulgar version of the law; and I confess that in this, as in most other vulgar versions of great truths, we find little of suggestive character. Let us now adopt a more philosophical phraseology: — Every atom, of every body, attracts every other atom, both of its own and of every other body, with a force which varies inversely as the squares of the distances between the attracting and attracted atom. — Here, indeed, a flood of suggestion bursts upon the mind” (XIV, 215). Approaching his task in Eureka with a ‘'sentiment even of awe” (XVI, 5), he avoids vulgar phrasing — that is, the restricting and non-suggestive, the jargon of the thinkers-that-they-think, which allows no dehiscence of suggestion of the sort that can exalt the soul. He permits us to are his attitude of awe before the grandeurs of the universe, scientifically explained notwithstanding. Modeled by human language, the gradual revelation resembles the physical unfolding of the infallible and ever-present Word. Speaking for Poe, his letter-writer quotes Kepler who said, “‘I care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers when God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians. I will indulge my sacred fury’”(XVI, 198).

Only through the act of saying can we put ourselves in relation with one another and with the sacred. As the Word was the primordial particle created by the Divine Volition in its completion of the conception of Creation, so human expression is the creation of human conception, an imitation of the original act. Being of God, man can, within his limitations, imitate creation until he becomes conscious of himself as God, reaching that full consciousness, though brief, which releases the soul from everlasting ignorance. And in triumph he can should “Eureka” to an astonished and fettered world.

Loyola University: New Orleans

[[Footnotes]]

1. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (17 vols.; N.Y.: The Kelmscott Society Publishers, 1902), XVI, 185. Hereafter quotations from this source will be noted in my text by volume and page numbers.

2. Everyman His Own Poet (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968), pp. 220-221.

3. “Poe's Sense of an Ending,” American Literature, XLV (March, 1973), 21.

4. Everyman, p. 1.

5. Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ., 1957), p. 251.

6. Ibid., p. 250.

7. Ibid., pp. 251-252. See Allen Tate's “The Angelic Imagination: Poe as God” in The Forlorn Demon (Chicago: Regnery, 1953). Mr. Tate argues, “Poe understood the spiritual disunity that had resulted from the rise of the demi-religion of scientism, but by merely opposing its excesses with equally excessive aims for the ‘poetic intellect,’ he subtly perpetuated the disunity from another direction” (p. 71).

8. Philosophy in a New Key (1942; rpt. N.Y.: New American Library, Mentor Books, 1951), p. 45.

9. Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections, ed. Clarence H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson (N.Y.: American Book Co., 1935). See Edwards’ “A Divine and Supernatural Light” in which he distinguishes between sense and notion. On the latter, Edwards places less importance by stating that “merely the speculative faculty, or the understanding” is exercised (p. 107). About the importance of the word, he says that without it, we can have no spiritual light; however, the word is only the occasion, not the cause (see pp. 10-111).

10. “Sonnet — To Science,” Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 1, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), p. 91.

11. Van Nostrand, Everyman, p. 203, infers that “Eureka was largely about his trying to write it.”

12. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Vol, 11 (Chicago: The Univ, of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 23.

13. Ibid., p. 109.

14. Ibid., p. 113.

15. Edgar Allan Poe (London: Oliver & Boyd, Ltd., 1963), p. 36.