Text: Richard P. Benton, “Cross-Lights on Poe's Eureka,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. i-ii (This material is protected by copyright)

[page i, unnumbered:]

In a late letter to Maria Clemm, Poe wrote: “1 have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more.” Until 1950, so few Anglo-Americans had taken Poe's assessment seriously that W. H. Auden, in that year, recognizing its importance, was able to assert that “outside France” — where it had astounded critics from Forgues to Valery — it had been neglected. Whereas scholars from William Hand Brown to William Connor saw in it anticipations of later scientific speculation, Auden praised its style (which he noted was as lucid as the best of Poe's criticism), noted its genre (the cosmology, which Hesiod and Lucretius had perfected centuries before), and emphasized its relevance to the bulk of Poe's earlier works — both poetry and prose — because it contained nearly all his characteristic obsessions — his passion for logic, for merging with the One, and for resolving antinomies.

In 1957, Davidson provided the first sophisticated criticism of Poe's work, including Eureka, declaring that in it Poe had worked his way toward teleological unity and purposive monism and had achieved an ontology and epistemology according to which “things hang together because our minds perceive them in association” pointing to the universal symmetry of the cosmos. Frye saw Eureka, as he saw Yeats's Vision, as possible myth alien to the descriptive structure of science and akin to the structural principle of poetry. To him, a cosmology — whether inverse or prose — assumes its true mythic character as its scientific validity diminishes. Then it provides not merely “a framework of poetic symbols but is one” and belongs “to the grammar of literary imagery. “

Whereas Bierly's dissertation developed Auden's suggestion about the centrality of Eureka, Levin, while praising it as Poe's “boldest imagining, “contradicted Auden, judging it his “dullest piece of writing.” Importantly, he characterized it as a rational counterstatement to Transcendentalism and a pioneering effort in science-fiction. Although he recognized it as “a distillation of themes” previously expressed, he saw in it no death wish but a quest for cosmic consciousness. The same year, Fox noted in Eureka Poe's vacillation between the rationalistic and the Romantic, the latter winning in the end. According to Richard Wilbur, Poe's God was a poet; the universe, a poem; and the proper response to both, aesthetic. To him Poe's favorite mode of consciousness was visionary reverie or trance — the “hypnagogic state” — in which intuition superseded scientific analysis.

In the 1960's, the first to trace exhaustively Poe's sources and to evaluate structure (which she declared defective), Maddison believed Eureka had evolved from Poe's creative personality as aesthetician, detective, and scientist. Maxwell noted Poe's method of unconsciously converting physical measurements into the oracular and subjective suppositions of a myth-maker. Some critics studied Eureka by means of comparison and contrast, Patrick F. Quinn noting that both it and Nature provided answers to the same universal mystery but in different ways — Emerson's “prose poem” being an optimistic “affirmation of life” and Poe's, a pessimistic vision of death. Smithline countered by observing that although Poe had expressed contempt for Emersonian mysticism, he was himself a Transcendentalist as well as a cosmic optimist, who, while offering no specific plan for personal redemption (as Emerson did) nonetheless envisaged a time when all “‘individual Intelligences’” would become one. On the other hand, Ramakrishna saw parallels between Eureka and Vedantic mysticism, and Van Nostrand contrasted it with Henry Adams’ s Education, maintaining that whereas Poe rationalized his established sense of belonging to the universe, Adams tried to redefine the concept of unity.

Although convinced that Poe shifted tone, Jacobs recognized that in Eureka he became the scientist-poet, reaching the point of equating the poetic imagination with the scientific — truth and beauty being one because, in Poe's eyes, “beauty had become the design of the universe itself.” Lynen urged critics to learn from Eureka that what readers might suppose to be the perverse, grotesque or compulsively destructive in Poe's poems and tales has its source not in the phantasies of a diseased mind but “in a metaphysical system reasoned with great subtlety and precision.” Seeing that the metaphysics and theology of Eureka resembled the Naturphilosophie of Fichte and Schelling and the Transcendentalism of Kant, Meister found Poe's philosophy “a neutral monism which expresses itself on the phenomenal level as panentheism.” He judged Eureka to have “all the elements of poetic form and feeling.” [page ii:]

In the 1970's, viewing Poe as a masterly, fun-loving craftsman as well as a “serious occultist, “Levine sees Poe in Eureka as running counter to Western rationalism by disregarding the usual distinctions between science, magic, religion and art, and by presenting “a large scientific thesis in an artistic way”-through inspiration art and science becoming identical. Hoffman sees Eureka as a dream in which Poe reaches “salvation from suffering by suffering annihilation of the self” to become part of “the universal dance of atoms and galaxies.” Fundamental to an understanding of Poe's art, Thompson's book shows that Poe's genius consists in his ability to manipulate the Gothic genre to the point that he transcended it and, in short, became a Romantic ironist. To Thompson, “the problem for any critic who would deal with Eureka is its complexity of tones:, for it is at times comic and satiric, at times melancholy, at times coldly and precisely rational, at times intuitional and ecstatic.” In other words, Eureka manifests the ironic complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence characteristic of all Poe's creative works — “a tension between the creative and destructive impulses of the universe as perceived (and misperceived) by the questing ‘philosophical lynxeye.’ ” In Eureka, moreover, Poe makes “a desperate, intuitive leap, the final act of the rational mind confronting horrible doubt” and thus reconciles what had been unreconcilable.

Of the two recent structuralist or phenomenological studies of Poe — a dissertation by Osowski and a book by Halliburton — the former essentially reflects Auden. She sees Poe's individual works as metastructures within a composite structure, Poe's theory of the universe in Eureka being inherent in his other works. On the other hand, Halliburton's most significant idea is that Poe's works reflect a will to affirmation — a “transcendence or ‘going beyond’ ” their situations. In Eureka, Poe overcame “decay and death” by constructing “a theory of indestructible life” and by presenting the master design of the universe as a plot of God.

The accompanying text with line numbers and the bibliography are offered to Poe scholars as an incentive to investigate Eureka as a unique and complex masterpiece, which belongs to a definite genre of ancient vintage made contemporary in Poe's day. Studies may advance in several directions: (1) history and prophecy, (2) rhetorical technique, (3) multiplicity of tones, (4) unity of effect, (5) structural coherence, (6) relevance of genre, (7) nature of the “prose poem, “ (8) verbal and cosmic irony, (9) cosmology or science-fiction, (10) positive or negative romanticism, (11) reconciliation of opposites, (12) panentheistic theology, (13) scientific vs. mytho-poetic truth, (14) existential philosophy, (15) myth of the eternal return, (16) scientific cosmic model-building or hoax, and (17) the relationship to a specific poem or tale — a list which certainly does not exhaust the possibilities!

R. P. B.

Autumn, 1973