Text: Barton Levi St. Armand, “ ‘Seemingly Intuitive Leaps’: Belief and Unbelief in Eureka,” Poe as Literary Cosmologer (1975), pp. 4-15 (This material is protected by copyright)

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Austin Warren has remarked that the Poe scholar who wishes to produce anything more than a pedestrian criticism of that singular author must attempt a saltus, a precipitate leap of both faith and imagination. In this, the scholar would only be following Poe himself, whose Eureka was an admittedly bold attempt to demonstrate the axiom that “true Science, makes its most important advances — as all History will show — by seemingly intuitive leaps.”(1) In this spirit, I wish to make some observations about Poe's opus in general, and his late work in particular, with special attention paid to Eureka's place in the remarkable development of that work. Lest the reader become apprehensive about these contemplated mental gymnastics, I alert him now that my own critical performance will consist of a preliminary hop and a preparatory skip before the ultimate, exploratory jump. First, I quarrel with a commonly accepted view of Poe as the chief American advocate of an overblown Romantic imagination and, this accomplished, I wish to demonstrate that Poe's special definition of the imagination has profound implications for any consideration of the unity of his late work, including the landscape stories, the tales of ratiocination, and the criticism, as well as the cosmography of Eureka. Finally, I place Eureka in a tradition of speculative writing which justifies Poe's original and fruitful view of the human imagination while it also links that work to standard theological arguments from design rather than to Romantically radical acts and gospels.

It is easy to call Poe a Romantic but difficult to prove the assertion when one carefully examines his firmest critical and aesthetic principles. It was the Providence seeress Sarah Helen Whitman who confidently anagramatized Edgar Poe's name into the startling spiritual message “a God-peer, “thus confirming the view of her contemporary nineteenth-century readers that her former fiancé was a modem Lucifer who challenged the authority of the Deity himself.(2) Mrs. Whitman's extravagance has recently been paralleled by Daniel Hoffman, who exclaims in a work similarly influenced by magic numbers and free-lance divination that Poe's true faith was: “The symbolist religion of art! The image of the artist as the autochthynous [sic] creator of his own universe — the perfect escape from the tyranny of time, from the baseness of the material life. The perfect substitute for the devotion to the spirit and its life which was once the business of the Christian Church to provide for the Western World, and which the world no longer takes as its business, having run away from its Father's business.”(3)

That Poe was much about his Father's business is a point which I hope to elucidate later, but now I wish to counterbalance Hoffman's claims by reminding my readers that Poe's chief business as a serious man of letters was thought itself, and that he was in this regard a very rigorous businessman indeed. If Poe really believed fully in the divinity of the artist and the sanctity of his work — in “the symbolist religion of art” exclusively — then it would be a not unlogical assumption that he would also accept wholeheartedly the foremost definition of the creative imagination, Coleridge's description in the Biographia Literaria of the “primary IMAGINATION” as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM .”(4) And, concomitantly, should we not also expect that the aristocratic Mr. Poe would, like Coleridge, disdain Fancy as “no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, “as a mechanical device which “has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites.” But even if Poe rejected Coleridge's [page 5:] blasphemous identification of the Primary imagination with the creative power of the Godhead as gross intellectual excess, we would expect him to discard the tawdry and vulgar “Fancy” for Coleridge's praise of that ‘'Secondary Imagination, “granted only to an elite few, which echoes the Primary Imagination but manages to articulate and to incarnate it by dissolving, diffusing, and dissipating “in order to re-create.” The Poe who sought Supernal Beauty would surely applaud the Secondary Imagination's struggle “to idealize and to unity, “since this faculty was “essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” Perversely, one could argue that the only reason why Poe might possibly reject both the Primary and Secondary Imaginations for an acceptance of mere Fancy would be to maintain a foolish consistency with his assertion in the Philosophy of Composition that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”(5) If, indeed, the Fancy's realm was that sublunary one of dead and finite things, then here it could be entertained to the full.

An examination of Poe's attitude toward the thought of Coleridge, however, and an analysis of his own exfoliating critical consciousness both prove that Poe's rejection of Coleridge on the imagination was a careful, deliberate, and subtle intellectual act. In a review of the Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge published in the Southern Literary Messenger for June, 1836, the normally reserved Poe thundered that “If there be any one thing more than another which stirs within us a deep spirit of indignation and disgust, it is that damnation of faint praise which so many of the Narcissi of critical literature have had the infinite presumption to breathe against the majesty of Coleridge — of Coleridge — the man to whose gigantic mind the proudest intellects of Europe found it impossible not to succumb” (Works, IX, 151). There is no doubt, then, about the veneration which Poe held for Coleridge; and he closed his early review with a plea that the Biographia Literaria (which he called “the most deeply interesting of the prose writings” affording “a clearer view into his mental constitution than any other of his works”) be republished in America as soon as possible.

The influence of Coleridge continued to simmer in Poe's brain as he quoted bits and snatches from the Master in various essays.(6) In a review of Joseph Rodman Drake's The Culprit Fay, he toyed with the possibility of applying Coleridge's differentiation between the Primary and Secondary Imagination and the Fancy directly to the text at hand. Defining imagination as the ‘'soul” of “Poesy” (Works, VIII, 283), Poe added a footnote wherein he speculated that “Imagination is, possibly in man, a lesser degree of the creative power in God,” a clear echo of Coleridge on the Primary Imagination, though the canny Poe buried his source by directing his reader instead to M. Le Baron de Bielfield's Les Premiers Traits de L’ Erudition Universelie. Later in his review, he disputed that Drake's Culprit Fay was a work of true imagination precisely because it lacked sufficient “ideality” (the product of the Secondary Imagination), since it concerned itself mainly with the combination and comparison of mundane objects. Drake's poem was thus a consummate result of the “mere efforts of the Fancy” (p. 295), dealing as it did with the description and collection of those fixed and finite objects so disdained by Coleridge. At the same time, however, Poe signaled his undercurrent of doubt at the continued anatomizing of art by boldly declaring that “Poetry has never been defined to the satisfaction of all parties. Perhaps, in the present condition of language it never will be. Words cannot hem it in. Its intangible and purely spiritual nature refuses to be bound down within the widest horizon of mere sounds” (pp. 280-281).

The same scope and freedom which Poe allowed to poetry in his review of The Culprit Fay, he gradually conferred on the faculty of poetic imagination itself. In this way he solved a dilemma which Coleridge bequeathed to Romantic aesthetics and which has continued to plague the critical consciousness down to our own day. For if, as Coleridge suggested, the human imagination was hierarchical in nature, then man and art were equally fragmented and compartmentalized. Only one highly selective stratum of the imagination was truly in contact with the divine; only one type of imagining was truly “creative, “in the deepest sense. When Coleridge's hierarchy of the imagination was combined with the natural divisions of literary endeavor into the arts of poetry, fiction, and criticism, his initial discrimination was, as it were, both squared and sextupled. Poe began to discover this in his review of The Culprit Fay, for, when he attempted to apply the criterion of “ideality” to poetry, he automatically had to relegate any exact description of the “real” to the lower order of the “Fancy.” And if this were true of the genre of poetry, which supposedly was the literary medium most conducive to the creation of the ideal, then what of the writing of prose fiction and criticism? If one fully accepted Coleridge's elite, mystical definition of the imagination, it was almost impossible to conceive of a divinely creative (i.e., truly “Imaginative”) work of fiction or piece of criticism. With his natural taste for omnicompetence, for originality in all fields, for nineteenth-century virtuosity in its fullest [page 6:] sense, Poe slowly realized that the Coleridgian definition of the Imagination had the tendency to demean fiction and criticism to the enhancement of poetry, and he gradually found himself being boxed into a dark corner by the extravagance of such Romantic claims.

Poe proceeded to solve his problem in a deceptively simple if thoroughly orthodox fashion. He left divine creativity to God, and imagination to man. That is, he abandoned the Romantic doctrine of inspiration, with which he had never been truly comfortable, and substituted for it a more practical philosophy of insight and intuition. Even here Poe built upon a principle which he had incorporated into his 1836 review of The Culprit Fay, for in that same footnote in which he speculated that Imagination is “possibly [emphasis mine] in man, a lesser degree of the creative power in God, “he added that “What the Deity imagines, is, but was not before. “What man imagines is, but was also. The mind of man cannot imagine what is not” (Works, VIII, p. 283). While God continues to create ex nihilo, man, of necessity, can deal only with what has been created, or imagined, by Divinity. Here begins to open up that fearful chasm between man and God which Poe attempts to bridge in Eureka, where he again firmly asserts that the Godhead is a major premise as well as first cause, and that “Of this Godhead, in itself, he alone is not imbecile — he alone is not impious — who propounds — nothing” (Eureka, p. 20). Unlike Moses and the prophets, we can apprehend God only through his creation, not directly through his person, and the words of the “Baron de Bielfield” that “We know absolutely nothing of the nature or essence of God: — [for] in order to comprehend what he is, we should have to be God ourselves” are directly invoked in corroboration of this assertion. By 1848, however, Poe was ready to doubt “if this our present ignorance of the Deity is an ignorance to which the soul is everlastingly condemned.”

In the interim between the review of Drake in 1836 and the publication of Eureka in 1848, Poe deliberately, even obsessively, worked out his new definition of the imagination, using Coleridge as his strawman and the Baron de Bielfield as his judge advocate. In a review of Thomas Moore's Egyptian romance Alciphron, in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1840, Poe took the occasion to refer slightingly to the “dogmatism of Coleridge” and summarized his learned distinction in a single sentence. “‘The fancy,’ says the author of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ in his Biographia Literaria,’ the fancy combines, the imagination creates’” (Works, X, p. 61). Poe then asserted that, if this is indeed a distinction, “it is one without a difference; without even a difference of degree, “because “the fancy as nearly creates as the imagination; and neither creates in any respect” (pp. 61-62). Neither creates, of course, because God is the only Creator: “All novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations. The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed; and this point is susceptible of the most positive demonstration — see the Baron de Bielfield, in his ‘Premiers Traits de L’Erudition Universelie,’ 1767. It will be said, perhaps, that we can imagine a griffin, and that a griffin does not exist. Not the griffin, certainly, but its component parts. It is a mere compendium of known limbs and features — of known qualities. Thus with all which seems to be new — which appears to be a creation of intellect. The wildest and most vigorous effort of mind cannot stand the test of this analysis” (p. 62).

Poe is thus one with the Preacher: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes, 1:9). Poe uses this finite aspect of reality, however, not to confine but rather to liberate the poetic imagination. In effect, he abolishes the hierarchy set up by Coleridge and elevates the Fancy to a position of being the one and only imaginative faculty. Just as Poe had his review of Drake's Culprit Fay in mind when he wrote on Moore's Alciphron, so did he actually have the Alciphron review open before him when, in 1845, he continued his attack in some comments on one of the most popular of “American Prose Writers, “N. P. Willis, in an essay published in the Broadway Journal. He proceeded to copy the paragraph quoted above nearly verbatim (Works, XII, p. 37), adding that as far as the distinction between fancy and imagination went, “experience would prove this . . . to be unsatisfactory”(p. 38) as, of course, experience had already done. In a major aesthetic statement, he then went on to abolish the careful distinctions between the types and functions of the Imagination fabricated by Coleridge, restoring to the artist a full range of intellectual endeavor which stressed the human over the divine and, by extension, effective workmanship (“effect”) over mystical creativity. “The fact seems to be,” wrote Poe, “that Imagination, Fancy, Fantasy, and Humor have in common the elements Combination and Novelty. The Imagination is the artist of the four. From novel arrangements of old forms which present themselves to it, it selects only such as are harmonious; — the result, of course, is beauty itself — using the term in its most extended sense, and as inclusive of the sublime. The pure Imagination chooses, from either beauty or deformity, only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined; — the compound, as a general rule, partaking (in character) of sublimity or beauty, in the ratio of the respective [page 7:] sublimity or beauty of the things combined — which are themselves still to be considered as atomic — that is to say, as previous combinations. But, as often analogously happens in physical chemistry, so not unfrequently does it occur in this chemistry of the intellect, that the admixture of two elements will result in a something that shall have nothing of the quality of one of them — or even nothing of the qualities of either. The range of Imagination is, therefore, unlimited” (Works, XII, p, 39).

It may be charged that in dethroning the mystical basis of Coleridge's definition of the Primary Imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM, “Poe is reducing the power and prestige of human consciousness itself — that he is, in fact, murdering Creativity in its own bed. On the contrary, Poe's reformulation is remarkably salutary and restorative, in the same sense that To S. Eliot's chemical metaphor in his seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent, “affirms that “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but on the poetry.”(7) Poe recognizes that privileged claims of “divinity” and “creativity” only obscure the value of the work of art, which is the product of something other than a direct inspiration of the Godhead.

We may not take kindly to the idea that the artist combines rather than creates, so conditioned are we by extreme Romantic theories which, like those of Coleridge or Emerson, make the Poet into a liberating God, or, like those of Wallace Stevens, convert him into a little god manqué. But in asserting that “The range of Imagination is, therefore, unlimited, “Poe prepares us to accept that, if we dispose of the red herring of ‘Creativity” in favor of a unitary conception of Imagination, we are free to recognize that the poet is no more imaginative than the critic, the tale-writer, or the cosmologist. Even T. S. Eliot did not manage to go quite as far as Poe, for Eliot was still burdened with a hierarchical conception of art and imagination. In “The Function of Criticism” Eliot daringly asks, “If so large a part of creation is really criticism, is not a large part of what is called ‘critical writing’ really creative? If so, is there not a creative criticism in the ordinary sense?” (Eliot, p. 19). Unfortunately, he is forced by his own tacit acceptance of the Romantic doctrine of creativity to reply that “The answer seems to be, that there is no equation” because “I have assumed as axiomatic that a creation, a work of art, is autotelic; and that criticism, by definition, is about something other than itself. Hence you cannot fuse creation with criticism as you can fuse criticism with creation. The critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfillment in a kind of union with creation in the labour of the artist” (p. 19). This kind of pseudo-scholasticism Poe avoided by demolishing the Coleridgian distinctions, which even today assure us that the mysteries of “Creative Writing” can never be synonymous with the practice of literary criticism.

To Poe, every artist is presented with a fait accompli — the universe he inhabits — a universe created solely by God. Since the artist can deal only with the very tangible building blocks of his environment, since he can “imagine nothing which has not really existed, “and furthermore since he is forbidden any direct communication with the Creator himself, there is but one imaginative exercise left to him — that of intuition. In this sense, every artist is in some measure a critic, and every work of art a criticism, an insightful perception and presentation of that which already exists. Even Baudelaire, who wished to claim Poe as the archetypal Romantic poet, was himself too careful a critic not to recognize Poe's rejection of the prime Romantic doctrine of inspiration. As he wrote in his “New Notes on Edgar Allan Poe”: “For him [Poe], Imagination is the queen of faculties; but by this word he understands something greater than that which is understood by the average reader. Imagination is not fantasy; nor is it sensibility, although it may be difficult to conceive of an imaginative man who would be lacking in sensibility. Imagination is an almost divine [emphasis mine] faculty which perceives immediately and without philosophical methods the inner and secret relations of things, the correspondences and the analogies. The honors and functions which he grants to this faculty give it such value (at least when the thought of the author has been well understood) that a scholar without imagination appears only as a pseudoscholar, or at least as an incomplete scholar.(8)

As intuition so thoroughly replaced inspiration in the framework of Poe's total aesthetic, Baudelaire, idolator that he was, could not refrain from accusing Poe of a ‘'slight impertinence” in the fabrication of that arch example of ex post facto intuition, “The Philosophy of Composition.” Uneasily, Baudelaire tried to pass off this remarkable piece of criticism as a work of true bravado, of exquisite badinage, writing that “Confirmed advocates of inspiration would be sure to find in it blasphemy and profanation; but I believe that it is for them especially that the article was written” (p. 58). Baudelaire still felt that Poe was “one of the most inspired men I know, “yet modem champions of the nouveau roman have seen more realistically how “The Philosophy of Composition” in fact deals a deathblow both to Romanticism and to “the mysterious and confusing dogma of inspiration.”(9) [page 8:]

Thus, the heroes of Poe's late work, including, in the case of Eureka, Poe himself, are seldom carried away on the fiery wings of inspiration; rather, they are continually ravished by the cooler frissons of a sublime intuition. Life, poetry, the universe are never ends in themselves but only means by which, through the exercise of the Imaginative faculty, the artist can approach the unknowable. “And thus when by Poetry, “he writes in “The Poetic Principle,” “. . . or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods — we find ourselves melted into tears — we weep them — not as the Abbate Gravina supposes — through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses” (Works, XIV, p. 274). The effect of poetry is to tease and to tempt our intuition, not to satisfy it, for only in Heaven shall we all be truly inspired, like Poe's rarefied angel Israfel. The question of the exact connection between divine inspiration and human intuition brings us at last to Eureka, Poe's ultimate “Book of Revelation.”

Eureka is a criticism, in the widest possible sense, of the universe itself. But, as the final result of Poe's expansive doctrine of imagination, it is also a work which refuses to be confined within the arbitrary definitions of genre, bearing as it does two subtitles: “A Prose Poem” (Eureka, p. 7) and “An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe” (p. 9). In addition, when originally given as a lecture, it was entitled the “Cosmogony of the Universe.” Poe further extended its provenance by calling it, in his published preface, a “Book of Truths, “a “composition, “and an “Art-Product alone, “adding that it should also be taken as “A Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem” (p. 5). In that other lecture delivered in 1848, “The Poetic Principle, “he had with his customary latitudinarianism noted that “The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes — in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance — very especially in Music — and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the composition of the Landscape Garden” (Works, XIV, p. 275). Moreover, he now essayed to define “the Poetry of Words” as “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty,” a definition which once again abolished finicky distinctions between what was truly “prose” and what was truly “poetry.” If an “Art-Product” had the effect of “elevating the soul, “then it was poetic by nature, whether it be a Gothic novel or a landscape garden. In this spirit, Poe had already called De La Motte Fouqué's prose work Undine a ‘'superb poem” (Works, XI, p. 247); just as he considered his own late prose extravaganzas, “The Landscape Garden” (1841), “The Domain of Amheim” (1847) and “Landor's Cottage” (1849) to be perfectly valid expressions of the “Poetic Sentiment.” Later in his lecture (pp. 282-283), Poe took the time to strike one last blow at the Coleridgean distinction between fancy and imagination, defending the poems of Thomas Moore against charges “that he is fanciful only” by claiming that Moore's work in fact was “profoundly” and “weirdly imaginative in the best sense.” The Imagination, the Fancy, and the Poetic sentiment were to Poe all names for an active principle to be looked for in the effect of the art-product itself, not in the nice abstractions and argumentations of the schools.

I have already mentioned that Poe left the act of creating to God, and affirmed that the artist's duty was to study that creation by use of his human faculties of imagination and intuition. That Poe should even believe in the concept of a Godhead may seem startling to those who still wish to consider him a pagan inconoclast, for many contemporary commentators on his work tend to agree with Sarah Helen Whitman's judgment in her 1860 Edgar Poe and His Critics that: “It has been said that [Poe's] theory, as expressed in Eureka, of the universal diffusion of the Deity in and through all things, is identical with the Brahminical faith as expressed in the Bagvat Gita. But those who will patiently follow the vast reaches of his thought in this sublime poem of the ‘Universe’ will find that he arrives at a form of unbelief far more appalling than that expressed in the gloomy Pantheism of India, since it assumes that the central, creative Soul is, alternately, not diffused only, but merged and lost in the universe, and the universe in it: ‘A new universe swelling into existence or subsiding into nothingness at every throb of the Heart Divine’”(Whitman, pp. 75-76).

Yet as Margaret Alterton has demonstrated in her Origins of Poe's Critical Theory, Poe's supposedly “appalling” theory of the universe is based in large part on his readings in a branch of Christian Philosophy which has been almost totally forgotten in our own time. 10 This is the field of Natural Theology and Apologetics which, although it can be traced back to the publication of Raymond de Sebonde's Theologia Naturalis in 1436, found its most famous advocate in William Paley (1743-1805). Paley's Natural Theology (1802) bears a subtitle that fully describes the method of the entire movement: Evidences of the Existence and attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature. Paley was as obsessed”with the concept of unity as Poe, and his grand scheme was to validate the special revelation of the Bible by means of rigorous historical and comparative tests, while illuminating the general and continuing revelation of nature through [page 9:] a pious accumulation of scientific knowledge. “Paley's watch” is even today the stereotype of an old-fashioned argument from design, referring to the opening contention in his Natural Theology that, if one found a watch upon the beach, one would infer from the intricacy of the mechanism the existence of an intelligent watchmaker; by analogy, the ordered nature of the universe implies the existence of a cosmic artificer, the Christian God. As Professor Seith of University College, Cardiff, wrote in his informative article on Paley in the 1896 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he “has popularized for 19th-century use the Deistic conception of the universe and the divine economy which was common ground last century both to the assailants and the defenders of orthodox Christianity.”(11)

Surely the icy streams of eighteenth-century Reason helped to refrigerate the writings of Paley and other early nineteenth-century Natural Theologians, whose passions were almost wholly of the mind. The ultimate result of their utilitarian speculations in America was the Unitarianism of Channing, which a disgusted and rebellious Emerson contemptuously labelled a “corpse-cold” religion. However, the entire growth of Natural Theology was cut short or rather seriously stunted by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, an event signalling the outbreak of the violent warfare between Science and Religion, which beforehand had lived together in relatively peaceful detente. I contend that Poe's Eureka, with its stress on intuition over inspiration, with its rhapsody on the extent and magnificence of the universe, with its awed reverence for God the Creator, is a late, original, and radical contribution to this movement.

As Alterton details in her painstaking source-study, it was not Paley but rather other popularizers of Natural Theology and Apologetics whom Poe read, absorbed, and reconstituted in his articles and reviews. Indeed, his review of John Lloyd Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land in the New York Review of 1837, is itself an extended essay in Apologetics, attempting to prove that the evidences of Stephens’ travels in the Middle East confirm in the most literal manner certain prophecies contained in the Old Testament. Here Poe writes: “While the vast importance of critical and philological research in dissipating the obscurities and determining the exact sense of the Scriptures cannot be too readily conceded, it may be doubted whether the collateral illustration derivable from records of travel be not deserving at least equal consideration. Certainly the evidence thus afforded, exerting an enkindling influence upon the popular imagination, and so taking palpable hold upon the popular understanding, will not fail to become in time a most powerful because easily available instrument in the downfall of unbelief. Infidelity itself has often afforded unwilling and unwitting testimony to the truth. It is surprising to find with what unintentional precision both Gibbon and Volney (among others) have used for the purpose of description, in their accounts of nations and countries, the identical phraseology employed by the inspired writers when foretelling the most improbable events. In this manner skepticism has been made the root of belief, and the providence of the Deity has been no less remarkable in the extent and nature of the means for bringing to light the evidence of the accomplished word, than in working the accomplishment itself” (Works, X, pp. 1-2).

I have quoted Poe at length because such a passage demonstrates his belief that “inspiration” was a quality to be associated solely with the writers of the Old and New Testaments, just as “creativity” was a function of God alone. Although one could be sure of “inspiration” only in connection with the prophecies and pronouncements of Biblical authorities, it was one task of Natural Theology “To determine, so far as may be done from general revelation, what man may reasonably hope for as to deliverance from sin and its consequences, and what he may reasonably believe as to the conditions of existence in a future world.” Professor Flint, who provides this definition in his paragraph on “Natural Theology” in the same 1896 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, cautiously adds, however, that “As to this [latter] point the view is prevalent that the light of nature discloses nothing regarding man's salvation or future destiny” (XXIII, p. 275). Poe, as the heir of the Natural Theologians, tried to reconcile this seeming paradox in Eureka.

The cause of Natural Theology received an impetus when, in 1829, the Rev. Francis Henry, Eighth Earl of Bridgewater, left £8000 to the British Royal Society for the purpose of commissioning a person or persons to “write, print, and publish one thousand copies” of a book “On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation; illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as, for instance, the variety and formation of God's creatures, in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the effect of digestion, and thereby of conversion; the construction of the hand of man and an infinite variety of other arguments; as also by discoveries ancient and modem, in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of literature” (quoted by Poe, Works, VIII, pp. 206-207). The President of the Royal Society, Davies Gilbert, met this rather tall order by commissioning not one treatise but eight, dividing the Earl's bequest among an octad of. [page 10:] learned gentlemen, each of whom received £1000 “together with any benefit that might accrue from the sale of his work, according to the will of the testator. “The Bridgewater Treatises gave a definite style and plan to later nineteenth-century Natural Theology, accelerating the movement's thirst for stupendous statistics, its marvel at the construction of human organs like the hand and the eye, and its benign belief in an idea of progress which would eventually synthesize all Science, Philosophy, and Religion in one grand Argument from Design.

Poe himself reviewed one of the Treatises, Peter Mark Roget's Animal and Vegetable Physiology, considered with reference to Natural Theology, in the Southern Literary Messenger of February, 1836, remarking that he did not think Dr. Roget's study was the best of the lot (Works, III, p. 210). For background information on the plan of the Treatises, Poe acknowledged an article in the London Quarterly, which, as Alterton points out, was his mistake for the Quarterly Review, where, in Vol. L (October, 1833-January, 1834), we find “The Universe and Its Author.” This essay is in itself a miniature work of Natural Theology, soon becoming rhapsodic in its catalogue of the staggering works of God, and blissfully announcing the generally held view that “Recent geological researches have brought to light some extraordinary antediluvian deposits, which forcibly illustrate the order of creation on earth as narrated in Genesis.”(12) The anonymous author also outlines in typically pompous language the exciting future of Natural Theology: “Direct communications of a supernatural order have admonished [mankind] of the existence of a Divinity, who had no beginning and can have no end; by whose power the universe was created; by whose wisdom its multitudinous parts were harmoniously adjusted, and by whose beneficent will it has been sustained during centuries of whose number we can form no conception. But although the records of inspiration deserve our implicit belief, our most unreserved confidence, the time appears to have newly arrived, when science and conviction ought to walk hand in hand with faith. The re-examined and accumulated results of the researches of geologists, and the combined labours of astronomers and mathematicians, cannot have been intended for the mere entertainment of those who have devoted themselves to such pursuits. They point to a higher destiny. The more successfully the sciences have been cultivated, the brighter and the more numerous have become the signs, and, we may add, the demonstrations of the existence of an Omnipotent Intelligence by whom all things were made” (pp. 6-7).

When he came to write Eureka (which may be considered an uncommissioned ninth Bridgewater Thesis), Poe took the stock idea behind the “The Universe and Its Author” and refurbished it in literal, brilliant fashion. The old Deistic metaphor of the title became an exact description of the nature of reality, for God became a supreme author whose “Art-Product” was unfettered by the shackles of space and time. Poe writes: “But with the very idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient, we entertain, also, the idea of the infallibility of his laws. With Him there being neither Past nor Future — with Him all being Now. . . .” (Eureka, p. 46). That is, God was not subject to the one-way movement of the great chain of being; or, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, the Deity's beginning was in his end, and his end was in his beginning. To God, existing beyond circumstantiality, the first and last pages, Alpha and Omega, were one and the same, being but different degrees of the initial act of creation. With Divinity, all things were reflexive, simultaneous, and continuous; His Art-Product was an eternal one, for “the Universe . . . in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems” (Eureka, p. 71). As Poe explained, Divine adaptation was divine precisely because of its inherent “mutuality.” As such, it was distinct “from that which is merely the work of human constructiveness” because “in human constructions a particular cause has a particular effect; a particular intention brings to pass a particular object; but this is all, we see no reciprocity. The effect does not re-act upon the cause; the intention does not change relations with the object. In Divine constructions the object is either design or object as we choose to regard it — and we may take at any time a cause for an effect, or the converse — so that we can never absolutely decide which is which” (Eureka, p. 65).

If this divine reciprocity of adaptation were possible in man, he would be able to construct a tale in which the beginning sentence — or indeed any sentence or any word — would give immediate knowledge of any other word or sentence in the story.(13) But since man is trapped in a vectored chain of cause and effect, the best he can accomplish is to tailor his art-product to produce but a single preconceived effect, as Poe demonstrates in “The Philosophy of Composition, “or to start with a mass of miscellaneous facts and intuit the cause, as C. Auguste Dupin manages to do so brilliantly in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe elaborates: “The pleasure which we derive from any display of human ingenuity is in the ratio of the approach to this species of reciprocity. In the construction of plot, for example, in fictitious literature, we should aim at so arranging the incidents that we shall not be able to determine, of any one of them, whether it depends from any one other or upholds it. In this sense, of course, perfection of plot is really, or practically, unattainable — but only because it is a finite intelligence that constructs. The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God” (Eureka, pp. 65-66). [page 11:]

Since mere mortality carried with it the necessity of a double vision, Poe decided to use this double ness in order to accomplish the great task of the Natural Theologians and Christian Apologists: the ultimate reconciliation of man with his fate.(14) The Oneness which was the Godhead resolved all seeming doubleness through a divine reciprocity of adaptation, and although Mrs. Whitman denied the “Brahminical” basis of Poe's work, the Deity of Eureka actually has much in common with the “Brahma” of Emerson's famous poem, who sings:

Hence, Poe's joyful catalogue of polar opposites and mirror images: Matter and spirit, attraction and repulsion, gravitation and electricity, diffusion and agglomeration-principles which “accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship forever, “so that even “The Body and the Soul walk hand in hand” (Eureka, p. 41). For God himself, however, all these dichotomies were resolved into unity; no matter what permutations and combinations might occur in the middle of Poe's cosmic equation, the magic number “one” always stood on either side of the equal sign. It was “the great idiosyncrasy” of the Divine “mutuality of adaptation” which “All the Bridgewater treatises have failed in noticing,” Poe confidently recorded in one of his “Marginalia” (Works, XVI, p. 9), and as he writes in Eureka: “‘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 rëaction 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 Reaction, and through Reaction, ‘Principle,’ as we employ the word” (Eureka, p. 37).

There is but one act of creation, which, like a stone dropped into a limpid pool of water, causes a series of continuing “rëactions” — the ripples fanning outward in ever-widening circles from the initial point of impact. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. Matter will sink back toward an Absolute Unity, as if the sequence of the stone, the pool, and the ripples were reversed in the way a motion-picture film can today be run backwards. Then, “in sinking into Unity, it will sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all Finite Perception [emphasis mine], Unity must be-into that Material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked [emphasis mine] — to have been created by the Volition of God” (Eureka, p. 75). I have added the extra emphasis to this last quotation because it has so often been charged that Poe here revealed that essential nihilism which Mrs. Whitman found so “appalling.” On the contrary, Poe stresses that it is the human imagination which is forced to conceive of a void or “nothingness” as the logical antonym of a principle of Absolute Unity. What the void is from God's perfectly adaptive point of view we can only guess, or intuit.

To Poe, then, Eureka was an act of faith, not a clever apostacy. There is no better evidence for this assertion than the letter which he wrote to Charles F. Hoffman, editor of the Literary World, a New York weekly that had published a scoffing review of Eureka by an anonymous author who had designated himself only as “A Student of Theology.” Poe had good reason to believe that this upstart was John Henry Hopkins, Jr., the son of the first Episcopal bishop of Vermont, who had earlier accused him of a dangerous “pantheism” and who seems to have interfered in the relationship between Poe and Marie Louise Shew on the grounds that the author of Eureka was on the high road to complete infidelism. Poe began his letter to Hoffman by expressing a wish to refute his critic “tone for tone — that is to say, of answering your correspondent, flippancy by flippancy and sneer by sneer — but, in the first place, I do not wish to disgrace the ‘World;’ and, in the second, I feel that I never should be done sneering.”(16) Poe does essay to correct four outright misrepresentations and misquotations of his thought, however, and it is the fourth correction that bears most directly on the question of his supposed impiety. The “Student of Theology” writes at one instance: “After all these contradictory propoundings concerning God we remind him [Poe] of what he lays down on page 28 [of Eureka] — ‘Of this Godhead, in itself, he alone is not imbecile — he alone is not impious who propounds nothing’. A man who thus conclusively convicts himself of imbecility and impiety needs no further refutation” (p. 381). In rebuttal, the outraged Poe [page 12:] done is not impious — who propounds — nothing, “and then adds, “By the italics, as the critic well knew, I design to distinguish between the two possibilities — that of a knowledge of God through his works and that of a knowledge of Him in his essential nature.” He then angrily concludes: “Were these ‘misrepresentations (is that the name for them?) made for any less serious purpose than that of branding my book as ‘impious’ and myself as a ‘pantheist,’ a ‘polytheist,’ Pagan, or a God knows what (and indeed I care very little so it be not a ‘Student of Theology,’) I would have permitted their dishonesty to pass unnoticed, through pure contempt for the boyishness — for the turn-down-shirt-collar-ness of their tone: — but, as it is, you will pardon me, Mr. Editor, that I have been compelled to expose a ‘critic’ who, courageously preserving his own anonymosity, takes advantage of my absence from the city to misrepresent, and thus vilify me, by name” (p. 382).

What Poe considers most serious about the review, then, are its charges of impiety. Like his own prisoner of the Inquisition in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” he is being condemned by a sinister, black-robed authority who damns him for some vague and trumped-up heresy; unlike the prisoner, however, Poe does not “swoon” but rather vigorously protests both his orthodoxy and his innocence. Indeed, although there are no mentions of Christ per se in the Natural Theology of Eureka, Poe's entire attitude toward the Universe is fully compatible with the kind of Apologetics I have previously outlined. Natural Theologians like Paley and the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises, in fact, could invoke Christ only when dealing with their “proofs” of the New Testament, for when turning from the specific revelation of Scripture to the general revelation of Nature, they were necessarily forced to confront a more shadowy and abstract conception of the Godhead. Poe's performance in Eureka was perfectly consonant with this kind of strategy and indeed, had he cared to, Poe could have quoted the following paragraph from Thomas Dick's The Christian Philosopher as an adequate defense of his right to practice Natural Theology in opposition to the opinions of conservative students of divinity. Dick writes: “It is, unquestionably, both foolish and impious, to overlook or undervalue any of the modes by which the Divine Being has been pleased to make known his nature and perfections to mankind. Since he has given a display of his ‘Eternal Power and Godhead’ in the grand theatre of nature, which forms the subject of scientific investigation, it was surely never intended, and will ill comport with reverence for its adorable Author, that such magnificent displays of his Power, Wisdom, and Beneficence, as the material universe exhibits, should be treated, by his intelligent offspring, with indifference or neglect. It becomes us to contemplate, with adoring gratitude, every ray of our Creator's glory, whether as emanating from the light of Revelation, or as reflected from the scenery of nature around us, or as descending from those regions where stars unnumbered shine, and planets and comets run their solemn rounds . Instead of contrasting the one department of knowledge with the other, with a view of depreciating the science of nature, our duty is, to derive from both as much information and instruction as they are calculated to afford; to mark the harmony of the revelations they respectively unfold; and to use the revelations of nature for the purpose of confirming, and amplifying, and carrying forward our views of the revelation contained in the Sacred Scriptures.”(17)

Thomas Dick (1775-1857) was a Scottish popularizer of Natural Theology; and I have quoted from his Christian Philosopher (1824) because Alterton has proved Poe's dependence on this work for the substance of many passages in Eureka. Yet, as always, Poe used his direct sources only in order to go beyond them. In is case, Poe enacted Dick's plan of “confirming, and amplifying, and carrying forward our views of the revelation contained in the Sacred Scriptures” by boldly speculating on the means of the soul's reunion with God. “The Communion of the Saints” is a common tenet of Christian orthodoxy, but Poe merely framed it in cosmic terms when, in suggesting that “the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine,” he identified that heart with our own human one (p. 15). “Let not the merely seeming irreverence of this idea,” Poe cautions, “frighten our souls from that cool exercise of consciousness — from that deep tranquillity of self-inspection — through which alone we can hope to attain the presence of this, the most sublime of truths, and look it leisurely in the face” (p. 76).

If we employ that same “cool exercise of consciousness” which characterized the approach of Natural Theologians like Paley and Dick, we can see, I think, that Poe's final solution to the old problems of “Fixed Fate, Free-will, Foreknowledge Absolute” is still within the tradition of Apologetics. Indeed, on a cosmic scale, it is remarkably similar to Christian Universalism, which holds that “evil will ultimately be eradicated from the world, and that all erring creatures will be brought back to God through the irresistible efficacy of Christ's divine love.”(18) For, just as Poe in his aesthetic theory had urged the primacy of the imagination and its essential equality of expression in the arts, so now does he affirm the equality of souls as an expression [page 13:] of the primacy of God: “No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of any one's soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought; — these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity — are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul is inferior to another — that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul — that each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator: — in a word, that God — the material and spiritual God — now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the reconstitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God” (Eureka, p. 76).

“Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed” (1 Cor., 15:51). To Poe, just as Matter balances Spirit, so is the Apocalypse indissolubly linked to the Millennium, “that awfully triumphant epoch when [man] shall recognize his existence as that of Jehova” (Eureka, p. 77). In justifying his expansive doctrine of imagination and intuition, Poe took Natural Theology to a sphere where even its benign optimism had seldom ventured, as he actually described the physical mechanism of salvation itself.

I believe that a reading of Eureka in the context of Poe's sources fully supports Eric W. Carlson's observation in a stimulating article entitled “Poe's Vision of Man” that “The central theme in Poe's work, is not so much death and annihilation, as the spiritual rebirth or rediscovery of the lost psychal power essential to every man and artist seeking his fullest self-realization. I would only question Carlson's further contention that “To see this main thread running through the whole fabric of the writings from 1827 to 1849 is to see Poe not as a low jack-of-all-trades, which in some ways he sometimes was, but as a high Romantic, more transcendental even than Emerson” (p. 7). If a case is to be made either for Poe's high Romanticism or his Transcendentalism, it has to be a special one indeed, for I have attempted to show that Poe in fact rejected the prime Romantic theory of the imagination for a conception of “Fancy” that Coleridge had tried to relegate to a philosophical dustbin. In thus refurbishing “Fancy” to stand for a unitary, non-discriminatory, non-mystical concept of imagination, Poe also avoided that aesthetic schizophrenia which has continued to characterize Romantic applications of “creativity” and “inspiration” to individual works of art.

By advocating generalism, perhaps Poe was attempting in some measure to justify his own role as an intellectual “jack-of-all-trades, “but he also affirmed that we should judge any art-product on its own merits as an act of the imagination, not measure it against an arbitrary hierarchy of elitist values. “There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration, “he wrote in his “Magazine Writing — Peter Snook.” “To originate, is carefully, patiently, and under standingly to combine” (Works, XIV, p. 73). While Emerson raised the creative faculty to new Dionysian heights in such essays as “The Poet, “Poe remained the sure and steady advocate of an Apollonian virtuosity. The critic, not the poet, became Poe's “central man, “and in effect Poe revived the old eighteenth-century ideal of the “Man of Parts” in opposition to a common Romantic emphasis on single-minded Genius. Indeed, the stress on the selectivity of the artistic process harks back to both the Associationism of Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) and the rationalism of the Scottish Common Sense school.(20) Similarly, the joints of Natural Theology were already getting creaky and arthritic when Poe employed its methods in the 1848 Eureka, yet he managed to revive even those dry bones in his own way, as he had earlier with his use of the Gothic genre in fiction. Eureka itself is addressed “to those who feel rather than to those who think — to the dreamers who put faith in dreams as in the only realities” (Eureka, p. 9); and all his life Poe was accused of being a dabbler and a day dreamer, but as he wrote in another “Prose-Poem” entitled “Eleanora, ‘ ’ “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill in awaking, to find that they have been on the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the “light ineffable,” and again, like the adventurers of the Nubian geographer, ‘agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, guid in eo esset exploraturi” (Works, IV, p. 236).

The “Nubian geographer” is in fact the famous Claudius Ptolemaeus, inventor of the Ptolemaic system and an eminent mathematicisn and astronomer, as well as cosmologist and geographer. The quotation is from his Geographia, reading in translation: “They pushed forward into the sea of darkness, in order to explore what there might be therein.”(21) Ptolemy is exactly the kind of sublime generalist whose works best [page 14:] fit Poe's expansive definitions of poetry and imagination, while we remember that in Eureka, the “remarkable letter” demolishing deductive reason in favor of intuition is “found corked in a bottle and floating on the Mare Tenebrarum — an ocean well described by the Nubian geographer Ptolemy Hephestion, but little frequented in modem days unless by the Transcendentalists and some other divers for crotchets” (Eureka, p. 11). Poe's tone here is superficially light, but his purpose is deadly serious, for Eureka signalled his own penetration — “rudderless, compassless” — into that same formidable sea. It was, as I have suggested, a true saltus, a leap into the dark, an exploration of a vast and threatening ocean of meaning. Even Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith — who was also a “Knight of the Infinite” — could do no more.

Brown University

[[Footnotes]]

1. Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem [New Edition with line numbers, Explanatory Essay, and Bibliographical Guide], ed. Richard P. Benton (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1973), p. 12. References to Eureka are to this edition with page numbers cited in the text.

2. Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics [1860], introduction and notes by Oral Sumner Coad (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1949), p. 78.

3. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1972), p. 180.

4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in The Portable Coleridge, ed. I. A. Richards (N.Y.: Viking Press, 1950), p. 516.

5. Edgar Allan Poe, Complete Works, ed, James A. Harrison (N.Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1902), XIV, 201. References to Poe's works other than Eureka are to this edition with volume and page numbers cited in text.

6. For a full study of Poe's relation to Coleridge, see Floyd Stoval, “Poe’ s Debt to Coleridge, “Texas University Studies in English, X (July 8, 1930), pp. 70-127.

7. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932), p. 7.

8. Charles Baudelaire, “New Notes on Edgar Poe,” in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: Univ, of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 52-53.

9. See Claude Richard's informative article, “Poe Studies in Europe: France,” Poe Newsletter, II, No. 1 (January, 1969), p. 22.

10. Margaret Alterton, Origins of Poe's Critical Theory, Univ, of Iowa Humanistic Studies, II, no. 3 (Iowa City: Univ, of Iowa Press, 1925), pp. 112-131.

11. A. Seith, “William Paley,” Encyclopaedia Britannica [Ninth Edition], XVIII (1896), p. 182.

12 Anonymous, “The Universe and Its Author, “Quarterly Review [Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman, & Holden, 1834], L (October, 1833-January, 1834), p. 30.

13. Though difficult to imagine, the operation of this divine quality is hinted at in the stories of that modern heir of Poe's occult metaphysics, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In “Funes the Memorius, “an accident endows a young man with just this kind of divine mutuality of adaptation so “He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world” (Labyrinths [N.Y.: New Directions, 1964], p. 65). The divine gift is here seen as a human curse. The narrator of “The Aleph, “however, is granted a vision by means of a magic crystal in which in one “gigantic instant I saw millions of delightful and atrocious acts; none astonished me more than the fact that all of them together occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency.” He lives to tell of it (A Personal Anthology [N.Y.: Grove Press, 1967], p. 150. Finally, in “The Mirror of Enigmas” Borges approaches an idea of the omniscience of Poe's God when he asks in a footnote the rhetorical question, “What is a divine mind?” and answers: “There is not a theologian who does not define it; I prefer an example. The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconceivable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle. This figure (perhaps) has its given function in the economy of the universe” (Labyrinths, p. 212).

14. This is the kind of doubleness Emerson seizes upon in his 1853 essay, “Fate, “to reconcile the ambiguities of existence. Utilizing contemporary scientific data and the methods of Natural Theology much as Poe does, though with more Stoic leavening in his thought, Emerson writes: “One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists; the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians of the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one and the other foot on the back of the other. So when the man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit; a sour face and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; — he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain” (in Selections, ed. Stephen E. Whicher [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960], p. 351). Whereas Emerson urges spiritual athleticism as the only possible [page 15:] human response to the exigencies of fate, taking as his unwritten motto “Morituri Te Salutant,” Poe regards “Beautiful Necessity” as a numinous manifestation of the Deity: “In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice — of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil comes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more — it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes — with a view — if even with a futile view — to the extension of our own Joy” (Eureka, pp. 76-77). In sum, it remains paradoxical that Poe's Eureka contains the Transcendental fervor of an early Emerson essay like “Nature” (without the Transcendental philosophy, of course), while Emerson's late essay “Fate” contains all the Poesque calulation and Jesuitical resoning of a work like “The Philosophy of Composition” (see also Patrick F. Quinn, “Poe's Eureka and Emerson's ‘Nature’,” Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 31 [1963], pp. 4-7).

15. R. W. Emerson, “Brahma,” in Selections, p. 451.

16. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), II, 380.

17. Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher; or, The Connection of Science and Philosophy with Religion [1824] (N.Y.: Solomon King, 1831), p. 21.

18. Encyclopaedia Britannica [Ninth Edition], VIII (1896), p. 25. Poe was familiar with the works of Thomas Burnet (1635-1715) because, in a review (Edinburgh Review for July, 1835), he castigates the editor of Macintosh’ s The History of the Revolution in England in 1688 for repeatedly mispelling Burnet's name and for ignoring him: the “author of the Theoria Sacra [1681] is a personage of whom, or of whose works, the gentleman who undertook to edit the Fragment of Sir James Mackintosh has evidently never heard” (Works, VIII, 83). Poe probably was particularly drawn to Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra (Sacred Theory of the Earth) which contained a fanciful theory of the earth's structure; but the author of “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” might have found Burnet's De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium Tractatus (1723) of at least equal interest because here he maintained the doctrine of a middle state, the millennium, and the limited duration of future punishment. Significantly, Thomas Burnet is considered one of the precursors of Christian Universalism.

19. Eric W. Carlson, “Poe’ s Vision of Man,” in Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom, ed. Richard P. Veler (Springfield, Ohio: Chantry Press, Inc., 1972), p. 20.

20. See Donald A. Ringe, “Introduction,” The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in the Art of Bryant, Irving, and Cooper (Lexington: Univ, of Kentucky Press, 1971), pp. 1-15. Alison's Associationism is directly explicable to the opening paragraphs of “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

21. Eric W. Carlson, ed., Introduction to Poe: A Thematic Reader (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman & Co., 67), p. 583.