Text: William Drake, “Survival: Eureka in Relation to Poe's Other Works,” Poe as Literary Cosomology (1975), pp. 15-22 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 15, continued:]

Eureka has long given students of Poe the tantalizing vision of a philosophical poet-critic who, in a final magniloquent effort, placed the capstone on his system, fulfilling the quest for unity that was his obession. Baudelaire, in his preface to “Mesmeric Revelation” in 1848, compared Poe with Balzac as a philosophical writer seeking to construct a coherent world, and in 1852 (in Poe: His Life and Works) credited him with a thirst for unity like that of philosophers and conquerors. The impression of internal coherence in the body of Poe's writings has been impossible to ignore, whether it is the “mass of unique shape and impressive size to which the eye constantly returns” that T. S. Eliot saw, or the psychological architecture of Richard Wilbur's “House of Poe, “the neat Augustan classifications of Auden, or the actual “system” defined most recently by David Halliburton in Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton, 1973).(1) A dominant tendency of criticism in our time has been to discover coherent “worlds” of the imagination, detectable through the consistent patterns of symbolic imagery that can be traced in a writer's work — a method often applied so indiscriminately that Mr. Wilbur was obliged to apologize for employing it in his explication of Poe, a writer who seems to call for it above any other. But despite widespread agreement that Poe's writings offer genuine opportunities for systematic analysis, one is struck by the variety of unifying patterns that [page 16:] have been deduced, and by the ease with which Poe eludes capture. Did Poe actually build a system of sorts — or have we built systems out of Poe?

The answer must lie in the meaning to Poe of “unity,” which reaches its apotheosis in Eureka as a long-sought goal, the writing of which affected him with profound emotion and a sense of having reached the end of he had to say. “It is no use to reason with me now,” he wrote to Maria Clemm on July 7, 1849; “I must die. I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more.”(2) David Halliburton notes (p. 394) the ‘'superfluity of feeling” in Eureka, and quotes Arthur Ransome's similar observation in his Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Study (London, 1910): “It is hope almost throttled by fear and for that reason raising its voice to an unnatural pitch.” Eureka does not appear to be the end-product of patient system-building over the years, but rather a burst of glorious intuitive vision, its energy coming from below the surface of consciousness with feverish intensity. Its calculated serenity is unquiet within, like the superficial calm and icy logic of Poe's own fictional madmen. Logic in Eureka, he makes quite clear in his attack on Aristotelian and Baconian reasoning, is not a process of argument leading to conclusions, but a system of internal consistency supporting the intuited vision. These factors — the disquieting emotionalism, the rigidly self-contained logical vision — suggest that unity for Poe is a stratagem of art and life, reflecting the Ideal, a necessary act that holds together one's mind and being against the forces of annihilation. Taking that “distant view of it as a whole” which Eliot recommended, Poe's work does not suggest a philosophical system or an architectural pattern so much as it does a series of crucial acts along the path of his life and development. Its continuity lies in the problem constantly dramatized: the struggle between destruction and survival, the twin forces which lie at the heart of his vision in Eureka. In this sense, Eliot is correct in saying that Poe id not appear to believe, but rather to entertain theories.”

Poe's forthright statements on unity and coherence bear out the argument that he is not a “philosophical’ system-building poet, like Milton, Dante, or Lucretius. Unity is “that vital requisite in all works of Art,” he says in “The Poetic Principle” — in 1849, not far from the time of writing Eureka — but goes on to define a work's unity as “its totality of effect or impression.” Unity is not a matter of intellectual coherence or plan ideas, but an experience or response that results from the careful manipulation of the medium by the artist almost as a playgoer responds to a performance. As Edmund Wilson wrote in his appreciation of Poe in 1926, it is not what you say that counts, but how you make the reader feel.”(3) It is inconceivable that Poe should be concerned with the overall connective design of his work, as Joyce was, for example — and as the genuine cosmological poet must be. Poe's focus is always on the short, self-contained individual work as a dramatic act. Unity is an aspect of method.

Rational order in Poe's work does not, then, support a definable system of ideas in the usual sense, but has, on the simplest level, a theatrical and psychological function. Poe's brilliant sense of showmanship needs no illustration, and he explained in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) how logical coherence functions to dazzle and impress the reader; how, actually, the effect of unity is obtained. The writer's proper starting point, he says, is the denouement, for in order to attain the desired effect everything must lead logically and inevitably to that end: “It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.” The writer must never entangle himself in a challenging puzzle and then find only a weak way out of it. When the solution is determined in advance, the structure of events can [page 17:] be carefully designed to lead to that solution, so that the reader's expectations are completely fulfilled. As event succeeds event in seeming inevitability, the reader is unaware that he is not following an empirical process of reasoning from the known into the unknown, but is rather being led along a predetermined path. The denouement is a surprise to him, perhaps, but not to the author, for whom it was tautologically included in the design of the plot itself. The full range of possibilities that might exist in real life is rigorously excluded, so that only an arbitrary selection remains to give the impression of logical consistency. Beyond the footlights, all is darkness.

This theatrical rationality may account for the fact that some have found Poe wanting in intellectual depth, for one cannot apply his logic to situations in life. A philosophical poet or novelist would intend his rational vision to be morally and intellectually instructive, a use Poe was notoriously anxious to avoid. He must be classed with the great literary entertainers and not with the philosophers and academic thinkers. To the fastidious, his art is heavy-handed and naive, his “ear” bad. It is hard for Eliot, Auden, and Wilbur to praise him without an undercurrent of distaste for the operatic shabbiness of his artifice. But his work seems right for the public arena for which it was designed. His art grew out of practical journalism like that of Twain and many another American writer struggling in the democratic marketplace. Twain's apparent crudeness is excused because it goes with the carefully cultivated Western rough-neck pose. Poe, with pretensions of higher culture — and a similar disdain for the crowd — is not so easily recognized as playing to the same audience. The subtleties of the public entertainer's art are of a different order from those of Eliot and other men of letters in today's academic canon. But they are consistent with the view of Poe as the dramatizer of the vital conflict that concerned him most deeply. His theatrical stage sets are the artifacts of a growing and changing personality acting out the terms of his problem over and over as he progressed.

Even in Eureka, “with humility really unassumed, “Poe does not change his artistic method, but flings down at the outset an outrageous challenge whose denouement has been safely worked out in advance: “I design 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. I shall be so rash, moreover, as to challenge the conclusions, and thus, in effect, to question the sagacity, of many of the greatest and most justly reverenced of men. “When the cosmic conclusion is unveiled — the “plot of God” — we realize that Poe had been approaching that ultimate formula all along. God's plot is tautological, an intuited vision with its self-sustaining logic: the “Original Unity of the First Thing” contains both the unfolding of all else and its “Inevitable Annihilation.” Poe had, in truth, reached the end of a particular line of development. What began as a game and then grew to a serious artistic principle ended as a blinding universal vision. Having reconciled the terms of his conflict under the stress of deep emotion, he could indeed go no further. For his work had been the product of tension between chaos and logical order, driving him to find a resolution.

Eureka is therefore not a capstone to a theoretical system, or even a blueprint to the architectural maze of his invented world. It is the place where his development ended. Its value is that, looking back, we can see more clearly the route by which he came. Eureka is not, however, his grand denouement planned’ in advance, revealing the logical plot of his work as a whole. It is a long way from the conventional yearning for an ideal heaven in “Al Araaf” and “Israfel, “contrasted with flawed and sorrowful earth, to the perfectly coordinated, harmonious universe of Eureka in a non-tragic divine plan. But that, in the briefest possible statement, is the history of Poe's development, and it defines the relation of Eureka to his earlier work.

From the beginning, Poe placed his faith in the capability of the human imagination to envision a heaven of ideal love and beauty. In the vein of Moorish exoticism popularized by Byron and Moore, he removed from his heaven any Christian theological implication and endowed it richly with a sensuous but pure aestheticism. “Al Araaf’ (1829) has only a dimly outlined cosmography, its most memorable feature being its beautiful indistinctness, for it predates Poe's obsession with logic and internal consistency. The need for that had not yet arisen. The yearning for immortal perfection was a common enough theme in Romantic literature, and it is only when Poe begins to treat it with mature seriousness that it takes on distinctness, and the melo-dramatic sadness at life's disappointments gives way to the possibility of tragic suffering. If the ideal of harmonious love and beauty is life-giving, and rational order is its expression, then disorder, grotesqueness, madness, disintegration, and death are its opposite and its enemy. As soon as Poe got beyond the conventional youthful pose of hymning ideal beauty while luxuriating in sorrow at its unattainability on this earth, he realized the terror that sprang from the discrepancy between the ideal and the real. As the tension grew, the emphasis on rigorous artistic form, embodying abstract rational principles, grew in proportion. Hence, the paradoxical tale whose subject is madness but whose method is supremely logical. [page 18:]

Since idealism in its philosophical sense has been discredited in the twentieth century, the interpretation of Poe's conflict has generally been shifted to a modern psychological basis, as in Joseph Wood Krutch's Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (N.Y., 1926). This approach requires one to explain the quest for the ideal as a regressive infantile desire to escape life's normal unpleasantness, and his art as an elaborate form of compensation. Edmund Wilson roundly rejected the psychoanalytical method in “Poe at Home and Abroad” (New Republic, December 8, 1926), along with the claim that Poe preferred “dream worlds” to reality. But the view nevertheless persists, probably because its assumptions are so deeply engrained in the mentality of our time. Richard Wilbur's brilliant Library of Congress lecture in 1959, “The House of Poe, “approvingly quotes Auden's description of him as “an unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing house,”(4) and goes on to portray Poe as a spoiled child who would close his eyes and obliterate the real world in order to transcend it with his imaginary ideal. All this, however, demonstrates the limitations of the psychoanalytical approach in its failure to understand religious or idealistic beliefs except as flights of delusion by unstable personalities in search of adjustment. It misses, too, the fact that Poe tested his idealism in the crucible of experience and reported the results unflinchingly. The thrust of his imagination was to act out the terms of his conflict in symbolic drama, rather than to seek escape through a ritualistic destruction of reality. This is to argue exactly the opposite of Mr. Wilbur's idea (in “The House of Poe”) that “Poe conceived of art, not as a means of giving imaginative order to earthly experience, but as a stimulus to unearthly visions.” It was precisely “giving imaginative order to earthly experience” that Poe was about. The ideal was more than a dream of perfection that caused him to reject life in petulant disappointment. As anyone in his time would have explained, it provided the standards and the principles for measuring conduct and achievement in this world; it fixed one's aim. The ideal was necessary to demonstrate to human beings how imperfect they were. The entire idealistic tradition from Plato onwards rests on its fundamental applicability to life. The ideal itself might be literally as unattainable as the star to the moth; but in that most common idealistic image, it was a star, a beacon and guide. Only by understanding the idealistic premises as they appeared to those who held them can we resolve the apparent paradox in Poe, who did not pine away in contemplation of ideal beauty but busied himself throughout his short life in producing an impressive body of poetry, fiction, and criticism, with an intelligence keenly attuned to his time. Idealism in the nineteenth century often does not receive sympathetic study, our view of it having been colored by the destructive criticism of the later realists and naturalists.

There is a consistency throughout Poe's work, then, in his constant exploration of a somewhat limited theme: the plight of a passionate idealist in a hostile real world. But the kind of visionary dreaming to which we find him committed in his early poems is not the same as that in Eureka. The pervasive mood of his early work is the pleasurable sadness that results from dreaming of ideal beauty, in contrast to the world which he holds in weary disdain. The ideal cannot be grasped; it is only a stimulus to rich discontent. The poetic subject is not so much unearthly perfection as the psychological consequences of the pursuit. To commit oneself to the ideal is to commit oneself deliberately to noble suffering, and Poe does so with a Byronic flourish. The perversity of this decision foreshadows the fascination he later expressed for the inexplicable drive toward self-incrimination and self-destruction of which the personality was capable, sometimes out of the very desire for happiness. But only “The Lake” among his earlier poems hints that the delicious melancholy he deliberately sought might carry him farther than he anticipated. With an ambivalent “terror” and “tremulous delight” the lake, which his solitary imagining had made to appear an Eden, turned instead into a black vision of death: “Death was in that poisonous wave, / And in its gulf a fitting grave. . . .” There was an ironic fatality in the soul's adventure, guided by the fitful light of its star, for the harmonious vision of heaven led into an actual hell of experience — a thematic pattern to which Poe returned over and over in both his tales and his later poems, gradually advancing to resolution in Eureka.

Echoing Platonic idealism, Poe attributed absolute mathematical harmony, immortality, and perfect rationality to his notion of the ideal. Insofar as the individual could be in harmony with the divine intention, he displayed to some degree the qualities of inner consistency and rational harmony which he depicted most succinctly in the poem “The Haunted Palace, “where a stately and orderly union of music, color and gesture expresses the ideal in its earthly equivalent. But that harmony does not last. He usually portrayed the human personality in a desperate struggle for sheer survival, if not doomed to a morbid process of disintegration. “The Descent into the Maelstrom” is one of his few allegories of a self's maintainance [[maintenance]] of its wholeness by the successful exercise of reason. It is, therefore, an interesting early anticipation of Eureka. In that story, the protagonist, whirling hopelessly into the vortex that signifies death and loss of identity, does not succumb to a perverse fascination for his own destruction but manages to stand coolly aside and, by an imaginative grasp of the principles of order in nature, apply his reason to the situation and so save himself. The moon breaking through the clouds to light his way signifies the parallel between human and divine reason. The idealist for once is not a victim of life's buffetings, but proves the validity of his commitment. [page 19:]

Heroic success, however, is not the rule. And if the narrator of “The Descent into the Maelstrom” is responsible for his own salvation, the protagonists in Poe's other tales who descend into other vortices do not seem to be equally responsible for their own demise. What, precisely, are the adverse forces which destroy them? The shocks of life are seldom clearly specified. They are indefinite losses, reverses of fortune, not important in themselves but only for the traumas they produce. They are ambushes by fate, seemingly without cause: “But evil things in robes of sorrow / Assailed the monarch's high estate.”

These undefined assaults of life upon the ego are most probably projections of the fear of death, leading to a paralyzing vision of horror. The evil in life seems to be chiefly the conscious knowledge of one's own mortality and the inevitable loss of all that one holds dear. Unnamed disasters are then extensions or anticipations of the final thing to be feared — an uncontrollable drift into psychic disintegration and death, the fate no one can manage to avoid. The accidental shocks do not need to be specified; they simply serve to turn the mind inward upon its own mortal destiny. Innocent happiness and the pure enjoyment of beauty are thereby irretrievably lost. Yet it was the star of the ideal that awakened him to life's sadness by bidding him to love and enjoy. The youthful perversity that drove him to embrace suffering as the price of the unattainable ideal led him finally to a vision of hell.

But, one may ask, are not Poe's protagonists really responsible for their fates? An air of ambivalence surrounds his treatment of the question, for not only are the external causes of disaster obscure, but the characters often seem to cooperate in their own destruction. If, during this middle period, Poe seems doubtful whether one can integrate his life in the face of certain death, he seems equally uncertain whether one does not bear some responsibility for drifting into ruin. Poe's major poems from “The Raven” (1845) through “Ulalume” (1847) to Eureka (1848) show his movement towards a reconciliation of the immortal ideal and death-ridden reality. Interestingly, this is also the period of great technical virtuosity, the implication of which will be mentioned further on, for the unfolding vision of order is related to the constructive ingenuity of the poems.

In “The Raven,” however, there is not yet a solution, only a drastic statement of the problem, which has not been so succinctly crystallized before. As usual, a traumatic loss has turned the mind of the narrator to introspection, and a window opens from the lighted study (with its books and bust of Pallas Athena a symbol of conscious intellect) onto the blackness of a deep and indefinable space. The raven, which comes out of the night, is not only linked to the traditional imagery of birds as messengers from the spirit world, but in a more modem sense is a voice from the subconscious darkness, an inarticulate level where the human and the sub-human worlds blend into one. An animal form is its appropriate expression. It has, of course, no language, and its one mechanically repeated and ambiguous word can mean whatever the hearer wants it to mean. The narrator proceeds perversely to engineer his own self-defeat by asking questions which he knows will receive a negative answer. Significantly, for this analysis, the hope which is so defeated is that of “Aidenn,” the one-time heaven of “Al Araaf’ and “Israfel, “or the Romantic dream of a place where peace and happiness are achieved by elimination of all earthly imperfection. But the narrator, in this eclipse of reason and paralysis of will, is self-condemned by his own insistent despair. “The Imp of the Perverse, “a tale from almost the same time as “The Raven,” shows a similar analysis of self-induced fate, where a deeper level of personality plays tricks on rational control.

But most importantly, “The Raven” suggests that man's self-destructive reaction to loss, grief, or other traumatic sorrows, may be his own fault, resulting paradoxically from his futile yearning for a perfect world where such things do not occur — that the pursuit of perfect joy brings about its own tragedy. This thought looks forward to Eureka for resolution.

“Ulalume, “halfway between “The Raven” and Eureka, and one of Poe's most complex poems, analyzes the problem in broader scope and moves closer to the eventual answer. For now the mood is not melodramatic despair but quiet resignation. Recognition of the painful truth this time is not such a paralyzing shock, and an effort is made to explain how one can be led into false hopes by the dream of ideality. To understand the poem one must first realize that its landscape and actors are to be taken as a projection of the narrator's own self in its entirety, just as “The Raven” symbolized the mind as the small enclosure of a room where the boundary between light and fathomless darkness was sharply demarcated. The landscape of “Ulalume” seems carefully designed to portray the complexity of human personality as it exists simultaneously on levels of conscious thought, subconscious emotional activity, and memory. [page 20:]

The original trauma of becoming acquainted with death has been covered over by the passage of time, superficially healed. But the knowledge has not really been accepted, only repressed. Under the surface are stirring unrecognized currents of disturbing unconscious memory. By association — it being an anniversary, or perhaps simply the time of year when death in nature and All Hallow's Eve remind one of mortality — the narrator unwittingly begins a journey into the memory of a passionately emotional time when death entered his awareness along with love. His companion, who functions diffidently as a guide, is Psyche, whom I take to be an intellectual or rational principle. The star that arises in their path almost like a false dawn is the illusory light of the heaven of the ideal, which promises total “Lethean peace” or release from earthly pain, the “surcease from sorrow” so anxiously desired in “The Raven.” The star, Astarte, sees and takes pity on the anguish of the death-haunted narrator: “She has seen that the tears are not dry on / These cheeks where the worm never dies.”

It is a misreading, I believe, to contrast Astarte with Dian as voluptuous versus chaste love, and to see this poem as an instance of Poe's inability to conduct “earthly” relationships. His Romantic heaven of the ideal was sensuously aesthetic and suggested the culmination of perfect love. Rather, Astarte's promise is the old dream of ideal love unattainable in this world, and Dian represents not chastity but reason, with which the light of the moon in Poe's earlier work was sometimes associated, for it lit the vortex of the maelstrom and turned blood-red as Roderick Usher's mind crumbled in insanity. The point seems to be that a futile yearning for fulfillment of the dream leads first to illusion and then to a painful confrontation with reality. “Ulalume” is, I believe, a further probing into the possibility that Poe's “Aidenn,” the Romantic notion of an ideal realm where one can escape the imperfections of this world, is only an invention of wish-fulfilling fantasy, a misuse of intuitive imaginative, actually luring its victims into worse suffering than they were trying to flee from — again, self-inflicted pain. And Poe himself, if this is true, is painfully trying to reconstruct his beliefs.

As the narrator in “Ulalume” insists on following the illusory star, which cannot possibly misguide them (he thinks) because “it flickers up to Heaven through the night, “Psyche intuitively senses its falseness and tries to dissuade. When the narrator pushes forward, disregarding her sound advice, he discovers death at the end of his path rather than the beautiful fiction of heavenly love. This excursion into the deepest part of the self, down to a “dim lake” in the “misty mid-region” where the outlines become indistinct, has uncovered not an ideal realm of spirit, but the inescapable fact of mortality. Like Emily Dickinson, Poe could not force himself to see beyond the grave to a place where the soul could enjoy the promise of perfect bliss.

If “The Raven” hinted that the pursuit of the ideal in the face of life's realities might itself be the mistake, because it created false hopes and therefore disappointment and anguish, “Ulalume” ventures to ask how one could so mislead himself. The answer is a measure of Poe's growing insight: the “merciful ghouls, “elemental protective forces in the landscape of the human subconscious, try to keep secret from the conscious mind the disturbing knowledge of death by creating the illusion of an ideal heaven — that is, drawing up the distracting “spectre of a planet.” But their well-meant device only postpones the inevitable confrontation with reality. Although the personality blindly tries to protect itself, the truth cannot be evaded. With “Ulalume” the insupportable idea of a heaven to escape to is finally abandoned without collapse into melodramatic despair. But the resulting vulnerability made necessary the final step: to integrate the acceptance of death into a scheme of positive order, where the self-induced pain of life, a consequence of the pursuit of joy, could be justified.

Eureka came to Poe, as its title indicates, as the discovery of what he had been looking for. Since he wished it to be judged “as a poem only,” we are correct in placing it in a direct line of continuity with his other poems and reading it as another artistic stratagem for coping logically with life's conflicts. Most striking in Eureka is the transmutation of death from the negation of life, hope, and one's dreams to a necessary spiritual function, a part of the rhythm of divine life. The nearest equivalent in late Romantic literature is Whitman's pantheistic view of the diffusion of spirit throughout nature in an inseparable blend, with death as the womb of further life. Poe, whose imagery is drawn from physics and mathematics rather than from organic science, constructs, of course, a very different and more abstract sort of vision. But it met the same need for reconciling spirit and matter, life and death.

Gone, too, along with the fear and horror, is the sense of injury because life bruises one's ideals of perfect love and beauty. Perfection is not somewhere else, to be yearned for while complaining of this earth. [page 21:] The manifold system of reality itself is perfect. Life and death are no longer at war. They are symmetrical forces in eternal balance of attraction and repulsion, one unthinkable without the other. If the germ of death were not present in birth, there could be no expansion, no growth and complexity, finally no consciousness or art. “The Body and the Soul Walk hand in hand, “and the spiritual and the material are bound “in the strictest fellowship, forever.” Good and evil are only the names we apply to the positive and the negative, “as cold is the negation of heat — darkness of light.” The universal tendency is always to return to normality, for the negative to be balanced by the positive.

But in the totality of this magnificent design by which Poe at last reconciles himself to all life, the important thing is that each individual is a fragment of the Divine Being who has diffused Himself according to mathematical plan through time and space, and our destiny is ultimately to be gathered in to the center to be reunited with all spirit in the unity of the original individual God. Such a view makes injustice, fate, and evil both “intelligible” and “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 — even with a futile view — to the extension of our own joy.” In the entanglement of love and pain that is the ordained nature of life, the sum of all happiness is “precisely that amount . . . which appertains by right to the Divine Eeing when concentrated within himself.” Our pain and our joy are not our own, but God's. Sorrow is cheerfully accepted and unearned joy is not to be expected.

Eureka is a breathtaking leap into self-unification and self-healing. It does not matter whether its cosmology is valid as such, if indeed any cosmology can be. Like others of his poems, it is a symbolic action of the self in the effort to achieve integration within and harmony without, against the forces of destruction. Logic is the instrument of survival, giving order to the imaginative vision. Poe had moved steadily in the direction of locating the responsibility for unhappiness within one's self rather than in the flawed scheme of things. What he could not do before Eureka was to find a way to place his vision of rational order in the context of the external world without appearing to make the universe a mere extension of his own wish-fulfilling dreams.

Poe tried hard to establish the ontological validity of his vision by proposing that the relation between self and universe can be grasped by an intuitive leap of the pure reason. It does not really matter whether this philosophical position is defensible. Poe was in search of a means of practical resolution of his dilemma, which had profound emotional consequences; these ideas provided that means. They were, in their function for him, not an act of imaginative projection of unrealistic desires, but one of coming to terms realistically with himself, of reconciling the intolerable conflict between hope and death. From our more sophisticated psychological viewpoint today, we recognize that the important thing about each man's “dream” of reality is that it work, not that he can prove its validity.

Poe's leap from the realm of empirical science to that of pure logic may have been derived, however indirectly, from Hume's destructive criticism of reason, which allowed no valid logical demonstration of the “laws” of physical nature: “there is no such thing as demonstration,” Poe insisted at the outset of Eureka, disposing of the criticism that he was merely avoiding proof on the level of the natural sciences. When the criticism was nonetheless leveled in a review in the Literary World, Poe wrote a lengthy answer to Charles F. Hoffman (whom he supposed to have been the author) in September, 1848, that “there is no absolute certainty either in the Aristotelian or the Baconian process . . . neither has a right to sneer at that seemingly imaginative process called Intuition” (Ostrom, II, 380). Poe would have been fully aware of the overwhelming commitment of American science in the 1830's and 1840's to the Baconian ideal of observation and experiment, and its hostility to speculative theory. Logic, Hume held, was a set of perfect tautological consistencies somehow a part of the human mental equipment. Reason, in the hands of the great philosopher of the Age of Reason, ironically had been reduced to very little indeed, and scientific method had to go on faith, for logic could not prove that the sun will rise tomorrow. Poe would hardly have accepted Hume's skeptical thinking beyond the critique of reason, but he did capitalize on the inference that the sole absolute truth is perfect consistency, available only by looking within one's own mind. He went on to extend that perfect law to the universe by the exercise of intuition, for the grasp of the glorious consistency was not available through the perception of material reality or the application of scientific method. Hume had destroyed the bridges between reason and nature's order, but Poe took wings.

What Poe desperately needed was a unifying vision of life in which the physical processes culminating in death were not at war with the imagination, which yearned for immortal perfection. By finding these subject to an orderly cosmic plan which could be grasped by the imagination and firmly supported by the only [page 22:] acceptable law of human reason, Poe performed his final creative act of psychological integration. He had begun by accepting the gap between physical and spiritual worlds, sighing for the supposedly perfect ideal on the other side. Now he abandoned “heaven” as an illusory dream and found that the law of perfect consistency in the mind gave order to the pain and imperfection of this life after all, rendering them comprehensible and endurable. One's dreams were legitimate if they were not at odds with the truth of experience, which included pain as well as pleasure and death as well as life.

In the last analysis, Poe's need for a self-contained unity on a universal scale, a grand tautology, may bespeak a profound insecurity which could find no peace on lesser terms. Clearly Eureka attempted to put an end to his drift into disintegration and despair. His most ingeniously constructed work, as was noted earlier, also comes from this period of greatest personal instability — as though the extreme of disorder were met by the response of its opposite and as collapse grew imminent, it called forth a supreme effort of integration. This see-sawing, as it were, culminated in Eureka. The extreme nervous intensity that surrounded its writing and performance reveals its tremendous emotional significance to Poe. Was it the last, and most extreme, attempt to pull himself together once and for all, a prelude to collapse and death? He wrote in Eureka, “As divine intentions are accomplished — so . . . should we expect to find an acceleration of the End.” Afterward, he said he had no further desire to live; he could “accomplish nothing more.”

To return to the question of how Eureka should best be related to Poe's other work: my answer has been to establish a pattern of development so that Eureka is not mistakenly read within the more limited terms of his earlier works and their unresolved problems, or they within its cosmic expansiveness and its solution. Poe's mind was dynamic and changing, dramatizing its deepest problems progressively in the poems and tales. They are public performances in the arena of life, not mechanical abstractions laid out by a contemplative thinker. His logical structures hold explosive emotions within their grasp. Reason functions in this world, as does art, coming to grips with the terms of existence. Poe's commitments which were intensely earnest, engaging his whole being, he pursued vigorously to the end. What unites his total work, then, is not an architectural plan but the path he moved along. Eureka stands there as a last great life-sustaining effort.

State University of New York at Oswego

[[Footnotes]]

1. Eliot's Library of Congress lecture of 1948, “From Poe to Valery,” Wilbur's Library of Congress Lecture of 1959, “The House of Poe,” and Auden's “Introduction” to Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose and Poetry (N.Y., 1950), are all included in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor, 1966). All subsequent references are to this edition. David Halliburton says in his study (p. 415): “I have tried to show . . . that Poe's imaginative writings constitute an overarching unity or whole — that Baudelaire was right when he observed that Poe, like Balzac, was absorbed in creating a ‘system.’ ”

2. Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John W. Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), II, 452.

3. Edmund Wilson, “Poe at Home and Abroad,” New Republic, December 8, 1926. In Carlson, p. 151.

4. Auden's original statement appears in Carlson, p. 229.