# The Mind Of Edgar Allan Poe



## Josiah (Jan 23, 2015)

This is from an article in the New York Review of Book by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson praises his idiosyncratic brilliance, claiming the long prose poem about cosmology he wrote in the last year of his life, Eureka, was “so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it”:


Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.


This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.


All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-ﬁrst century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.


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## RadishRose (Jan 23, 2015)

I didn't know Poe was so brilliant. I will never forget our 7th grade teacher reading aloud Poe's "The Telltale Heart". We were spellbound.

Thanks for this insight.


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## Warrigal (Jan 24, 2015)

I too was introduced to Poe by a school reading of The Tell Tale Heart. In year 8.
I went on to seek out other stories by Poe but I never stumbled upon Eureka.
I wonder if it is on the Guttenberg Project website?


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## Meanderer (Jan 24, 2015)




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## Josiah (Jan 24, 2015)

Dame Warrigal said:


> I too was introduced to Poe by a school reading of The Tell Tale Heart. In year 8.
> I went on to seek out other stories by Poe but I never stumbled upon Eureka.
> I wonder if it is on the Guttenberg Project website?



The entire work is available at

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/eureka.html

I'm not sure I'm up to its profundity.


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