Eureka: A Prose Poem
Adapted from a lecture he had presented, Eureka describes Poe's intuitive conception of the nature of the universe, with no antecedent scientific work done to reach his conclusions.
[3] Analysis of Eureka's scientific content shows congruities with modern cosmology, stemming from Poe's assumption of an evolving Universe.
Modern critics continue to debate the import of Eureka, and some doubt its seriousness, in part because of Poe's many incorrect assumptions and his comical references to historic thinkers.
[13] Poe suggests that people have a natural tendency to believe in themselves as infinite with nothing greater than their soul—such thoughts stem from man's residual feelings from when each shared an original identity with God.
[15] Likewise, Poe saw the universe itself as infinitely expanding and collapsing[16] like a divine heartbeat which constantly rejuvenates itself, also implying a sort of deathlessness.
[21] Poe's decision to call Eureka a "prose poem" goes against some of his own "rules" of poetry which he had laid out in "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle".
In particular, Poe had called the ideal poem short, at most 100 lines, and utilizing the "most poetical topic in the world": the death of a beautiful woman.
[28] Poe's voice crescendos throughout, starting as the modest seeker of truth, moving on to the satirist of logic, and finally ending as the master scholar.
A scientific reassessment of Eureka also emphasizes that Poe was the first person to conceive a Newtonian evolving universe in which nothing can stop stars or galaxies from collapsing on each other.
[41] If this is the case, as interpreted by poet Richard Wilbur, Poe is criticizing this world, suggesting that it has fallen away from God by elevating scientific reason above poetic intuition.
[43] Astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington has disputed this notion, declaring that "Eureka is not a work of dotage or disordered mind".
[44] Some modern critics believe Eureka is the key to deciphering meaning in all of Poe's fiction – that all his works involve similar theories.
Poe's friend Marie Louise Shew, who had helped his wife Virginia on her deathbed, broke off their friendship, because it offended her religious beliefs.
Poe believed it to have been written by John Henry Hopkins Jr. (1820–1889), a young theology student who had previously criticized Eureka as pantheistic and "a damnable heresy" that "conscience would compel him to denounce".
[46] Literary critic George Edward Woodberry in 1885 thought the essay was based on a crude understanding of the science a student learns in school, "rendered ridiculous" by absurdity and the density of his ignorance.
[47] Thomas Dunn English, a writer, lawyer, and physician who frequently criticized Poe, wrote an article for the John-Donkey headlined "Great Literary Crash".
The article reported that a shelf of books had crashed because someone had "imprudently" stacked an edition of Eureka on it, and that it was a miracle that the whole building had not fallen down as a result.
Poe's friend Evert A. Duyckinck wrote his brother that the lecture had bored him to death and that it was "full of a ludicrous dryness of scientific phrase—a mountainous piece of absurdity".
French writer Paul Valéry praised it for both its poetic and scientific merit, calling it an abstract poem based on mathematical foundations.
