Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850

Abstract

The jury is still out on Eureka. Although still a seemingly anomalous outlier in Poe's oeuvre, Eureka has been given high marks for its remarkable anticipation of many features of twentieth- and twenty-first-century physics, astronomy, and cosmology even as it still challenges modern nonscientific readers with its conceptual rigors. And while recent scholars such as René van Slooten and David N. Stamos have explored the myriad scientific and philosophical insights found in Poe's cosmological treatise, the average Poe aficionado often steers clear of the text after a first reading. Poe himself, of course, set great store by his last major creative effort, writing to Maria Clemm on July 7, 1849, “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more.” First published in June 1848 and dedicated to the German scientist and polymath Alexander von Humboldt, author of the multivolume Kosmos, Eureka had been debuted as a lecture at the New York Society Library lecture on February 3 while Poe was trying to raise money for his projected magazine, The Stylus. Among Eureka skeptics, the New York editor and critic Evert Duyckinck, who launched Poe's first collection of Tales (1845), wrote his brother George after the lecture that it was “full of ludicrous display of scientific phrase—a mountainous piece of absurdity for a popular lecture.” But for more discerning and sympathetic readers, the world has been catching up with Poe's cosmological intuitions ever since.In his new study of Eureka, Robert J. Scholnick, a scholar specializing in the intersection of nineteenth-century American writers and science, presents a useful examination of the scientific and cultural milieus that produced Poe's work, highlighting the possible influence of the writings of Erasmus Darwin as well as the other scientific minds who likely helped shape Poe's thinking such as William Herschel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, John Pringle Nichol, Robert Chambers, and Alexander von Humboldt. Produced when the concepts of Deep Space and Deep Time were beginning to alert individuals to the staggering age and size of the universe, Eureka was in fact, in Scholnick's view, an integral part of an emerging scientific debate over cosmic and planetary evolution; indeed, it was “grounded in the radical, dangerous science of its own time” and “part of a vibrant and contentious transatlantic discourse that addressed fundamental questions of science, social structure, and religious belief” (iv). As Scholnick notes, Eureka has the distinction of anticipating a number of key concepts in modern astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics including the theories of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, the idea of a multiverse, the equivalency of matter and energy, the concept of a pulsating or oscillating universe, the existence of black holes, the butterfly effect as set forth by chaos theory, the space-time continuum, and more. Poe was well trained in mathematics at West Point and, as a book-reviewing polymath, well read in many of the contemporary sciences of his day, notably astronomy. But to what extent did Poe draw on contemporary science for his ideas, and to what extent were they original to his literary imagination?In his analysis of the influences on Eureka, Scholnick emphasizes those figures like Erasmus Darwin and William Herschel whose ideas and discoveries tended to undermine traditional religious beliefs and extend the subversive power of the European Enlightenment in order to conceptualize the idea of an evolving, dynamic materialist universe little resembling the biblical mythology of Genesis. Scholnick thus begins by providing an overview of some of the leading scientific ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing particularly on the work of Erasmus Darwin, a brilliant doctor, scientist, and progressive thinker of the later eighteenth century whose writings suggested the evolutionary basis of life on earth, as set forth in the two-volume medical treatise Zoonomia, and in the didactic poems The Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature. Scholnick notes that Poe demonstrated his acquaintance with Erasmus Darwin's posthumous poem Temple of Nature (1803) by alluding to it in number 69 of his “Pinakidia,” published in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger. Scholnick argues that Darwin's popularity in the early nineteenth-century United States, both because of his scientific acumen and his championship of American democracy, made it likely that Poe read Darwin's didactic poetry and may have gleaned there his ideas of the explosive origin and future collapse of the universe.In Chapter 1 Scholnick provides an overview of how Poe went from his 1827 “Sonnet—to Science,” which depicted science as a vulture preying on the poet's heart, to his embrace two decades later of a subversive Romantic-era science in Eureka. Influential along this route was likely the publication of Robert Chamber's Vestiges of the Natural History of the Earth, a sensational publication in both England and the United States in 1844–45 for its depiction of an evolutionary history of the earth beginning with the formation of the planet according to Laplace's nebular hypothesis, which in turn drew on the astronomer Hershel's recent findings on the seeming evolutionary growth and development of celestial phenomena. Scholnick notes that Poe denied having read Vestiges, although the astonishing popularity of the work makes it seem likely that he was familiar with its basic ideas. Like the anonymous author of Vestiges in his history of the planet, Poe would be positing the materialist, evolutionary development of the cosmos, with the token figure of God providing only an initial impetus for creation. Poe's Eureka thus clearly took advantage of the intense contemporary interest in new scientific ideas in the 1840s. Eureka was also symptomatic of the work of other lesser-known scientific figures of the era whose work advanced the materialist focus of science away from the orthodox ideas of natural theology; these included the surgeon William Lawrence, whose daring writings on physiology were read by Percy and Mary Shelley and influenced the creation of Frankenstein.In Chapter 2, Scholnick points out the concept of the sublime that pervaded Poe's writings and appeared in Eureka, noting that “the sublime serves as a perceptual vehicle for a journey back to the origins of everything and forward to the cosmic collapse” (41). Poe, of course, was deeply read in Burke's influential treatise on the subject, but it is still a moot question whether he also knew of Kant's theories of the sublime, whether at first- or secondhand. The ineffable sublime scale of the cosmos depicted in Eureka, according to Scholnick, also traces its scientific lineage back to the atomism of Lucretius, whose unorthodox poem on the atomistic composition of the universe had been steadily gaining an audience, appearing in England in 1805 in a translation by John Mason Good, later the author of the popular Book of Nature (1826). In Chapters 3 and 4, Scholnick returns to the similarities between Eureka and the pioneering ideas of Erasmus Darwin in their shared depictions of an evolving universe: “Both in Darwin's poetry and in his prose, Poe could have found sublime depictions of the Big Bang and also of the Big Crunch, as well as a direct reference to the foundational discoveries of William Herschel” (67).Finally, in Chapter 5 Scholnick examines the relationship between Eureka and the work of Alexander von Humboldt, the first volume of whose five-volume Kosmos was published by Harper and Brothers in the United States in 1847. Scholnick notes that Poe reprinted an English translation of a German review of the first volume of Kosmos in the Broadway Journal on July 12, 1845, a review that noted von Humboldt's initial presentation of his ideas in a lecture series in 1827–28 in Berlin—a possible reason for Poe's initial presentation of the ideas in Eureka in his February 1848 lecture. The introduction to the first volume of von Humboldt's masterpiece included an overview of the latest discoveries in astronomy, also possibly providing an important impetus for Poe's composition of Eureka. Von Humboldt was notable for his embrace of a Romantic view of science that welcomed the coexistence of intellectual rigor and artistic imagination, an idea that Poe also palpably endorsed in his cosmological treatise. As the most celebrated scientist of the mid-nineteenth century, whose work had a profound impact on American science, environmentalism, literature, and art, von Humboldt was well suited to be the tutelary spirit to Poe's treatise.Overall, in his study Scholnick provides a suggestive overview of the scientific milieu in which Poe was writing Eureka and a stimulus for further the study of a number of scientific figures who might have influenced Poe's late work. Scholnick's discussion of the figure of Erasmus Darwin is especially intriguing, but it needs further exploration and development to attain more critical mass. The emphasis on Erasmus Darwin in the title of the book thus draws attention to this relatively unexplored connection, but Scholnick's study also provides an informative guide to several other figures within the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century radical scientific community who played a role in the larger scientific and cultural context of Eureka. In Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850, Scholnick thus has produced a very useful gloss on a Poe text that continues to both baffle and fascinate the common reader even as it offers a tantalizing skeleton key to the mysteries of the cosmos—the final testament to Poe's brilliant cryptographic imagination.