It is inaccurate to maintain (see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, PMLA, lxxxiii, 1968, 284-297) that Edgar Allan Poe's vision of death and dissolution is totally ecstatic and beatific simply because the metaphysical and esthetic “Unity” presented by death is part of the basic “design” of the Universe as Poe conceived it. Instead, the esthetic cosmology of Eureka and the implicit themes of other of Poe's works, especially Pym, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” present a tension between hope and despair, reason and madness, Divine Purpose and seeming Nothingness which must be called “skeptical.”