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Poe’s1848 Eureka, the Southern Margin, and the Expanding U[niverse] of S[tars] Jennifer Rae Greeson No astronomical fallacy is more untenable, and none has been more pertinaciously adhered to, than that of the absolute illimitation of the Universe of Stars.   —Poe, Eureka Edgar Allan Poe’s last major work, Eureka, is many things at once. Among others, this “Essay on the Spiritual and Material Universe” is a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of human knowledge, and a quasi-scientific treatise on the developing field of cosmology. My reading in this essay, however, focuses upon Eureka as a satire in which Poe not only engages the language of abstract, theoretical inquiry, but also remains firmly grounded in the political turmoil of his day. Indeed, adding a reading of Eureka as satire to the other ways of reading it reveals a deeper level of import in the overall work of this complicated essay. Through his compounding of the language of scientific and philosophical inquiry with the language of politics, Poe investigates the extent to which “spiritual” discourses of objective, impartial Truth may underwrite quite “material” programs of imperial dominion. To read Eureka as a satire is to see in it not only an essay on “the Universe ,” but also a critique of the real-world uses of the category of “the Universal.” As with any satire, uncovering the satirical dimensions of Eureka involves excavating the context in which Poe wrote it. In the broad realm of U.S. political history, the most obvious context for Poe’s essay is that of the U.S.-­ Mexican War of 1846–48, the time during which the popular clamor of “Manifest Destiny ” reached fever pitch and seemed to realize its ultimate goal. Poe gave the lecture that was the basis for Eureka in February 1848, just three weeks after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was finalized, ceding California and the presentday U.S. Southwest to the United States. And Poe cemented the relays of his “universal ” treatise with the march of continental expansion when he chose the title 123 124 | Jennifer Rae Greeson for its published version. He titled the lecture simply “The Cosmogony of the Universe,” but by the time he sent the manuscript to press in July he had retitled it “Eureka.” In these months, Poe was in close contact with Bayard Taylor, who was serving as the New York Post correspondent in California, and thus it is probable that he would have been aware of the gold rush–inspired association of “eureka”—“I have found it”—with that newly acquired territory.1 By the summer of 1848, a preliminary seal for the future state of California had been designed with the word “eureka” over the top as a motto. Titling anything “Eureka” at this moment was tantamount to titling it “California,” naming it for that site at which the United States borders had at last reached continental scale. A second satirical vector of Eureka is revealed when we place the essay in the more local context of Poe’s other writing in the last years of his life—in particular, his literary criticism from late 1844 on. During these years in New York, Poe increasingly self-identified as a southerner, an identity that allowed him to express, under the aegis of sectionalism, animus against what he saw as a Boston-centered Transcendentalist hegemony in U.S. letters—a hegemony that he believed privileged political stances over aesthetic achievement, and promoted authors on the basis of their geographical identity rather than their creative genius.2 In his most direct criticisms of the Boston Transcendentalist writers in the mid-1840s, Poe vociferously protested what he called their “frantic spirit of generalization,” their tendency toward universalizing local and personal experience and perspective.3 Reading Eureka in the context of this sectionalist vein of Poe’s criticism, we notice that he opens Eureka with an extended parody of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s defining 1843 Dial essay, “The Transcendentalist,” in which Emerson had put forth one of his most direct statements of universalizing as method: His thought,—that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible , unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them. . . . From this transfer of the world into the consciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, follow easily his whole ethics.4 Emerson had proposed that elite New En­ gland­ ers...

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