Evermore: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the Universe

Preface

ix preface This book explores several of the major questions of life that Edgar Allan Poe considered. It does not explore all the questions he asked, nor does it attempt to exhaust the subject on those questions it examines. This book could have explored a single question , but it would have failed because Poe did not have a fragmented view of life that would allow us to examine a single aspect apart from its relationship with the whole. Poe was concerned with unity. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, virtually everyone , sympathetic Poe scholars included, regarded Poe’s 143-page essay Eureka as bizarre evidence that he had gone round the bend. Over the last ten years, I have had the honor of conversing with many important Poe scholars, most of whom have acknowledged that they were at a loss when it came to Eureka. The easy road has been to dismiss it. This book is not for those who have taken the easy road. The issues Poe discusses in Eureka begin showing up in his poetry, tales, essays, and criticism at the beginning of his career. He quotes and paraphrases his own work throughout Eureka. In it, he proposes the Big Bang theory, speculates about what we call black holes, rejects the scientific understanding of the invisible ether through which gravity works, and declares that time and space Evermore x are one thing, all while constructing a theology of creation and a philosophical answer to the problem of suffering. One of my areas of work for many years has been the intersection of science and religion . This crossroad fascinated Poe, and we see this fascination playing a major role in his development of the possibilities of science fiction, a type of literature so new when he began experimenting with it that it was often simply referred to as a “hoax” because the genre had no name until the twentieth century. Because of its subject, this book does not pretend to be literary criticism. Instead, it examines Poe’s life and work from a philosophical and theological perspective. The book necessarily interacts with Poe’s work as literature and as scientific theory, but it strives to do so with humility. My doctoral degree is in theology rather than in American literature, but I did study literary criticism and the philosophy of language at the graduate level. I have tried not to overstep the bounds of my expertise, and when I have trespassed, I hope it will be acknowledged as an expression of enthusiasm rather than as a claim to authority I do not possess. While my efforts to show how Poe’s thoughts on his big questions will have apparent flaws, I believe this book offers to literary scholars a tool to navigate some of the issues that permeate Poe’s work, but which lie outside the province of literary scholarship. As a descendant of Poe’s cousin, William Poe of Augusta, Montgomery , and Baltimore, and as president of the Poe Museum of Richmond, I write with sympathy for Poe and with little patience for serious treatments of Poe that assume the Griswold myth. On the subject of this book, however, I began from an agnostic perspective . I had no idea what I might find. In the end, I found a complex interrelationship of ideas and beliefs. This book took little time to write but many years to prepare. At one level it represents the substance of a series of lectures I delivered during the bicentennial of Poe’s birth in 2009. At another level I grew up with Poe. When I was a child, my mother took us to the Charleston Museum, where I saw a shadow box on display with a small image of Poe standing on the shore of Sullivan’s Island gazing out to sea. “He’s your cousin,” she explained. One night at xi Preface home, my father was doing family research and pulled out a folder from his father’s file drawers. “This is a letter that Edgar Allan Poe wrote to my father’s grandfather,” he remarked as he showed me the large photograph print and added, “but he had to sell it to pay my brother’s medical bills.” When I was in the third grade, I first understood who Edgar Allan Poe was when I went to see Roger Corman’s House of Usher starring Vincent Price...