Evermore: Edgar Allan Poe and the Mystery of the Universe

6. The Problem of the Universe

133 THE PROBLEM OF THE UNIVERSE 6 The problem of the universe may be simply stated: Why is there something rather than nothing? In a letter to George Isbell on February 29, 1848, after delivering his lecture on the universe, but before publishing it as Eureka, Poe gave his simple answer to this simple question: “Because Nothing was, therefore All Things are.”1 By far, Poe’s most controversial and neglected work is Eureka, in which he proposed the original Big Bang theory. Though it is longer than anything else he wrote, except his only novel, the average reader has never heard of it, and the Poe scholar avoids it. Having insisted all his professional life that poetry is “the rhythmical creation of beauty,” Poe’s full title is Eureka: A Prose Poem. What did he mean by calling this extravagant cosmological essay a poem? Though Poe’s major scientific proposals in Eureka had become the accepted view of physics and cosmology by the end of the twentieth century, his science seemed weird and strange in the nineteenth century and for the greater part of the twentieth century. The science of Eureka tended to be dismissed by literary critics who sought to make sense of Eureka strictly in terms of symbol and metaphor.2 Poe had always taught that the special province of poetry is Beauty, but he argued that Eureka deals with Truth. In what sense, Evermore 134 then, did he think of it as a poem? He had always seen Truth and Beauty as distinct “Non-overlapping Magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould would say. Poe provided this cryptic clue in his brief preface: To the few who love me and whom I love—to those who feel rather than to those who think—to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in realities—I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone:—let us say as a Romance; or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem. What I here propound is true:—therefore it cannot die:—or if by means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will “rise again to the Life Everlasting.” Nevertheless it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.3 On the first page of the text, however, Poe restates the title with a different subtitle: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe. In his own writing Poe had always understood that his body of work had a unity that could only be understood in terms of the whole. In working through Eureka, Poe believed he had unraveled a mystery that comprehended a unity to the universe. Beauty and Truth, science and religion, mathematics and poetry, matter and spirit all had an intertwining relationship.4 Despite the significance of the Big Bang theory for modern cosmology and astrophysics, few people realize that Poe first proposed the theory. Allen Tate, one of the leading poetry critics of the twentieth century, remarked, “I have wondered why the modern proponents of the Big Bang hypothesis of the creation have not condescended to acknowledge Poe as a forerunner.”5 In the modern world of specialization, how could a literary critic or scientist take Poe seriously? Even after his major ideas have been demonstrated, few people can imagine how Poe did it. But imagining was precisely how Poe did it. Before turning to Eureka, however, it will be helpful to see the many steps by which Poe finally arrived at his proposal for the original Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. 135 The Problem of the Universe The Long Background Poe did not suddenly write Eureka in 1848. It came at the end of a long consideration of many questions that had dangled independently in his mind.6 He had always been interested in science and religion. He grew up in an Enlightenment world and attended Mr. Jefferson’s university, where students were taught to believe Descartes ’ view that mind and body, or matter and spirit, were totally unrelated.7 This Enlightenment way of thinking informed his early view that Beauty and Truth are unrelated spheres and that poetry does not deal in Truth.8...