Change and Transformation: Voyaging with Poe and Alexander von Humboldt

Reviews “Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland in the valley of Tapia on the foot of the vulcano Chimborazo.” Painting by Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1810). PD-Art. R E V I E W Change and Transformation: Voyaging with Poe and Alexander von Humboldt Douglas Anderson. Pictures of Ascent in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xii, 201 pp. $85.00 cloth. Laura Dassow Walls. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009. xv, 404 pp. $35.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. I n April 1850, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review opened a short notice of the first two volumes of Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos by noting that, “while the name of Humboldt [was] familiar to every one, few, perhaps, [were] aware of the peculiar nature of his scientific career.” The monthly reminded readers that Humboldt, who was then over eighty, had made a great “survey of the American continent” from 1799 to 1804 and since then had worked assiduously in every branch of science, publishing a great wealth of material. Asserting that the first volume of Cosmos “comprise [d] all” that was then “known of the physical universe,” the Democratic Review commented that no work in recent memory had appeared that was “more acceptable . . . to those who appreciate[d] the enjoyment of scientific research” [26 (April 1850): 382]. Over the next several years, Humboldt’s fivevolume Cosmos became a transatlantic bestseller. Both directly and through extensive discussions of the work, Humboldt became well enough known in the United States that in section 24 of “Song of Myself,” published in 1855, Walt Whitman, the epic poet of democracy, could introduce himself as “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” [Leaves of Grass, and Other Writings (New York: Norton, 2002), 680]. The spelling of “kosmos” serves as a reference to the German title of Humboldt’s masterwork. And so too does Whitman’s 1860 poem “Kosmos,” in which the poet uses Humboldt’s concept to define a new human ideal. The “kosmos” is that individual who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories, The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States; Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons [330] C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 44, 2011 89 R E V I E W Humboldt, a visionary discoverer of new worlds, Whitman suggests, opened the possibility of a more complete realization of human potential than hitherto was possible. Born in Berlin in 1769, Humboldt, who was educated at Frankfurt and Göttingen, became the most distinguished scientist of the first half of the nineteenth century. Out of the epic expedition he took to the Americas with Aimé Bonpland, and then a long and productive life devoted to exploring the entire range of human knowledge, Humboldt formulated new ways of understanding the natural world and exploring humankind’s relationship to the ecosystem, a concept that he was the first to define. Humboldt’s prophetic vision of the interconnectedness of all life remains even more relevant in today’s era of environmental degradation and global warming than when he decried the destruction of forests in South America over 200 years ago. An important advisor on scientific expeditions to Thomas Jefferson, whom he visited in the White House, Humboldt, as Laura Dassow Walls demonstrates in her excellent The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, became a powerful presence in American literature and American life more broadly. Walls skillfully takes the reader on a fascinating voyage or “passage” back to the origins of Humboldt’s world in the Germany of his youth, to his journey through the Americas, and forward to his long career as a scientist, culminating in Cosmos, a work he didn’t live quite long enough to complete. A life-long supporter and proponent of American democracy, a man who considered himself “half...