But I winced at her claim that Poe's theorizing is "perfectly sound." She makes Eureka sound like a scientific treatise-but it is actually something far more ambitious and bizarre. I am grateful to Robinson for alerting me to Poe's peculiar work. From the one Particle, as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically-in all directions-to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space-a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms." Let us conceive the Particle, then, to be only not totally exhausted by diffusion into Space. The assumption of absolute Unity in the primordial Particle includes that of infinite divisibility. But on these points I will speak more fully hereafter. A diffusion from Unity, under the conditions, involves a tendency to return into Unity-a tendency ineradicable until satisfied. An action of this character implies reaction. This constitution has been effected by forcing the originally and therefore normally One into the abnormal condition of Many. We now proceed to the ultimate purpose for which we are to suppose the Particle created-that is to say, the ultimate purpose so far as our considerations yet enable us to see it-the constitution of the Universe from it, the Particle. The willing into being the primordial particle, has completed the act, or more properly the conception, of Creation. Oneness, then, is all that I predicate of the originally created Matter but I propose to show that this Oneness is a principle abundantly sufficient to account for the constitution, the existing phenomena and the plainly inevitable annihilation of at least the material Universe. Here the Reason flies at once to Imparticularity-to a particle-to one particle-a particle of one kind-of one character-of one nature-of one size-of one form-a particle, therefore, ' without form and void'-a particle positively a particle at all points-a particle absolutely unique, individual, undivided, and not indivisible only because He who created it, by dint of his Will, can by an infinitely less energetic exercise of the same Will, as a matter of course, divide it. "Let us now endeavor to conceive what Matter must be, when, or if, in its absolute extreme of Simplicity. Here's an excerpt, in which Poe presents his theory of creation: Eureka does indeed evoke some modern scientific ideas, but in the same blurry way that Christian or Eastern theologies do. Imagine what you might get if you toss Aristotle's Metaphysics and Newton's Principia in a blender along with scoops of gothic rhetoric and romantic philosophy. It's like a 19 th-century version of the many manuscripts I have received over the decades from brilliant but deranged autodidacts who have solved the secrets of the universe. Poe's book strikes me as both strange and strangely familiar. All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century."Ĭurious, I found Eureka posted on the website of The Gutenberg Project. This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and 'duration' are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe. But Robinson contends that Eureka is actually "full of intuitive insight"-and anticipates ideas remarkably similar to those of modern physics and cosmology.Įureka, she elaborates, "describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which 'radiated' the atoms of which all matter is made. Just before he died in 1849, when he was only 40, he wrote a book-length work titled Eureka.Īccording to Robinson, Eureka has always been "an object of ridicule," too odd even for devotees of Poe, the emperor of odd. Robinson then hooked me with her first sentence, which calls Poe "a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day." She went on to reveal something I definitely didn't know about Poe. But when I spotted an essay on Poe by novelist Marilynne Robinson in the February 5 New York Review of Books, I hesitated to read it, thinking, What more can I know about Poe? I've always been an Edgar Allan Poe fan, so much so that I even watched the horrifying-not in a good way-2012 film The Raven.