by Paul Collins
One day later, Virginia was dead. The family’s landlord was so touched by their plight that, to keep Virginia from a pauper’s grave, he offered space in his own family crypt—and the Poes were so poor that they took it.
Edgar was nearly despaired of as well; his recently regained health fell apart. “He did not seem to care,” one acquaintance recalled, “after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all.” At one point he fell senseless and had to be carried to a doctor; when he regained consciousness, he feverishly babbled to his nurse about his long-dead brother Henry—“He talked to me incessantly, of the past,” she recalled, “ . . . [and] begged me to write for him his fancies, for he said he had promised so many greedy publishers his next efforts.”
Poe awoke from the haze of illness and depression that spring to find his prospects improbably brightened. Though he’d been too sick to attend the court hearings, he’d prevailed in his libel suit, and was awarded over two hundred dollars. Rufus Griswold had deigned to recognize his work in his newly published Prose Writers of America, declaring in particular of his mysteries that “a subtle power of analysis is his distinguishing characteristic.” Better still, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” had received the highest possible compliment in Paris: it was translated and passed off by a Frenchman as his own. When the real authorship of “Rue Morgue” was discovered—an impeccable Parisian mystery, by an American!—Poe’s reputation rose higher there than perhaps in his own country.
“[Poe] is pestered and annoyed at home by penny-a-liners whom his iron pen has cut into too deeply . . .” his editor Evert Duyckinck mused. “It is curious to contrast this with his position abroad, where distance suffers only the prominent features of his genius to be visible.”
Visiting for a tea party that June, Duyckinck found Poe recovered and enjoying “the purity of the air” outside; inside, there was a new rug on the floor, and Aunt Maria had laid an improbably decent spread on the table, complete with a new silver-plated coffeepot—the pleasant spoils of his libel suit.
Poe, however, had not quite recovered the strength to write—and what little he did set down that year was salvaged from older work, haunted by an almost paralyzing sense of mourning. His one major poem in 1847, “Ulalume,” is effectively an ululation for the dead, and weird and obscure in its effect. It is his most daring work of poetry, adopting insistent repetition to an unnerving effect—not the simple one-word refrain of “The Raven,” but the sickbed delirium of entire phrases echoing and twisting from one line to the next:
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere:
It was night, in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year. . . .
Poe had likely drafted it the year before—and the first friends and acquaintances to read it were so puzzled by the production that they hardly knew what to make of it.
For his one major prose work of 1847, Poe dug back even further, appending and retitling an obscure 1842 piece. “The Domain of Arnheim” is a curiously moving short story, though. Beginning from the notion of an heir reaping an improbably gigantic bequest after a century of compound interest, the impoverished Poe imagined this poignant question: even if you are the richest man in existence, how can you find happiness? In Poe’s earlier story, the heir settles upon landscaping an almost Edenic refuge; but in “Arnheim,” the newly added closing scenes follow a boat entering the completed paradise:
There is a gush of entrancing melody; there is an oppressive sense of strange sweet odor;—there is a dream-like intermingling to the eye of tall slender Eastern trees—bosky shrubberies—flocks of golden and crimson birds—lily-fringed lakes—meadows of violets, tulips, poppies, hyacinths and tuberoses—long intertangled lines of silver streamlets—and, upspringing confusedly from amid all, a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture, sustaining itself by miracle in mid-air, glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs, of the Fairies, of the Genii, and of the Gnomes.
It bears the haunting pathos of a grieving man imagining an afterlife—and, he admitted privately, the story “expresses much of my soul.”
His musings upon paradise were not exactly theological, as Poe had never found much solace in church—“The Bible, he says, is all rigmarole,” a scandalized Broadway Journal colleague once reported. But as 1847 came to a close and a new year began, Poe could often be found late at night standing on the porch of his cottage and staring at the stars twinkling in the frigid winter air—wondering not just what heaven meant, but what the heavens signified. He gulped down coffee and excitably kept his long-suffering aunt up late into the night, warding off solitude as he set his ideas down to paper.
“He never liked to be alone,” she later recalled, “and I used to sit up with him, often until four o’clock in the morning, he at his desk, writing, and I dozing in my chair. When he was composing ‘Eureka,’ we used to walk up and down the garden, his arm around mine, until I was so tired I could not walk. He would stop every few minutes and explain his ideas to me, and ask if I understood him.”
She was likely bewildered by his talk, but Poe had never felt so sure of himself.
“What I have propounded will (in good time) revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science,” Poe wrote to a friend that February. “I say this calmly—but I say it.”
5
Nevermore
IN THE FEBRUARY 3, 1848, issue of the New York Tribune, an enigmatic notice was wedged between ads for a “Whig Newspaper Establishment for Sale” and a lecture on “Mesmerism, Somnambulism, Clairvoyance and Hallucination”:
Edgar A. Poe will lecture at the Society Library on Thursday evening, the 3d inst. at half-past 7. Subject, “The Universe.” Tickets 50 cents—to be had at the door
It was a three-line ad, the smallest and cheapest Poe could buy in the Tribune; to make it fit, the period at the end was cut off.
Curious readers arrived at the corner of Broadway and Leonard, stepped inside the grand Ionic-columned edifice of the Society Library, and made their way back to one of the lecture rooms. Among those waiting attentively were Poe’s old editor Evert Duyckinck and a smattering of newspaper reporters. But more noticeable was who wasn’t there: with only about sixty people in the crowd, most of the seats in the hall sat empty.
A thin and pale Edgar Allan Poe took the stage, dressed in his usual black and with his coat tightly buttoned. His subject that evening, he announced, was the very nature of matter itself—the stars, the planets, gravitation and electricity, the beginning and end of the universe—and also, God. Poe began by reciting a droll satire, a letter from the year 2848, from a time of 300 mph railroads, airships, and “floating telegraph wires”—and then, quite as unexpectedly, he launched back into cosmology. As rain pelted outside and the clock passed nine, his listeners shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Poe, still pondering gravity and nebular theories, showed no sign of letting up.
“Every minute after that seemed to be possessed of the famous property so conspicuous in his discourse, called gravity,” one attendee recalled. “It weighed upon the heart. Still no end was visible; the thin leaves, one after another, of the neat manuscript, were gracefully turned over; yet, oh, plenty more were left evidently behind.”
It was nearly ten by the time the author finished and announced that he wished to raise funds for launching his beloved Stylus magazine; audience members quietly fled before he could raise the one hundred dollars he had been hoping for.
“A mountainous piece of absurdity for a popular lecture,” an appalled Duyckinck wrote to his brother afterwards. “It drove people from the room, instead of calling in subscribers.” Newspapers were largely as puzzled or as dismissive as Duyckinck; the one lengthy and appreciative account of the evening rued that bad weather kept the crowds away
. It was a charitable interpretation, considering the Park Theatre played to a full house that same night.
The blame was entirely Poe’s. The Society Library had proved hospitable to events by everyone from mesmerists to Swedenborgian lecturers; the following week, one Signor Spinetto used it for an exhibition of his “Learned Canary Birds.” But Poe was an author with no new published work announced for the lecture—the letter from the year 2848 was from his newly drafted short story “Mellonta Tauta,” but he didn’t mention the fact—and he was lecturing on a topic out of his usual expertise. He’d waited until the last minute to advertise and barely bought any space in the papers for it. For the same fifty-cent admission, New Yorkers could go to John Banvard’s “Three Mile Painting” that night, or spend half as much on the Christy Minstrels, “the Napoleons of Negro minstrelry.” More to the point, they only needed to wait one more night to hear an actual astronomer talk on the recent discovery of Neptune.
Yet Poe remained convinced of his lecture’s importance. He made an appointment with publisher George Putnam, and commenced the meeting by staring at him in dead silence for a full minute.
“I am Mr. Poe,” he finally said. Putnam was used to eccentric authors, and he knew perfectly well who Poe was.
“I hardly know,” Poe continued, “how to begin what I have to say. It is a matter of profound importance.”
The author almost trembled with emotion—for, Putnam recalled, “the publication he had to propose was of momentous interest. . . . An edition of fifty thousand copies might be sufficient to begin with, but it would be a small beginning. No other scientific event in the history of the world approached in importance the original developments of this book. All this and more, not in irony or in jest, but in intense earnest.”
Putnam agreed to publish Eureka: A Prose Poem, but the July 1848 print run was not 50,000, but 500. Its few readers opened it to find Poe’s most eccentric and puzzling work: “I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical,” he wrote, “—of the Material and Spiritual Universe—of its Evidence, its Origin, and Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny.”
What follows certainly explains his lecture audience’s confusion. For the next 143 pages, without chapter or section breaks, Poe argues that the universe emanated from nothingness, spread out from a “Primordial Particle,” and that this creative event entailed both forces of attraction (gravity) and repulsion (electricity). Attractive force would eventually collapse the universe upon itself into its original Unity. The deity embodied within this Unity is unknowable by human minds, except through its manifestation in the works of the universe—which, for a critic fond of knocking the Transcendentalists, sounded rather Emersonian.
But Poe went further: what if this process repeated, he asked, so that each expansion and contraction manifested its own God?
“I myself feel impelled to the fancy—without daring to call it more,” Poe mused, “that there does exist a limitless succession of Universes, more or less similar to that of which we cognizance—to that of which alone we shall ever have cognizance—at the very least until the return of our Universe into Unity. . . . Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its particular and proper God.”
The idea of matter from nothingness could already be found in textbooks, and notions of multiple universes dated back to the ancient Greeks; still, Poe’s particular fusion of the ideas has a pleasing oracularity, especially under his poetic talents. Anyone reading of “a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine” could see the mind behind “Ulalume” at work. Yet this “prose poem” was not a poem in any formal sense; and as prose, Poe gave no particular means of proving his theory beyond intuition, and a smattering of planetary and orbital calculations that one astrophysicist later briskly characterized as “all nonsense” and “numerology.”
Eureka’s inconsistent narrative voice—sometimes satirical and ludicrous, then pedantic, then stirring and expansive—hearkened back to Poe’s early and less confident writing. It was the work of a lonely widower in a remote farmhouse, with neither a spouse nor a magazine editor to contradict him or to keep the work’s flaws in check. Poe himself seemed unsure of how to explain the result.
“I offer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in Truth,” his preface states. The book is “an Art Product alone”—and yet he emphatically states, “What I here propound is true,” before finally allowing that “Nevertheless it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.”
In fact, Eureka’s genre is quite recognizable: it is crank literature. Any reader of such nineteenth-century panaceas as phrenology, octagonal homes, hollow-earth theory, or Fourierist colonies will find a delightful familiarity in Eureka. Such works are typically written by a non-expert, particularly one accustomed to being clever in a different field; with only superficial understanding of their subject, and indeed of scientific method, they may employ false analogies and supposition to make grand, unifying claims on politics, health, religion, and the universe itself. What is bewitching about crank literature is that it may have the kernel of a good idea, a passing observation that seems prophetic. Phrenology hit upon localized brain function and neural plasticity; crusades for octagonal homes posited open planning and concrete construction; even hollow-earth theories served to encourage early expeditions to the Antarctic. That Poe made a glancing proto-evolutionary reference, and a half-right explanation of the darkness of the night sky, did not make Eureka scientifically influential; it made it part of a long literary tradition of wildly unproveable near misses.
Reviews of Eureka were muted, respectful, and dismissive in equal measure; it is unlikely that Poe earned anything beyond the fourteen dollars that Putnam advanced him, less than he earned on some articles. He had another problem, too: after a stretch of sobriety and a sense of purpose in writing Eureka, he was at loose ends. Poe inexorably returned to the dream of his own magazine.
“I am resolved to be my own publisher,” he complained to a friend. “To be controlled is to be ruined.”
In the summer of 1848, he set off to his old hometown to try once again at raising funds for The Stylus. “I am desperately circumstanced—in very bitter distress of mind and body,” he explained to a prominent subscriber. “My last hope of extricating myself from the difficulties which are pressing me to death, is in going personally to a distant connection near Richmond.”
The trip was a disaster; though he made the rounds and introduced himself to Southern Literary Messenger editor John Thompson, he collapsed into drinking. “He remained here about 3 weeks, horribly drunk and discoursing ‘Eureka’ every night to the audiences of the Bar Rooms,” Thompson reported after Poe was bundled back to New York City.
The comment is a telling one. Thompson found Poe unable to write anything else while he visited; the author perseverated on Eureka, which he plainly regarded as his magnum opus. As to why Poe felt such an overwhelming connection to the work—declaiming it to any stranger who would listen—one must read its last words, a footnote regarding the collapse of the universe to its original unity:
*Note—The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process, as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of absorption, by each individual intelligence, of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be all in all, each must become God.
Virginia Poe had scarcely been in the grave for a year when Poe wrote this. For a man who had spent much of his career touching upon the mysteries of dissolution—of liminal states of death in life, of its phantasmal effect upon the living, of its visceral horrors—Eureka was a sincere effort to explain the inexplicable, to face the subject without artifice. That he failed by most measures says less about Poe than about death itself, and how it can leave even a great author at a
loss for words.
In Poe’s own eyes, though, his work had succeeded. For now he had reconciled himself to death—perhaps too well.
On November 4, 1848, Edgar Allan Poe decided it was time to kill himself. It was a crisp and cold Saturday morning in Providence; after a sleepless night in a hotel room, the author took a brisk walk to clear his mind. The stroll didn’t work—“the demon tormented me still,” he complained—but it did take him past a pharmacy, and that gave him a fine idea. He bought a powerful enough dose of opium tincture to kill most men, boarded a railway car to Boston without bothering to return to his hotel, and proceeded to write a suicide note. Then, upon reaching the city of his birth, he downed an ounce of the laudanum and walked to the post office with his dying words in hand.
He never made it.
“Before I reached the Post Office my reason was entirely gone, & the letter was never put in,” he later wrote dejectedly. “The laudanum was rejected from the stomach, I became calm, & to a casual observer, sane—so that I was suffered to go back to Providence.”
It was there that a few days later he was coaxed into sitting for a photograph. The 1848 “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype is today one of the iconic images of the nineteenth century: Poe, staring out into an unreachable middle distance, looking faintly chagrined at his dubious good fortune in having survived.
He was not supposed to be alone and forlorn like this. But Virginia’s hope that Poe might marry her deathbed nurse, Marie Shew, had gone awry; their rather simple friend was fond of Poe but piously frightened by Eureka. Poe instead conceived a fascination with one the most prominent critics and poets in America, Sarah Helen Whitman. She bore no relation to the still-obscure Walt, but—of far more interest to Poe—she was the wealthy widow of a Providence attorney. After quietly finding through a mutual friend that she admired his work, Poe sent a letter under a false name to determine whether she was in Providence at the moment: