Friday, November 5, 2021

Edgar Allan Poe, Crank Scientist

'The great discoveries of the age captivated his imagination. He almost always misunderstood them.'

Colin Dickey reviews The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, by John Tresch, at The New Republic.

"More known for ever-popular works like 'The Raven' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' Poe saw his real, unique contribution to American letters in a cosmological and philosophical treatise that is now rarely read or discussed. The fact that he saw it as the culmination of his entire life’s output suggests that we might have been missing something in Poe’s work this whole time. John Tresch’s new biography, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, is the rare study that does not see Eureka as an aberration. Tresch suggests instead that the poem can offer a key to much of Poe’s more famous writing—lacking the svelte frisson of his great horror tales, perhaps, but offering an insight nonetheless into the obsessions that spawned them."
[link fixed -ed.]

See Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Masque of the Red Death", in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 2.

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