Eureka: A Prose Poem - Influence and Significance

Influence and Significance

Eureka has been read in many ways, in part because Poe's sincerity in the work is questionable. It has been considered prophetically scientific, intuitively romantic, and even calculatingly ironic. Lacking scientific proof, Poe said it was not his goal to prove what he says to be true, but to convince through suggestion.

Though modern critics have dismissed Eureka for having no scientific worth or merit, Poe's work presages modern science with his own concept of the Big Bang. He postulated that the universe began from a single originating particle or singularity, willed by a "Divine Volition". This "primordial particle", initiated by God, divides into all the particles of the universe. These particles seek one another because of their originating unity (gravity) resulting in the end of the universe as a single particle. Poe also expresses a cosmological theory that anticipated black holes and the Big Crunch theory as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers' paradox (the night sky is dark despite the vast number of stars in the universe). In 1987 astronomer Edward Robert Harrison published a book, Darkness at Night, on this Paradox. This book clarified why lack of energy explains the paradox, and lays out how Harrison discovered that Poe's Eureka anticipated this conclusion.

Many of Poe's conclusions, however, are speculative due to his rejection of analytic logic and emphasis on intuition and inspiration. Further, Eureka contains many scientific errors. In particular, Poe's suggestions opposed Newtonian principles regarding the density and rotation of planets. He also says that Johannes Kepler came to his conclusions not through science but through guesswork. For this reason, it has been suggested that what Poe demands is true in Eureka is not actually about this universe, but a parallel fictitious one Poe creates. If this is the case, Poe is criticizing this world, suggesting it has fallen away from God by elevating scientific reason above poetic intuition, as suggested by poet Richard Wilbur.

More modern critics also suggest Eureka is a sign of Poe's declining mental health at the end of his life. Astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington disputed this notion, declaring that "Eureka is not a work of dotage or disordered mind". In the text, Poe wrote that he was aware he might be considered a madman. The lecture on which the essay was based was delivered only a few days after the anniversary of the death of his wife Virginia, suggesting a connection between the event and his new theories. Poe seems to dismiss death in Eureka, thereby ignoring his own anxiety over the problem of death.

Some modern critics believe Eureka is the key to deciphering meaning in all Poe's fiction, that all his works involve similar theories.