Eureka: A Prose Poem - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Response to Eureka was overwhelmingly unfavorable. Poe's friend Marie Louise Shew, who had helped his wife Virginia on her death-bed, broke off their friendship because it offended her religious beliefs.

After the publication of Eureka, a vehement anonymous censure was published in the Literary Review. This was believed by Poe to have been written by John Henry Hopkins, Jr. (1820–1889), a young theological student, who had previously criticized the work as pantheistic and "a damnable heresy" that "conscience would compel him to denounce". Literary critic George Edward Woodberry in 1885 thought the essay was based on a crude understanding of the science a student learns in school "rendered ridiculous" by absurdity and the density of his ignorance. Thomas Dunn English, a writer, lawyer, and doctor who frequently criticized Poe, wrote a news article for the John-Donkey with the headline, "Great Literary Crash". The article explained that a shelf of books crashed because someone had "imprudently" stacked an edition of Eureka on it and that it was a miracle that the whole building did not fall down because of it.

The lecture upon which Eureka was based also received negative reviews. Poe's friend Evert A. Duyckinck wrote to his brother that the lecture bored him to death and that it was "full of a ludicrous dryness of scientific phrase—a mountainous piece of absurdity." A local newspaper called it "hyperbolic nonsense". though one publication, the Courier and Enquirer, called it "a nobler effort than any other Mr. Poe has yet given the world". Audience members said it was not persuasive or simply too long. Even so, Poe considered Eureka to be his masterpiece. He believed the work would immortalize him because it would be proven to be true. In the Preface, Poe said: "It is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead."

After its publication he wrote to his aunt Maria Clemm saying, "I have no desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more." He confided in a friend that he believed his contemporary generation was unable to understand it but that it would be appreciated, if ever, two thousand years later. Some critics, however, respond favorably to Eureka. French writer Paul Valéry praised it for both its poetic and scientific merit, calling it an abstract poem based on mathematical foundations. Albert Einstein in a letter written in 1934, noted that Eureka was eine schöne Leistung eines ungewöhnlich selbständigen Geistes (a very beautiful achievement of an unusually independent mind).