An Intrinsic Luminosity: Poe's Use of Platonic and Newtonian Optics
1992; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies
Resumoplace of science in Poe's thought and imagination can be easily misassessed if we judge it on the basis of his poetry. Such verse as Sonnet--to Science (1829), with its identification of the poet with the defiant but doomed mythological figures of Prometheus and Icarus, represents a clear assault on science as a force preying on the poet's heart, as a force inimical to creative imagination (Promethean fire) and mythic or metaphoric language (Icarian flight). This poem, however, appeared early in Poe's career, and although he later revised and continued to publish it together with much of his other early verse, this work remains a testament to the author's youthful, possibly exaggerated reaction to science. true place of science in Poe's thought is manifest in his prose (including the prose poem Eureka), where in various forms it plays significant roles in his layering of meaning in these writings. In the 1840s, in fact on no less than five separate occasions, Poe remarked the common ground between the scientist and the artist. This relationship is implied in the introductory remarks to The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), and in A Chapter of Suggestions (1845) Poe specifically wrote: of the most profound knowledge--perhaps all very profound knowledge--has originated from a highly stimulated imagination. Great intellects guess well. laws of were, profoundly, guesses. This same comment, in somewhat different words, occurs in Mellonta Tauta (1849) and Eureka (1848), emphasizing that Kepler guessed, imagined, grasped ... with [his] soul laws he surmised through mere dint of intuition. And in a letter (20 September 1848) to Charles Fenno Hoffman, he explained more fully: There is no absolute certainty, either in the Aristotelian or Baconian Process ... neither Philosophy is so profound as it fancies itself--and ... neither has a right to sneer at that seemingly imaginative process called Intuition (by which attained his laws;) since `Intuition,' after all is but the conviction arising from those inductions or deductions of which the processes are so shadowy as to escape our consciousness, elude our reason or defy our capacity of expression. (1) At the outset of any attempt to assess the place of science in Poe's prose, however, one needs to express a cautionary note. Poe did in fact know much about science, but this knowledge came to him in various ways. Some scientific information came to him while he was a student, whereas much came to him from his reading as an adult. But this reading is difficult to trace sometimes. Poe's scientific information came to him from primary and secondary, even sometimes journalistic sources. As a result, when Poe cites a scientific source, we might be tempted to think he read the work containing the reference, when in fact he might well have read some other book and might only be repeating something cited in this other book. This is certainly the case when in Marginalia (1844-49) he seems to quote from Newton's Opticks (1704), but in fact the misattributed remark derives from an article Poe had read (Pollin 2:176). This problem does not delimit a study of the function of science in Poe's writings, where traces of scientific information are in abundant evidence; (2) it does delimit any attempt at concluding with ease whether he had a first-hand familiarity with and a thorough knowledge of a specific scientific treatise. So a quotation from Sir Isaac Newton's Principia (1687) in Marginalia, or a reference to it in Mesmeric Revelation (1844; Mabbot 3:1035) and Eureka (Harrison 16:223), does not necessarily mean that Poe read an edition of this late seventeenth-century work; it does mean that Poe was interested in the scientific observation made in that quotation or reference. Perhaps the scientific field that most fascinated Poe was astronomy. (3) For his account of Hans Pfaal's trip to the moon, Poe relied on Sir John Herschel's Treatise on Astronomy (1833), which is quoted from and paraphrased in Poe's story. …
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