Tresch recounts Poe’s literary work and winds his way back to Eureka, the 100-page book where he found the phrase that gave the book his title. He quarreled with the country’s literary poobahs and tried to imagine a distinctive American literary criticism. He worked in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. He published a few early stories, enlisted in the Army and then secured a spot at West Point, where the curriculum fed his interests in science, and he impressed his fellow cadets with his poetry.įor the next two decades, Poe struggled through the world of American publishing. The relationship between Allan and Poe soured over Poe’s gambling debts, and those unpaid bills forced Poe to leave the university. In 1826, Poe enrolled in Thomas Jefferson’s recently opened University of Virginia. Allan never formally adopted Poe, but he seemed set on training the young man to join the world of Virginia’s privileged white merchants. She died a year later and two-year-old Poe went to live in Richmond, Virginia, with family acquaintance John Allan and his wife. Poe’s father abandoned his actress mother in 1810, leaving her with three small children. Tresch works through the years of Poe’s short life. He is all combined and perhaps he is something more.” The possibility glimpsed in that “something more” animates the story Tresch tells.
Poe is not merely a man of science-not merely a poet-not merely a man of letters. Poe promoted the lecture with the modest title “The Universe,” later published as Eureka. Consumption had taken his beloved young wife the year before, yet Poe was determined to make a go of his literary aspirations. Tresch begins the book recounting a lecture Poe delivered in February 1848. Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Baudelaire, Stephen King and Jordan Peale have all been among Poe’s devoted fans, Tresch writes, “whether they revere him as the mastermind of horror, inventor of the detective story, pioneer of science fiction, high priest of symbolic art, or brooding prince of the goths.” While Poe might not have the weight of Lincoln in politics or Darwin in science, the heft of his literary legacy is extraordinary. He died in 1849, in October of the year he turned 40. Poe was born in Boston in January 1809, a year that also welcomed both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. It is a study of science stripped of a moral compass and the tangled cultural forces that made and crippled literary careers. Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science is a brilliant primer on the American 1840s. The decade witnessed a heady mix of fraud and fact, of humbug and humble truth.Īnd beneath it all were the rumblings we still feel that pit popular knowledge against elite expertise.
They consulted phrenologists, trusted mesmerists, and puzzled over a mechanical chess player and a Fiji mermaid. They thrilled to explorers’ stories of the earth’s remote polar regions and to accounts of new discoveries in electromagnetism, chemistry, and astronomy. Audiences hungry for speculation on great questions about the origin and nature of the universe packed lecture halls.
In Poe’s world the literary imagination had not yet squared off against the scientific. John Tresch, Mellon Professor in Art History, History of Science and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute in London, has written a remarkable book about Poe that rescues the writer from the condescension of his contemporary rivals and positions him amid the scientific tumult of the 1840s. The author of the amazing stories you read in middle school had strange theories about whirlpools and heavenly bodies and led a hard life saddened by the death of a young wife and cut short by drink.īut cheer up. Sunny days/dank dungeons chirping chickadees/doom-talking ravens blooming gardens/murderous orangutangs vaccinated neighbors/plague of the Red Death. Payment: PayPal, Skrill, Cryptocurrencies.The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John TreschĮdgar Allan Poe is a funny fit on this year’s mid-summer reading lists. Mulefactory: buy cheap PoE currency instant delivery (6% off coupon: poeitems).A set of five can be exchanged for a random divination card. Stacked Deck: random divination cardĪ Stacked Deck is a currency item that can be used to gain one random divination card. The price of The Porcupine is about 2 Chaos Orb. It is a long road without branches located on the side of a cliff. It is an area in Act 8 attached to The Bath House.
OutcomeĪ normal 6 Link Short Bow(Item Level: 50) A set of six can be exchanged for a normal Short Bow with six linked sockets and item level 50.