John Tresch - The Reason for the Darkness of the Night

At the start of February 1848, New York newspapers announced a mysterious impending event: Edgar A. Poe will lecture at the Society Library on Thursday evening Subject, The Universe. There could be no grander topic. But no one could say just what to expect: a story, a poem, a critical diatribe? It might contain anything and everything.

The Home Journal ventured, There is but one thing certain about it, that it will be compact of thought, most fresh, startling, and suggestive. As a born anatomist of thought Mr. Poe takes genius and its imitations to pieces with a skill wholly unequalled on either side the water. The announcements fueled speculation about the man himself. Despite his renown, he had been out of the public eye for more than a year.

The venue, newly relocated to Leonard and Broadway, offered few clues. The Society Librarys board included social luminaries such as the banker Cornelius Roosevelt. Its fare was more polished than at P. T. Barnums American Museum, ten blocks south; Ralph Waldo Emerson had delivered his Lecture on the Times there, but all manner of entertainments passed through its doors. Recent performances featured Swiss bell ringers, the American Daguerreotype Association, and the stage magician Signor Blitz.

Would Poes lecture be a story, a poem, a scientific treatise, or some unheralded novelty? The Weekly Universe remarked, Mr. Poe is not merely a man of sciencenot merely a poetnot merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.

The speech was Poes return after a fretful absence. He had become famous three years earlier with his poem The Raven. Its odd, enticing melody and haunting refrain, uttered by a cryptic bird to a scholar racked with grief, had engraved itself on the public mind: Quoth the raven: Nevermore. First published under a pseudonym, it was celebrated, reprinted, and parodied. A Gotham paper raved, It is written in a Stanza unknown before to gods, men, and booksellers, but it fills and delights the ear strangely with its wild and clashing music. Everyone reads the Poem and praises it.

They also heard it. Poe became a fixture of New Yorks literary salons, where he magnetized listeners with intense and hushed recitations. The poet Frances Sargent Osgood recalled his proud beautiful head erect, his dark eyes flashing with the electric light of feeling and of thought. Another author reported his reputation as a practitioner of mesmerism, the new science of invisible fluids and the vibrations that unite minds: People seem to think there is something uncanny about him, and the strangest stories are told, and, what is more, believed, about his mesmeric experiences.

The Raven opened other doors. In 1845 he gave a lecture titled The Poets and Poetry of America to a crowd of three hundred, denouncing the feeble state of American writing and criticism, its regional cliques and inflated reputations. By the end of 1846, Poes poems, tales, unflinching opinions, and flair for provocation had brought him near to his dream of running his own magazine. A sketch of him in the first flush of fame suggests a man of poise, wit, and discernment, with good reason to be optimistic (if perhaps a bit anxious).

But his luck changed. For most of 1847 he dropped from salons and lecture halls, to whispers of scandal and tragedy. He moved to Fordham, twelve miles north of the city, with his aunt and his ailing wife, Virginia. He later confessed to a friend, I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much.

Both allies and enemies speculated about his condition. His friend George Eveleth, a medical student, wrote to the editor Evert Duyckinck, Where is Mr. Poewhat is he doingand what is he likely to do? Does he continue to drink hard yet, or has he reformed? His rival Thomas Dunn English, who had written a novel with a vicious caricature of a drunken Poe, ridiculed his lowered state: We understand that Mr. E. A. POE has been employed to furnish the railing for the new railroad over Broadway. He was seen going up the street a few days ago, apparently laying out the road.

Poe around 1846, miniature sketch by John A. McDougall

In fact, withdrawn from the squabbles of the New York papers and salons, safe from public scrutiny and petty attacks, Poe was plotting the next phase of his career. While he was nearly isolated, at one of his lowest moments, his imagination soared. Rambling through Fordhams lush meadows and on the stark, stony cliffs along the Hudson, he undertook daring new works: essays articulating the science of composition; Ulalume, an incantatory ballad lit by the nebulous lustre of a newly born star; a visionary tale, The Domain of Arnheim, scrawled on a single, long scroll, in which an artist of unlimited wealth engineers a vast landscape garden resembling a heaven or a hell; and, most audaciously, the lecture titled The Universe, which the New York papers announced in early 1848.

Poe was pinning his hopes on this work, the first step of his concrete plan to re-establish myself in the literary world. As a magazine writer, he was lucky to receive more than twenty dollars for an article, no matter how widely it was read. A lecture with a decent audience paying fifty cents each could earn him several months rent. He planned to follow the New York event with a national tour, reaping ticket revenues and subscriptions for his reborn literary magazine, The Stylus, starting with his former classmates from the University of Virginia and the U.S. Military Academy: I must get a list of, at least, five hundred subscribers to begin with:nearly two hundred I have already. I propose, however, to go South and West, among my personal and literary friendsold college and West Point acquaintancesand see what I can do.

His lectures published title would be Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe. Eureka!I found it!was the exclamation of the ancient philosopher Archimedes upon discovering a method for testing the purity of gold. Eureka! was also the joyful shout of prospectors in California. Poe was convinced that the discoveries in his essay would secure his immortal fame, make him rich, and, by plumbing the mysteries of the universe, save his life.

The strategy was less crazy than it might seem. Poe had trained in mathematics and engineering at West Point and spent subsequent decades reviewing fast-breaking developments in electromagnetism, chemistry, natural history, and astronomy; he was positioned as well as nearly any of his contemporaries to speak on cosmology. The origin and makeup of the universe obsessed great minds of the agePierre-Simon Laplace, John Herschel, Alexander von Humboldtand had captivated the American public. The Scottish minister and astronomer Thomas Dick published popular astronomy books that harmonized natural science and Protestant theology, while the eight volumes of the