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Unity, Death, and Nothingness–Poe's “Romantic Skepticism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

G. R. Thompson
G. R. Thompson*
Affiliation:
Washington State University
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Abstract

It is inaccurate to maintain (see Joseph J. Moldenhauer, PMLA, lxxxiii, 1968, 284-297) that Edgar Allan Poe's vision of death and dissolution is totally ecstatic and beatific simply because the metaphysical and esthetic “Unity” presented by death is part of the basic “design” of the Universe as Poe conceived it. Instead, the esthetic cosmology of Eureka and the implicit themes of other of Poe's works, especially Pym, “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” present a tension between hope and despair, reason and madness, Divine Purpose and seeming Nothingness which must be called “skeptical.”

Type
Notes, Documents, and Critical Comment
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , March 1970 , pp. 297 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 See Wilbur's “Introduction” to the Dell Laurel edition of Poe's poems (New York, 1959), p. 12. Wilbur writes: “Since the poet's business is to help undo phenomena toward unity, dreaming the oak of creation back to its original acorn, his negation of human and earthly subject-matter becomes in Poe's cosmic theory positive; his destructiveness becomes creative.” In Eureka, Poe immediately states his basic proposition: “—In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of A11 Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation” (The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, New York, 1902, xvi, 185–186; all references to Poe's works are to this edition).

2 The subtitle of Adams' book (New York, 1966) is “Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century”; Petersen's article appeared in Poe Newsletter, i (1968), 14–16. I am indebted to Petersen for suggestions regarding the subject of Nothing. Petersen, however, finds Poe less “skeptical” than I. He writes in “Poe and the Void,” for example, that “disappointment is the source of the void in man's experience. Disappointment is the cancelling, the subtracting of hopeful expectation. A series of jolting subtractions of this sort can produce in some temperaments not mere skepticism but a thoroughgoing disbelief in his hopes and the habit of believing only in his fears” (p. 15; my italics). That Poe's appalled apprehension of the possibility of Void was tempered by an ambivalent and ironic turn of mind (always watchful for some hopeful clue but always suspicious of it) is, of course, my thesis here.