Eureka (Poe)
Heureka , full English original title Eureka. An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe , is a late work by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe . The cosmogony in the form of essays is the longest, non-fiction works of Poe and was published on July 11, 1848th It was the last work to be published during Poe's lifetime (he died barely a year later) and is considered to be his most ambitious work and “greatest intellectual effort”. Because of its complexity and the subject of the work, it received little attention from readers and critics until the middle of the 20th century. Poe dedicated the work to the German explorer and contemporary Alexander von Humboldt .
Prehistory and position in the complete works of Poe
Heureka , whose title refers to the famous exclamation Heureka by the Greek scholar Archimedes , contains Poe's idea of the origin and end of the universe and beyond. He had already dealt with the subject in 1839 in the short story The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion , followed in 1841 by The Colloquy of Monos and Una and in 1845 by The Power of Words . Also Mesmeric Revelation of 1844 and The Premature Burial 1845 deal with the same subject, namely the boundary between life and death, or the transition from life to death. An early version of the content of Eureka had Poe in February 1848 as a lecture The Cosmography of the Universe ( The cosmography of the universe held).
Poe wrote the approximately 40,000 word long work within a few months after the death of his young wife Virginia and regarded it as the high point of his work. In a letter dated July 7, 1849 (just under three months from his death) he wrote profusely to Maria Clemm, who was also his aunt and mother-in-law:
“I have no desire to live since I have done 'Eureka'. I could accomplish nothing more. "
“I haven't had any desire to live since I wrote Eureka. I couldn't achieve more. "
Poe saw this work as the summary of his philosophy of life and art and that he had nothing more to add.
content
The intention of the text is to expound the existence of God and the return of all created things to God in the sense of an apocatastasis , ie a restoration of the primeval paradise. The basis of Poe's argument is the prevailing world view of the cosmos as a sphere at the time. Essentially, Poe's thesis can be summarized as follows: At the beginning of all things, imagine a core in a sphere and a divine power residing in it. This energy for some reason causes the core to burst apart and the debris to scatter in all directions within the sphere. Poe is now trying to prove that the physical laws on which the interior of a sphere is based means that all particles can be distributed up to a certain limit - namely until the outermost shell of the sphere is reached - but then inevitably to return to the middle - as it were to God - one piece earlier, the other later, depending on the size, weight, volume and other nature of the respective piece of rubble.
With a purely aesthetic justification, he draws further conclusions from this, which show striking similarities with physical laws, relationships and cosmological theories that were discovered much later. He sees the cause of the existence of matter in tiny differences in density, which, due to gravity, lead to the agglomeration of particles. He draws parallels between space and duration, imagines stars that do not emit light, and postulates the existence of an infinite number of universes in which other natural constants or laws rule. He closes with the representation of a universe that collapses to its original state into a single particle and then expands again, leaving open whether our universe is the new one and thus one in a long chain.
German translations (selection)
- 1901: Hedda Moeller and Hedwig Lachmann : Heureka. JCC Bruns, Minden.
- 1922: Emmy Keller : Heureka. Propylaea, Munich.
- 1922: M. von Baudissin : Heureka. Rösl & Cie., Munich.
- 1966: Arno Schmidt : Heureka. Walter Verlag, Freiburg i. Br.
- 1989: Heide Steiner : Heureka. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig.
literature
- Harold Beaver: The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1986, ISBN 0-14-043106-3 , pp. 395-415.
- Richard P. Benton (Ed.): Poe as Literary Cosmologer: Studies on Eureka. A symposium. Transcendental Books, Hartford CT 1974.
- Fredrick S. Frank, Anthony Magsitrale: The Poe Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, Westport 1997, ISBN 0-313-27768-0 , pp. 120-121.
- Daniel Hoffman : Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe. Vintage Books, New York 1985, ISBN 0-394-72908-0 , pp. 272-293.
- Franz H. Link: Edgar Allan Poe. A poet between romanticism and modernity. Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Bonn 1968, pp. 332–351.
- Susan McCaslin, Katrina Bachinger, Eric Glasgow: Eureka. Poe's cosmogonic poem; Tit for tat , Salzburg 1981.
- Jerome McGann: The Poet Edgar Allan Poe. Alien Angel. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2014, ISBN 978-0-674-41666-6 , pp. 95ff.
- Una Pope-Hennessy : Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. A Critical Biography. Macmillan, London 1934, pp. 288-309.
- Marilynne Robinson : On Edgar Allan Poe . In: New York Review of Books , February 5, 2015
- David N. Stamos: Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, and Scientific Imagination. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017.
- Laura Saltz: Making Sense of Eureka. In: J. Gerald Kennedy, Scott Peeples (Eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe. ISBN 978-0-190641-87-0 , pp. 424-443.
- Kenneth Silverman : Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York et al. a. 1991, ISBN 0-06-092331-8 , pp. 332-344.
- Edward Wagenknecht : Edgar Allan Poe. The Man Behind the Legend. Oxford University Press, New York 1963, pp. 203-221.
Web links
- English full text
- German translation: Heureka I and Heureka II @ haus- Freiheit.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Fredrick S. Frank, Anthony Magsitrale: The Poe Encyclopedia. P. 120.
- ↑ Peter Ackroyd : Poe: A life cut short. Chatto & Windus, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-7011-6988-6 , p. 135.
- ^ Hans-Dieter Gelfert : Edgar Allan Poe: At the edge of the maelstrom. CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57709-3 , p. 160.
- ↑ JR Hammond: To Edgar Allan Poe Companion. Macmillan Press, London and Basingstoke 1981, ISBN 0-333-27571-3 , p. 145.
- ^ Hans-Dieter Gelfert: Edgar Allan Poe: At the edge of the maelstrom. Pp. 154-155.
- ↑ Joseph Wood Krutch : Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius. Knopf, New York 1926, p. 180.
- ↑ JR Hammond: To Edgar Allan Poe Companion. P. 147.
- ↑ Unless otherwise stated, the analysis of the connections between Eureka and modern cosmology is based on: Marilynne Robinson : On Edgar Allan Poe . In: New York Review of Books , February 5, 2015