Eureka: A Prose Poem.

Poe considered Eureka his magnum opus, but Putnam only agreed to publish 500 copies due to the unique nature of the material. Eureka has often been misunderstood and ridiculed, but it is in fact a remarkable precursor of several modern theories of physics and a powerful essay on the material and spiritual universe. Poe hypothesized that the universe began at a set point in the past and was finite rather than infinite. In arguing that the Universe of Stars must be finite, he appeals to the evidence of observed experience. Poe wrote, “Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy–since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all. That this may be so, who shall venture to deny? I maintain, simply, that we have not even the shadow of a reason for believing that it is so.” BAL 16153.