In the end, the telltale heart of “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night” is this: “Poe’s fantastic tales, detective stories, and nonfiction writings dramatized the act of inquiry and the struggles, fears, hopes, and delusions of the human being undertaking it. But even Tresch cringes over Poe’s strident denunciation of Longfellow’s abolitionist poetry as “incendiary drivel.” And he attempts to explain away Poe’s marriage to his 13-year-old cousin by saying such a practice was not unusual – though Poe, who was 26, lied about her age to friends and officials. For example, he takes Poe’s complaints about his foster father, John Allan, at face value.
It’s worth noting that Tresch has generated a fair amount of Poe apologia here. The biographer labels it “a serious mess, a glorious mess, but a mess.”īy signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy. Poe boasted to a friend that “Eureka” was destined to “revolutionize the world of Physical & Metaphysical Science,” but the result was something more confusing than revolutionary.
Near the end of his life, he wrote a philosophical-scientific treatise called “Eureka,” which has, for reasons that Tresch makes clear, fallen into obscurity. Poe was also deeply interested in formulating theories about the origins of the universe and the nature of God. His descriptions of the way the popular press blended news, entertainment, and hype will remind readers of the media landscape of present-day America, though Tresch himself refrains from explicit comparisons. “In the 1830s and 1840s, the lines between legitimate science, political provocation, and crowd-pleasing quackery were exceedingly difficult to define,” he writes. Speculation and controversy were rife in the press. Those who successfully denounced the tricks of charlatans were precisely those with the skills to make themselves believed.” “Together they were establishing the modern matrix of entertainment and science, doubt and certainty.
“Poe saw his age’s many humbugs and its ‘men of science’ pushing for foolproof forms of scientific authority as secret partners,” writes Tresch. Tresch has painted a full landscape of the journalism of the time, describing the conflicts between writers who made serious scientific observations and those eager to sensationalize or misrepresent new discoveries.
0 kommentar(er)
