¹ Poe, , “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” Poetry and Tales, ed. Quinn, Patrick F., The Library of America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 607Google Scholar; Adams, Henry, Mont St Michel and Chartres [1904], ed. Samuels, Ernest and Samuels, Jayne M., The Library of America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

² The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Ostrom, John Ward, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), 2, 452.Google Scholar

³ Eureka, Poetry and Tales, 1261.Google Scholar Subsequent references are to this edition and are incorporated in the text. (All italics in the original.)

⁴ [Epes Sargent], notice in the Boston Transcript, 20 07 1848Google Scholar. Collected in Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Walker, I. M. (London: Routledge, 1986), 280–81.Google Scholar

⁵ Presumably for this reason, the “Library of America” prints Eureka in its volume of Poetry and Tales, rather than Essays and Reviews. Given the division between “fiction” and “fact” which determines the principles of inclusion in the two volumes, the choice is perhaps inevitable, but it is also a further instance of Poe's endless ability to tease our categorizing impulses. Either “fiction” or “fact” seems an inappropriate label for the work.

⁶ See, for example, O'Gorman, Edmundo, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of its History (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Garry Wills uses the term in another though related sense in his Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978; rpt. New York: Random House, 1979).Google Scholar

⁷ Essays and Reviews, ed. Thompson, G. R., Library of America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1340.Google Scholar

⁸ 14 Mar. 1820. The Adams–Jefferson Letters, ed. Cappon, Lester J., 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 2, 562Google Scholar. I take Poe to be aiming a deliberate hit at the philosophical naiveté of the “Declaration of Independence”: “the now well-understood fact that no truths are self-evident” (Eureka, 1263Google Scholar). The inductive reasoning associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century empiricism no longer commands support in scientific procedure (it being now recognized that the hypothesis often precedes the experiment), but the division between induction and deduction as corresponding to the “scientific” and “artistic” realms respectively would have been familiar to Poe and his contemporaries.

⁹ Advice given to the American public in Poor Richard Improved for 1753Google Scholar, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, eds. Labaree, Leonard W. and Bell, Whitfield J. Jr., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959– ), 4, 408–09.Google Scholar

¹⁰ “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” Poetry and Tales, 977.Google Scholar

¹¹ Newton, Isaac, Letter to Oldenburg, in Newton's Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings, ed. Thayer, H. S. (New York and London: Heinemann, 1953), 91Google Scholar. Compare Eureka, 1354.Google Scholar

¹² Ibid., 4.

¹³ In another context, the answer, palpably, is Terror: “horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity”; “a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and the demons in their exultation” (Poetry and Tales, 232 [“Berenice”], 606 [“The Black Cat”]).Google Scholar

¹⁴ “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the Consideration of my Readers.” (Letter from Newton to Bentley, quoted by Thayer, 54.)

¹⁵ Plotting The Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 176Google Scholar. Fender points out how Walden conflates or juxtaposes the jargons of geology, botany and etymology with the effect that “the more transparent the subject, the more opaque the narrative” (178). In both Walden and Eureka the focus of complexity moves away from the things being described towards the surface of the language, from matter to consciousness.

¹⁶ “Nature,” Emerson's Complete Works, Riverside edition, 11 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885–1886), 1, 60.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. Watson, George (London: Dent, 1977), 167.Google Scholar

¹⁸ The Dunciad, Book IV, The Poems of Alexander Pope, Twickenham edition in one volume, ed. Butt, John (1963; London: Methuen, 1973), 799–800.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Slow Learner (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), 14.Google Scholar

²⁰ The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Samuels, Ernest and Samuels, Jayne M., Library of America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1155.Google Scholar

²¹ Slow Learner, 84–85.Google Scholar

²² Emerson, , Complete Works, 6, 49–51.Google Scholar

²³ “The Secret Integration,” Slow Learner, 180.Google Scholar

²⁴ Adams perhaps comes nearer to Pope and Swift than either Poe or Pynchon does, but his lament for the lost unity of mind and word is itself curiously dissociated, as Pope's and Swift's are not; “objectifying” himself in the third person also (and perhaps primarily?) draws attention to the self-consciously self-creating processes of the writing.

²⁵ The London Review of Books, 24 01 1985.Google Scholar