Few would hazard a challenge to long-standing opinions that Poe was a master of the Gothic horror tale, although many might not as readily be aware that he did not invent Gothic fiction. When he began to attract widespread attention by publishing several macabre tales in the Southern Literary Messenger in early 1835, critics sounded negative notes concerning his “Germanism,” a synonym for Gothicism, just as they deplored his wasting talents on what they deemed had become an outmoded type of fiction. Such caveats, as well as many offered over the course of the century succeeding his death, notwithstanding Poe's Gothic tales, are what have typically attracted greatest numbers of readers, and that allurement is wholly understandable. A descent from such British milestones in literary Gothicism as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford's Vathek (1786), W. H. Ireland's The Abbess (1798), or Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) is evident in Poe's writings. In his own day the brief tale of terror, familiarly known to the Anglo-American readership as the signature for fiction in the popular Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, served as Poe's, and other Americans', model, time and again, although his accomplishments in the short story far surpassed what now often reads like so much dross in the pages of the celebrated Scottish and other contemporaneous literary magazines from the first half of the nineteenth century.

Edgar Allan Poe, poet, short story writer, and critic, was a controversial figure in the publishing world of antebellum America. His ability to spark controversy stemmed not only from an image concocted by his contemporary detractors but from the sharp tone and pointed content of the critical articles he wrote during his lifetime. He worked as an editor and contributor to magazines in several American publishing venues, including Richmond, New York, and Philadelphia. His continuing ambition was to found and edit his own magazine, an outlet that would have granted him financial security and artistic control in what he deemed an antagonistic literary marketplace. Poe's challenge to moralistic strictures against literature, his confrontations with the New England literary establishment, and his caustic and satirical critical style won him many enemies.

In the Preface to the first edition (1687) Newton informs the reader straight off that he intends the Principia to illustrate a new way of doing what we now call empirical science:

Surprisingly, however, the main body of the first edition contains only two further comments about methodology: (1) a cryptic remark at the end of the opening discussion of space and time, announcing that the purpose of the work is to explain “how to determine the true motions from their causes, effects, and apparent differences, and, conversely, how to determine from motions, whether true or apparent, their causes and effects”; and (2) a scholium buried at the end of Book 1, Section 11 in which Newton proposes that his distinctive approach will make it possible to argue more securely in natural philosophy.

When the newly reformed Baltimore professional football team chose to call itself the Ravens in 1996, Poe received a fin-de-siècle apotheosis as one of popular culture's favorite sons. The fact that football and Poe have nothing to do with each other only highlights the extent to which this nineteenth-century American author has remained not only present, but much appreciated in the minds of the general public throughout the world. Poe pops up almost everywhere: from a commemorative stamp issued by the US Post Office to a somewhat confused John Wayne listening to Robert Mitchum recite lines from Poe's poem “Eldorado” in the Hollywood western of the same name. Poe's face appears amidst the crowd on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; the enigmatic “I am the Walrus” on Magical Mystery Tour includes the line “Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.” The Simpsons has made several allusions to Poe, including an admirable cartoon dramatization of “The Raven.” The Crow (1994) offers a triple-level tribute as Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) quotes “The Raven” after returning from the dead and entering a pawn shop in search of his murdered fiancée's ring. In the world of consumer goods, Raven Beer uses a publicity poster incorporating an irresistible pun: “I Know You're in the Pits. How about a Raven?”

The word “aesthetic” and its cognates have clung to the name of Edgar Allan Poe. A handful of his more resonant statements about poetic art have found a place within histories of “aesthetic theory,” and he has formed a permanent posthumous association with the late-nineteenth century cultural movement or mode of sensibility known as “aestheticism.” On the strength of a scattering of suggestive lines from his critical prose, posterity has assured Poe an early, in some accounts freakishly early, position in the genealogy of the various doctrines grouped together under the label “Art for Art's sake.”

The word “aesthetic” was still working its way into the English language in Poe's lifetime. It had first come into use as a technical term in Germany in 1750, in the title of A. T. Baumgarten's treatise, Aesthetica, which attempted to set out a philosophically-grounded theory of taste; it later furnished Immanuel Kant with the basic concept for an inquiry into the philosophy of art in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790).

On 1 January 1875, William M. Cash, an Alexandria, Louisiana news carrier, had a special New Year's Day gift for the customers on his paper route: he presented each with The Bells, a handsome, eight-page pamphlet reprinting the well-known poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Louisiana newspaper subscribers were not the only people to receive copies of The Bells as presents during the 1870s. In Philadelphia, a china and glassware retailer issued a complimentary edition of the poem for its customers during Christmas time, 1872, and the week after Christmas, grocery boys in the employ of Philadelphia grocer, Mitchell and Fletcher, gave copies of The Bells to their customers as New Year's Day presents. Since bells had been a commonplace holiday motif for centuries, perhaps it should come as no surprise that copies of The Bells were being distributed to Philadelphia grocery shoppers or Louisiana newspaper subscribers. Anyone who believed what they read in the literary periodicals of the day, however, would hardly find Poe's writings suitable material to pass through the hands of impressionable young news carriers and grocery boys.

In the course of a long life Isaac Newton made many enemies: Francis Linus (or Hall), Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann I Bernoulli. Of these Leibniz was by far the greatest intellect and above all an outstanding mathematician and philosopher. Newton defeated them all and outlived them all except the last, twenty-five years his junior.

It was a sad chronology that brought two such inventive mathematicians as Newton and Leibniz to live in the same age; never were temperaments and intellectual characters more at odds. Almost the only feature that they had in common was Protestant piety, yet even in appealing to God the Creator they could not agree. In mathematics and its applications to celestial mechanics, and more particularly in the development of the calculus, though the methods promulgated by the two men were equivalent, they had been reached and were justified by wholly distinct arguments. Newton was by choice a geometer, Leibniz an algebraist; the difference does not of course imply that they could not tackle the same problems. J. E. Hofmann has written that Leibniz’s “first major [mathematical] discovery in Paris [in 1673] originated in thoughts strongly influenced by considerations of logic and philosophy – and as so often with Leibniz, was not fully established but came as the fruit of a particular insight observed in simple examples and generalised by a stroke of genius.”

During the mid-1970s, Robert Motherwell created a series of Abstract-Expressionist collages inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe as well as a lithograph entitled Poe's Abyss. These creative efforts indicate Motherwell's lifelong fascination with Poe's writings, which he first encountered in his youth and returned to as a young man after discovering Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarmé, both of whom also received homage at Motherwell's hands. Being interviewed near the end of his life, Motherwell reiterated his devotion to Poe, naming him as a poet with whom he felt especially close.

“He keeps coming back, doesn't he?” the interviewer, aware of Motherwell's longstanding interest in Poe, observed. “What do you care especially for: the tales, the poetry?”

“Everything, really, the whole man,” Motherwell responded. “I think he was a one-man modernist, at a moment when America was moving in the opposite direction. His English is so alive, sophisticated.”

Isaac Newton deserves to be included in a series of companions to major philosophers even though he was not a philosopher in the sense in which Descartes, Locke, and Kant were philosophers. That is, Newton made no direct contributions to epistemology or metaphysics that would warrant his inclusion in the standard list of major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant - or even in a list of other significant philosophers of the era - Bacon, Hobbes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Wolff, and Reid. The contributions to knowledge that made Newton a dominant figure of the last millennium were to science, not to philosophy. By contrast, Galileo, the other legendary scientific figure of the era, not only published the most compelling critique of Aristotelian scholasticism in his Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems, but in the process turned the issue of the epistemic authority of theology versus the epistemic authority of empirical science into a hallmark of modern times. Although Newton clearly sympathized with Galileo, he wrote virtually nothing critical of the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy, and the immense effort he devoted to theology was aimed not at challenging its epistemic authority, but largely at putting it on a firmer footing. Newton made no direct contributions to philosophy of a similar magnitude. Indeed, from his extant writings alone Newton has more claim to being a major theologian than a major philosopher.

The obituary notices following Poe's death in 1849 struggled to make sense of what fellow-authors felt was the central contradiction of his life: that he was one of the country's preeminent literary “geniuses” yet he had lived a life of misery and privation. Overwhelmingly, Poe's contemporaries were forced to conclude that his peculiar personality was responsible for his lack of professional success. Many, like fellow-author Nathaniel Parker Willis, felt that Poe's particular habits and talents as a writer foreclosed the possibility of material reward: “Mr Poe wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid.” George R. Graham agreed: “[T]he very organization of a mind such as that of Poe - the very tension and tone of his exquisitely strung nerves . . . utterly unfitted him for the rude jostlings and fierce competitorship of trade.”

Among the notable eighteenth-century expositions of Newton's achievements were Henry Pemberton's A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728), Willem Jacob 's Gravesande's Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy confirm'd by experiments: or, an introduction to Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (6th edn, 1747), and Colin Maclaurin's posthumous An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1748). To the modern eye, there is something puzzling about these titles. We note the terms “philosophy,” “natural philosophy,” and “philosophical,” and we wonder what they mean in this setting. Take Maclaurin's Account, the best of the genre, and written by one of the leading Newtonians of the day. Newton made great scientific discoveries, and we can learn what most of them are from reading An Account, but what philosophical discoveries did he make? Maclaurin describes Newton's work in mechanics, rational and celestial, and in physics, theoretical and experimental (though not optics). But Newton the philosopher? To answer these questions requires a preliminary disentanglement of the disciplinary classifications that clustered around the business of “philosophy” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Sphinx or hoax? Aside from the poète maudit, the satanic dandy revered by Baudelaire, and the alleged dope-ridden neurotic gratifying public tastes with the morbid paraphernalia of his Gothic tales, Poe was also a born humorist equally inspired by parody and self-mockery. In an anti-romantic vein so common among the popular humorists of his time, he enjoyed applying his acumen to deride the outpourings of emotions too often surging from mediocre fiction and poetry. Through a mysterious alchemy, humor was at least for him a short-lived euphoric response apt to exorcise the fiendish visions harassing his mind. This Janus figure seemed to view the world in two opposite directions, yet sometimes provided a dual perspective to reconcile extremes paradoxically. In his Anthologie de l'Humour Noir, André Breton held that the contradiction between the acclaimed poet of “The Raven” and the wretched drunkard, was itself humorous since it implied an open conflict involving logical lucidity at odds with the vapors of liquor. Plagued with his physical insufficiencies and mental strains, Poe was able, however, to overcome his sense of alienation and filter the agonizing material he stumbled over in his private life and literary career, thus intermittently giving himself narcissistic comfort through an economy of expenditure in feeling, as Freud later defined the process.

NEWTON’S ALCHEMICAL MANUSCRIPTS

It may seem suprising to present Isaac Newton, the founder of modern mathematical natural science, as a serious student of alchemy. He himself must have felt this anomaly, since at all stages of his life he was concerned to hide his occult interests from the public. Until very recently his large collection of alchemical manuscripts was hardly looked at, much less systematically sorted or studied, in contrast to his better-understood manuscripts dealing with mechanics or the theory of matter. Yet Newton dedicated at least as much time to alchemical and theological studies as to his mathematical and physical ones.

The process of dating his manuscripts has shown that Newton worked on alchemy at all periods of his productive life, in parallel with his scientific work. This evidence proves that his occult studies were not the aberrations of senility. Newton would hardly have devoted so much time to such “absurdities” if he had not been convinced that some deeper knowledge lay hidden, which he eventually believed that he had at least in part discovered.

Newton attempted to make a synthesis of his occult-alchemical and exact-scientific research. For him a means of attaining this goal was the study of the so-called “prisca sapientia,” a tradition of ancient wisdom. Newton considered that the original wisdom of the ancients, which had been gradually lost through the ages, was most fully retained in the writings of the Hermetic tradition. He saw himself as endeavoring to explain, by means of experimental science, this “sapientia,” which had grown unintelligible.

Scholarly editions of Poe’s writings

When James A. Harrison completed his seventeen-volume edition of Poe's works in 1902, he may not have realized that, a century later, his work would remain the single most complete edition of Poe. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, who imagined a thoroughly annotated, scholarly edition of Poe's works through much of his life, never fully brought the project to completion. Mabbott edited Politan, Poe's unfinished drama, as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in 1923, and he was preparing an edition of the poems and tales at the time of his death in 1968, which appeared posthumously in three volumes. Ostensibly continuing Mabbott’s editorial work, Burton R. Pollin has edited several more volumes of Poe texts, which contain much valuable annotation, but whose overall quality is uneven. The two Library of America editions offer good collections of Poe’s imaginative and critical writings. Due to their accessibility and general overall quality, The Cambridge Companion to Poe cites these two volumes primarily. Readers, however, should consult the Mabbott and Pollin editions for their detailed annotations. Though John Ostrom has edited Poe’s letters, a thorough edition of Poe’s correspondence remains a desideratum of Poe scholarship. For letters to Poe, readers should consult the last volume of Harrison’s edition.

Newton's achievements in celestial mechanics tend in popular accounts to be underestimated in some respects, exaggerated in others. This chapter seeks to correct a number of misconceptions arising from inattention to the detailed history.

KEPLER’S FIRST TWO LAWS, SO-CALLED, AND NEWTON

The claim that the planets move in elliptical orbits, with the radii vectores from Sun to planet sweeping out equal areas in equal times, first appeared in Kepler’s Astronomia Nova of 1609. Since the late eighteenth century the two parts of this claim have been referred to as Kepler’s first two planetary “laws,” understood as empirical laws. According to the popular account, Newton relied on these “laws” as thus established.

Writing to Halley on 20 June 1686, Newton stated: “Kepler knew ye Orb to be not circular but oval & guest it to be elliptical.” Whether Newton ever saw the Astronomia Nova is unknown.

The Astronomia Nova is an innovative work. It establishes important empirical results, such as the passage of the planet’s orbital plane through the Sun’s center and the orbit’s oval shape. Was the orbit’s ellipticity also a straightforwardly empirical result, say by means of triangulations of Mars, as sometimes asserted? Kepler carried out many such triangulations, but they were subject to sizeable observational error, of which he was acutely aware.

Special edition from the past

NEW YORK CITY, April 13, 1844 - In an unprecedented feat of human ingenuity and artistic audacity, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe of Fordham today reported a purely imaginary feat of science and technology as a fait accompli, creating a near-riot outside the offices of The New York Sun. The stir was caused by citizens who sought to purchase a special edition containing the fallacious report of a hot air balloon's crossing of the Atlantic. By making facts of physical philosophy the basis and central concern of an adventure tale, Mr. Poe has invented science fiction. The seriousness and high-mindedness of this fictional mode will soon undoubtedly allow it to take its place among the most highly esteemed and prestigious genres of literature.

Countless unsuspecting readers were duped by Poe’s report, which claimed the paper’s front page with the large-type headline, “Astounding News! By Express Via Norfolk! Signal Triumph!” The article described in minute and technically plausible detail the flying apparatus allegedly invented and flown by well-known aviator Mr. Monck Mason. In all instances the author of the report was careful to explain the principles of aeronautics, meteorology, navigation and mechanics upon which the unexpected phenomena observed by his protagonists relied.