The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 448 pp.

Edgar Allan Poe is a funny fit on this year’s mid-summer reading lists. Sunny days/dank dungeons; chirping chickadees/doom-talking ravens; blooming gardens/murderous orangutangs; vaccinated neighbors/plague of the Red Death. The author of the amazing stories you read in middle school had strange theories about whirlpools and heavenly bodies and led a hard life saddened by the death of a young wife and cut short by drink.

But cheer up. John Tresch, Mellon Professor in Art History, History of Science and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute in London, has written a remarkable book about Poe that rescues the writer from the condescension of his contemporary rivals and positions him amid the scientific tumult of the 1840s.

In Poe’s world the literary imagination had not yet squared off against the scientific. Audiences hungry for speculation on great questions about the origin and nature of the universe packed lecture halls. They thrilled to explorers’ stories of the earth’s remote polar regions and to accounts of new discoveries in electromagnetism, chemistry, and astronomy. They consulted phrenologists, trusted mesmerists, and puzzled over a mechanical chess player and a Fiji mermaid. The decade witnessed a heady mix of fraud and fact, of humbug and humble truth.

And beneath it all were the rumblings we still feel that pit popular knowledge against elite expertise.

Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science is a brilliant primer on the American 1840s. It is a study of science stripped of a moral compass and the tangled cultural forces that made and crippled literary careers.

Poe was born in Boston in January 1809, a year that also welcomed both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. He died in 1849, in October of the year he turned 40. While Poe might not have the weight of Lincoln in politics or Darwin in science, the heft of his literary legacy is extraordinary. Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Baudelaire, Stephen King and Jordan Peale have all been among Poe’s devoted fans, Tresch writes, “whether they revere him as the mastermind of horror, inventor of the detective story, pioneer of science fiction, high priest of symbolic art, or brooding prince of the goths.”

Tresch begins the book recounting a lecture Poe delivered in February 1848. Consumption had taken his beloved young wife the year before, yet Poe was determined to make a go of his literary aspirations. Poe promoted the lecture with the modest title “The Universe,” later published as Eureka. “Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science—not merely a poet—not merely a man of letters. He is all combined and perhaps he is something more.” The possibility glimpsed in that “something more” animates the story Tresch tells.

Tresch works through the years of Poe’s short life. Poe’s father abandoned his actress mother in 1810, leaving her with three small children. She died a year later and two-year-old Poe went to live in Richmond, Virginia, with family acquaintance John Allan and his wife. Allan never formally adopted Poe, but he seemed set on training the young man to join the world of Virginia’s privileged white merchants. In 1826, Poe enrolled in Thomas Jefferson’s recently opened University of Virginia. The relationship between Allan and Poe soured over Poe’s gambling debts, and those unpaid bills forced Poe to leave the university. He published a few early stories, enlisted in the Army and then secured a spot at West Point, where the curriculum fed his interests in science, and he impressed his fellow cadets with his poetry.

For the next two decades, Poe struggled through the world of American publishing. He worked in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. He edited. He sent stories to magazines. He lectured. He quarreled with the country’s literary poobahs and tried to imagine a distinctive American literary criticism.

Tresch recounts Poe’s literary work and winds his way back to Eureka, the 100-page book where he found the phrase that gave the book his title. If an infinite number of light-generating stars filled the sky what is “the reason for the darkness of the night”? Poe’s explanations were a “mess,” Tresch writes, “a serious mess, a glorious mess, but a mess.” Poe stretched his sense of the cosmos, drawing from physics, philosophy, and astronomy, from Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, Alexander von Humboldt, Immanuel Kant, and polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace. Tresch describes Eureka as “one of the most creative, audacious, and idiosyncratic syntheses of science and aesthetics in nineteenth-century America.”

Poe has often seemed an odd fit in our literary history. He didn’t write novels or romances. He didn’t deliver Frederick Douglass’s lessons on race, slavery and the nation. Or Herman Melville’s on capitalism and race or Walt Whitman’s on sexuality. In Tresch’s telling, a study of Poe’s career “brings to light the violence, anxiety, feverish idealism, and horror that were indissociable from the building of the United States.” The materialist and objective science that evolved in the 1840s and 1850s was conscripted into the conquest of the American west, the dispossession of Native peoples, the construction of white supremacy, and the exploitation of natural resources.

Poe’s tales and poems, Tresch writes, sometimes echoed hierarchies of race, class, and sex. But “he was also sharply aware of the violence, threat, and fear behind ‘polite’ divisions and the cruelty with which they were enforced.” He could picture the perverse impulses that might bring about the destruction of what passed for modern civilization.

Readers looking for the delights that emerged in The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes masterful account of romanticism, might be disappointed by, well, the darkness of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night. Tresch has told an American story, and it is not always a happy one. From Poe, we gather that some of our most creative moments emerge in the midst of “maelstrom,” to use Poe’s word, or just when we have despaired in the darkness of the night.

Reading Tresch’s book in the steamy New England summer of 2021, I kept thinking Poe, a luckless man, is lucky in his afterlife to have an interpreter like Tresch, a man who holds a position in Art History, the History of Science, and Folk Practice. Likely, it took a heavy lift from all Tresch’s ways of knowing (Art, Science, and Folkways) to wrest Poe from the tight grip of American literary history and set him down in the history of American science. With Poe in the mix, the history of American science looks wonderfully dark and twisted, a domain stripped of its aura of inevitable purpose and awash in fresh mysteries to solve.

Ann Fabian writes about American natural history.