To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone: let us say as a Romance or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a Poem.Įureka is Poe's last major work and his longest non-fiction work, at nearly 40,000 words. To the few who love me and whom I love – to those who feel rather than to those who think – to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities – I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth constituting it true. Poe considered Eureka his greatest work and claimed that it was more important than the discovery of gravity. The essay contains aspects of transcendentalism, despite Poe's disdain for that movement. His suggestion that the soul continues to thrive even after death parallels his writings in which characters reappear from beyond the grave, as in ' Ligeia'. Poe's attempts at discovering the truth follow his own tradition of ' ratiocination', a term he had used in his detective fiction tales. Poe calls Eureka a 'poem', whereas many critics compare it with his fiction works, especially his science fiction stories such as ' The Facts in the Case of M.

Modern critics continue to debate the import of Eureka, and some doubt its seriousness, in part because of Poe's many incorrect assumptions and his comical references to historic thinkers. In Poe's day, Eureka was received poorly and was generally described, even by friends, as absurd.

Analysis of Eureka 's scientific content shows congruities with modern cosmology, stemming from Poe's assumption of an evolving Universe. Though Eureka is generally considered a literary work, some of Poe's ideas anticipate 20th-century scientific discoveries and theories. Eureka is dedicated to the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). He also discusses man's relationship with God, whom he compares to an author. Adapted from a lecture he had presented, Eureka describes Poe's intuitive conception of the nature of the universe, with no antecedent scientific work done to reach his conclusions. Eureka (1848) is a lengthy non-fiction work by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) which he subtitled 'A Prose Poem', though it has also been subtitled 'An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe'.

Wybór opowiadań by Edgar Allan Poe