A series of newspaper hoaxes sprang into life in the East. The scale was western, the tone that of calm, scientific exposition of wonders such as often belonged to western comic legend.

Americans ‘who like so much to be fooled’, Baudelaire commented in a note to ‘Hans Pfaall’ 26 adding that fooling people was Poe’s main ‘dada’, or hobbyhorse. The American hoax, or tall story, was indeed a kind of pioneer dada – a violent, endlessly protracted game with the absurd. What Poe, the Southerner, initiated, Mark Twain (the very name is a hoax) from the South-West was lovingly to perfect, and William Faulkner with reckless rhetoric to explore for a twentieth-century topology of the South.

But by detaching himself from the prosaic present, in imaginatively identifying with the future, Poe himself was duped. Compiling, extrapolating, closely paraphrasing, he seems to have deceived himself at last into claiming his very plagiarisms as his own.27 Spell-bound, he became his own victim. There are moments – at the climax of ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una’, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, or Eureka – when the hoax is no longer openly and ironically confessed as a ‘lie’, but celebrated as the ‘truth’ of the imagination, whose natural home is located on remote geographic horizons or pursued into the distant future. There, with intuition as guide, Truth and Beauty – science and art – will fuse in a single poetic vision. Why not fiction as a kind of science, when science itself was proving to be a kind of fiction?28

A perfect consistency, I repeat, can be nothing but an absolute truth.29

The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.30

All art constantly aspired towards the condition of science : all science constantly aspired towards the vision of art. The spell of science fiction for Poe derived as much from his long-drawn-out romance with science as from his scientific concept of romance.

He offered Eureka to his readers as 31

this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it true. 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.

It was to be his last stab at piercing the ‘Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical’ cloud of unknowing – ‘the cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt’.32 In an intuitive, that is to say apocalyptic vision he proposed ‘to show… the plainly inevitable annihilation of at least the material Universe’.33 What was it but a maelström of energy, speeding away and returning, round and round, in an eternal vortex, whose ‘First Cause’ was the will, ‘the Volition of God’? Such is the ‘plot of God’ – an endless drama of expansion and contraction, of dissipation (or irradiation) and collapse (or reconstruction), of exhalation and inhalation. In the beginning was the word, the breath, the inspiration of God. Such was to be this astronomical book of Revelation:34

Then, indeed, amid unfathomable abysses, will be glaring unimaginable suns… The inevitable catastrophe is at hand.

The bravado of thought, the hyperbole, the sheer effrontery is breathtaking :35

… a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator.

Poe is both the Euclidean theologian and methodological Wittgenstein of this universe, declaring ‘the modus operandi of the Law of Gravity to be an exceedingly simple and perfectly explicable thing’.36 For the ultimate basis of the vision rests on the imaginative primacy of the artist. If God is a poet, then only a poet can play God and reveal God. Dupin, with a hunch, could investigate the criminal mind (to reconstruct his action); but Poe intuitively enters the mind of God (to reconstruct the mystery of divine creation). He is both the creator and the solver of conundra.37 He is both the detached observer (scientist, explorer, detective) and imaginative artist; both master and mystagogue. What is a hoax at one end can turn to a poetic vision at the other. What is mystery can as easily turn to mystification; science fiction, to use his own word, become the science of ‘Mystification’.38

It is the poetical essence of the Universe – of the Universe which, in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the most sublime of poems. Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms : – thus Poetry and Truth are one.39

J. B. S. Haldane once pointed out that the human organism is exactly intermediate in size between the electron and the spiral nebula, the smallest and largest existing objects. This, he suggested, gave man a privileged position in the world of nature.40 But to what varying effect! For Poe, what he learnt as an amateur scientist and astronomer led incontrovertibly to what he had always known (intuitively) as an artist. Just as what Teilhard de Chardin, a century later, learnt as geologist and palaeontologist seemed to lead incontrovertibly to what he had always known (intuitively) as a Christian.41 Melville, in the face of science, imaginatively retreated into myth. Poe encountered science as the precise mathematical equation between Truth and Beauty; ‘that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. He aspired to be nothing less than an American Keats with the mind of Newton, or rather a sublimer Newton with the soul of Keats.

All his imaginary trips – by ship, balloon, laudanum, hypnosis – were aimed at setting the soul free from the demands of the body and so from the restraints of normal perception; simultaneously releasing the mind from its own tomb, the prison of its endlessly inturned and ramifying nervous complexes (where Madeleine Usher or Fortunato were buried). For, above all, they express ‘the thirst to know which is forever unquenchable’42 – reaching out for knowledge, beyond waking, in sleep; beyond sleep, in death; beyond death, pushed to further and further extremes of consciousness on voyages as dreams, or dreams as voyages (‘Out of Space – out of Time’), to a confrontation with the abyss, the whirlpool, the void which is eternity. There are voices of those who have plunged into the ultimate abyss, but survived (like the Norse fisherman); voices that seem to rebound from the fatal impact (like that of Arthur Gordon Pym); voices that hover suspended at the point of transition (like M. Valdemar); voices retrieved from beyond the point of no return (via bottles or Moon-men); voices that continue the quest on the far side of the grave in angelic dialogues among the stars.

Baudelaire, long ago, had mourned Poe’s ‘eccentric and meteoric literary destiny’.43 Mallarmé enshrined that image in a passionate tribute, Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe, recited at the unveiling over Poe’s grave in 1875 of a block of basalt. Walt Whitman attended the ceremony in Baltimore but declined to speak.44 Tennyson and Swinburne sent letters from England.