3 - Poe's methodology

Summary

IS SCIENCE DEADLY DULL?

Attend now to the first tactic of the opening strategy of Poe's Byzantine, necessary negotiation with science. The negotiation would last to the final and perhaps climactic performance of his career, Eureka, so that Poe's life as a creative writer would be imperfectly framed against the context of progressive, ingressive science.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

But why “Old” Time, if Poe, who despised progress, loathed science as purveyor of the new?

The premise of my answer is that Poe's real quarrel in this poem is not so much with science, which by 1829 was far beyond any “dull realities” that Poe could disdain, as with Bacon – “Hog” in Poe's sometimes scurrilous Eureka. It is Bacon who sets up the very epithet that Poe twists against him:

1. In “Of Innovations,” Bacon writes: “It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations, would follow the example of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived.” However, though knowledge ought to imitate time's deliberateness, Bacon stipulates that it must move deliberately in the opposite direction, since “time of course alters things to the worse.” In “Sonnet,” Poe asserts that science, true daughter of Old Time, “alterest all things” in the way a vulture alters carrion. Poe turns Bacon's metaphor against Bacon by portraying the offspring as rather too reminiscent of the parent.

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